Democratic Technology

Alternative organizations often find that off-the-shelf technology encodes politics at odds with their values. In response, some develop their own technology coherent with their alternative way of working, which they can share with similar organizations and thereby bolster the movement. The open source approach to software appears a perfect match for more democratic software development processes. And yet in our study of an Alternative Food Network, we find a significant faction that rejects a proposal to share in the development of open-source software to manage their cooperatively-run grocery stores, with some even arguing that the use of configurations of proprietary software is more democratic. To make sense of this surprising finding, this research project explores the relationship between technological openness and openness as a democratic value.

Publication

Shanahan, Genevieve, Jaumier, Stéphane, Daudigeos, Thibault and Ouahab, Alban. (2024). Why reinvent the wheel? Materializing multiplicity to resist reification in alternative organizations. Organization Studies.

Presentation

I presented this research to the Centre for Commons Organising, Values Equalities and Resilience (COVER) at Essex in May, 2023. Here’s a video of the presentation and subsequent exchange: