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

During the fall of 2021, The New School's Platform Cooperativism Consortium and BKC ran a Research Sprint with a cohort of early-career researchers, cooperative leaders, and activists from 8 countries across 4 continents. The "Alternative Data Futures: Cooperative Principles, Data Trusts, and the Digital Economy" Research Sprint brought together this group to explore new pathways for democratic governance of collective data.

With the help of world-renowned experts on the data economy and platform cooperatives, participants in the sprint examined existing data cooperatives, explored the data needs of the communities that cooperatives serve, and investigated difficult social, legal, and technological problems linked to community ownership and data governance.

Participants

Output

• What We Learned from Our Research Sprint on Cooperative Data Governance
• Syllabus and materials on Wikiversity
• Group 1 paper: Should We Certify Platform Cooperatives?
• Group 2 paper: Data Cooperatives in Europe: A Legal and Empirical Investigation
• Group 3 paper: Grounding Decentralised Technologies in Cooperative Principles: What Can 'Decentralised Autonomous Organisations' (DAOs) and Platform Cooperatives Learn from Each Other