Talking Cooperativism and Human-Computer Interaction: A Review of the CHI 2019 special interest group meeting.

If social, economic and environmental sustainability are linked, then support for “platform cooperativism”, or the increasing number of non-profit member-owned organizations, has never been more important. Together, these organizations: (1) tackle issues their members identify in the world of work, (2) provide network-driven collections of shared things (e.g., books, tools) and resources (e.g., woodworking spaces, fab labs) that benefit local communities; (3) change the use of resources at the community level and potentially the sosocio-economic structures on the ground. Yet, there is a scarce amount of design research aimed at the particular challenges of organizing in this way.

In contrast to the new “sharing economy” (e.g., Uber, Airbnb) and their well-served commercial needs, platform co-ops attempt to advocate ecological, economic, and social sustainability with the goal of promoting a fairer distribution of goods and labor, ultimately creating a stronger sense of community. While some Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) communities (e.g. Computer-Supported Collaborative Work) have started to leverage ethnographic research methods to explore this emergent phenomenon, researchers have called for more diverse HCI approaches to address the growing scope of challenges within platform co-ops, member-driven exchange systems, and cooperativism more broadly.

The first special interest group meeting on this theme at the HCI conference, CHI’19¹, brought together nearly a hundred researchers from different HCI communities to identify future research directions around cooperativism and platforms. We present the key takeaways and research questions that were raised from this group and open the door for further conversation.

Highlights and Takeaways

Trust

There are emergent challenges of interpersonal trust within co-ops as well as trust in the supporting systems. Traditionally, interpersonal trust is a crucial component in building a successful co-op. When it comes to trust in software systems, use of the platform or app does not necessarily engender trust of itself, conversely, it may actually hide the trustworthiness of people behind the systems. We can ask: once trust is established within one community/platform, how can it be transferred when moving from one community to another? Note that credible trustworthy relationships may change within the transition. Many platforms implement reputation review mechanisms and rating systems with a view toward improving trust. An interesting research avenue is to explore how those systems and mechanisms can be classified and categorized with respect to trust. Ultimately, there are institutional aspects to trust, that is, trust in structures and the organization of groups – trust in governance, as well as more interpersonal concerns. Where should co-op members turn to when something breaks? Who do they need to talk to? How might we design systems to facilitate the development institutional trust and to sustain it?

Sustainability

When it comes to studying co-ops’ sustainability, the issue can be viewed from the perspective of the process (Is the process sustainable?), effect (What are the outcomes? Are they sustainable?), and intervention (Is the intervention itself sustainable?). For example, looking at food co-ops, how can HCI facilitate food production and consumption practices to be more ecologically sustainable? In relation to that, social sustainability is of critical importance. There are significant challenges of access to co-ops for marginalized communities. How do we ensure that people aren’t being “left out”? HCI could look at the opportunity to connect people in the food context attending to food poverty issues and working to de-stigmatize the need for food for underprivileged groups. When it comes to economic sustainability, a key question is what are the business models for co-ops that would have a better chance of success. One central issue to consider is that cooperatives (including local volunteer-driven initiatives) cannot function without some economic/payment model – they must take a cut for operational costs. On the whole, it seems like more purpose-driven niche co-ops (e.g., tool sharing, nanny sharing) have been more successful than timebanking models. Prior work suggests that those seem to fail often because not all skills are valued in the same way. To further address this topic, HCI could look for opportunities to draw more from economics and political science, and Elinor Ostrom’s work specifically.

Participation and scale

When it comes to participation in co-ops, key challenges are related to member involvement, sustaining participation, and addressing economic needs. Furthermore, co-ops often struggle with doing things at scale. HCI may be able to help on this end. Specifically, as co-ops grow, it becomes harder to maintain a democratic member-involvement style. What is more, growth often brings hierarchy that may undermine the democratic principles of a co-op. Networks or federations of co-ops offer a way to work out some of those issues and, what is more, when it comes to the use of technology, collective decision-making tools like Loomio point to interesting opportunities to facilitate the timely involvement of broader groups of members. An interesting research opportunity, then, might be how to understand and support the configuring of tool ecologies for co-ops (especially for local low-tech organizations that are a part of the global movement). What tools could be shared across different (types of) co-ops?

Designing for global and local co-ops

While the co-op movement is global, a repeated point in our conversations was that often the most successful examples are local instances where a community has managed to secure the space, power, and money to engage in projects that they want to take on. However, “cooperatives federations” came up as an example of how small/local co-ops can join forces to rely on shared technology, identity, and branding, while maintaining relative autonomy in their activities and decisions. When it comes to designing platforms for co-ops, key questions include: What kind of flexibility do designers need to account for in their systems design in order to allow co-ops to shape a platform to fit their purposes? How do designers ensure that platforms have enough commonalities to be meaningful and sufficiently consistent for those using them? How should one account for the challenges of adapting platforms/systems to different countries, regulatory contexts, and markets?

Studying co-ops

When conducting research with co-ops, researchers need to be aware of the organizational intricacies involved. This may require a re-think of how partnering with an organization works: Even simple decisions in co-ops may take a lot of time. This can be difficult to align with the typically short research cycle in HCI. Thus, careful planning of the research intervention needs to account for the nature of organizing under study. Depending on the size of a co-op or and the level of researchers’ engagement in the co-op’s activities, researchers should make informed decisions regarding what approach (qualitative or quantitative) and, subsequently, what methodological toolkit to employ. Contextual, participatory design and co-design approaches seem like a good start to explore — and design for — co-ops’ needs and practices. We urge reflection on the following questions to better align researchers’ and co-ops’ agendas: How can researchers establish long-term partnerships with co-ops? What design methods and approaches can incorporate and facilitate sustainable knowledge and skills transfer within the community over time? How could research outputs look like to be genuinely useful for community members? Ultimately, do we need to redefine HCI when working with co-ops, in both a technical sense (who owns the infrastructure) and in terms of broader socio-political considerations?

Join the conversation

If you are a researcher who is interested in cooperativism and platforms or someone who is actively involved in running a co-op, we would be pleased to hear your thoughts! We encourage you to join the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #HCIxCooperativism. We are hoping this can also serve as a step toward new collaborations, be that in the shape of further special interest group sessions, workshops, or other forms of activity.

This article was written by Anton Fedosov, Airi Lampinen, Tawanna Dillahunt, Ann Light, and Coye Cheshire. A more detailed report from the special interest group meeting can be found here: https://uc.inf.usi.ch/event/sig-chi-2019/

¹ The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems is the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction. CHI — pronounced ‘kai’ — is a place where researchers and practitioners gather from across the world to discuss the latest in interactive technology. We are a multicultural community from highly diverse backgrounds who together investigate new and creative ways for people to interact.