A series of quick updates #3

“Alternative Data Futures: Cooperative Principles, Data Trusts, and the Digital Economy”

The New School’s Platform Cooperativism Consortium and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society – Fall 2021 Research Sprint

It was my privilege to be selected to participate among a cohort of twelve early-career researchers (myself included), cooperative leaders, and activists from 8 countries across 4 continents to explore new pathways for democratic governance of collective data.

The “Alternative Data Futures: Cooperative Principles, Data Trusts, and the Digital Economy” research sprint was a nine week intensive designed and implemented by Trebor Scholz, Elisabeth Sylvan, Valerie Gomez, and Adam Nagy – an amazing team – to learn about and share insights about the social, legal, and technological problems linked to community ownership and data governance. World-renowned experts on the data economy and platform cooperatives spoke each week during an online Zoom-hosted “synchronous session” where all the attendees from different corners of the world came together to hear about the challenges and opportunities to design new models for data governance based around the centuries old model of cooperatives.

Experts, activists, academics, early career researchers and others came together each week to produce new research outputs and to present at ‘#TheNewCommonSense. Forging the Cooperative Digital Economy‘ conference in Berlin and online in November.

I was involved in a working group with Sadhana Sanjay, Novita Puspasari and Kelsie Nabben exploring how DAOs and Platform Coops could mutually learn from and shape the other’s design and principles. Together we produced a paper ‘Grounding decentralised technologies in cooperative principles: What can “Decentralised Autonomous Organisations” (DAOs) and platform cooperatives learn from each other?’ now available on SSRN. We also presented the findings of this paper at the #TheNewCommonSense conference.

It was a challenging sprint, with lots of reading material to inform and inspire some important new work, and an amazing opportunity to connect with industry leaders who are taking on the entities that harvest, surveil, control and profit off our data. I look forward to whatever opportunities might emerge from this work.