Democratic Technology for Cooperatives

Under the Cardiff Business School Public Value Engagement Fellowship Scheme, I have been awarded £5000 to fund the research impact project Democratic Technology for Cooperatives. This project will involve surveying platform and digital cooperatives across the UK to understand how they make decisions democratically, particularly exploring their use technology tools for this purpose. On this basis, we will co-develop a user-friendly, interactive digital resource to summarize existing practices and guide cooperatives on suitable models for democratic organizing.

As we face a new wave of social disruption unleashed by digital technologies, the need for democratic governance of technological development is becoming more clear. Digital technologies hold the potential to significantly improve everyone’s quality of life. Yet this potential is squandered when firms focused on maximizing shareholder returns control the development of these technologies. Even more concerningly, many such firms have shown little willingness to meaningfully change course when unforeseen widescale harms have come to light – for instance, where social media platforms have spread misinformation and fostered real-world violence.

However, such concentration of power is not inevitable. The existence of cooperatives implies that businesses, including tech ventures, can be controlled in a democratic manner. Platform cooperatives, in particular, promise to make the digital economy more democratic. This potential stems not just from the democratic principles of cooperatives, but also from the unique democratic possibilities offered by digital technologies. The latter were core to my PhD research, which studied how two cooperative networks used digital technologies to achieve deeper forms of democracy than the traditional representative form adopted by cooperatives. This leads me to suggest that platform cooperatives serve as laboratories of innovation in organizational democracy, pulling ideas and practices from various sources like the cooperative principles, open-source software development, the commons movement, sociocratic organizing, and more.

Project aims

• Survey the technologically-enhanced democratic practices of platform and digital cooperatives across the UK.

• Create a user-friendly, interactive digital resource to summarize existing practices and guide cooperatives on suitable models for democratic organizing.

Updates

I presented initial findings from this project in October at Cardiff Business School’s Public Value Engagement Fellowship conference – more information is available here.

Project roots

This project builds in particular on my research with the Open Food Network regarding their innovative use of technology to render their decisions both transparent and editable – features that together enable democratic revisability. The figure opposite illustrates this process.