Takeaways from Distroid Issue 19: On Digital Organizing
Part 2
For Distroid Issue 19, my takeaways focus on three themes:
- Digital Organizing,
- Regenerative Finance, and
- Foresighting.
This post covers Part 2 of the Digital Organizing theme. For the other themes, please check Takeaways from Distroid Issue 19: On Regenerative Finance and Takeaways from Distroid Issue 19: On Foresighting.
Digital Organizing
Digital organizing is the act of organizing people into groups for achieving one or more goals in the digital space, or primarily through the use of information communication technologies such as the Internet.
For digital organizing, I focused on:
- Should We Certify Platform Cooperatives? by Ana Aguirre, Adriane Clomax, Noah DiAntonio, and Sadev Parikh,
- Minimum Viable Salaries for a fairer Web3 by Daniel Ospina, and
- Anticapture: Towards a Framework of Capture-Resistant Governance by spengrah.
I will also include a quiz for each article, and some additional related readings if necessary.
The first article discusses the considerations in creating a certification mechanism for the platform cooperative model (this will be mentioned in Part 2).
The second article discusses the concept of minimum viable salaries as a way to sustain contributor engagement in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) while balancing the contributor’s need for compensation stability and the DAO’s need for high-level work.
The third article describes the capture-resistant governance framework for preventing bad actors from pillaging a DAO’s shared resources.
You can find my comments and highlights (if any) from the articles below.
The fields covered in this takeaway include Platform Cooperativism and Web3.
Should We Certify Platform Cooperatives?
This paper was very interesting because it touched upon the positives and negatives of a certification (e.g., Benefit Corporation certification and Certified EO) for an organizational form (specifically, platform cooperatives). On the positive side, certifications can help ensure consistent practices, encourage positive behavioral change, and provide certified organizations access to resources to help scale their business. On the negative side, certifying agencies can act as gatekeepers of a movement, engaging in top-down behavior that inhibits participation among certified entities on the standards they are expected to follow.
The authors did find that there were some areas data cooperatives would like guidance on (legal and technical aspects of data management), but the authors determined that a certification was unnecessary to provide such guidance.
Though, I think a certification based on best practices or adherence to certain principles could be helpful for data cooperatives, for the reasons stated in the preceding sentence, and as a value-added process that helps people within existing cooperatives. I wonder if the team ever got the chance to talk with the Certified EO team in this regard.
Lastly, I thought an interesting point the authors made is that platform cooperatives are still primarily an academic field. I think this depends on how you see the Ledgerback Frontier because I see many projects in Web3 that exhibit characteristics of Platform Cooperativism, but are probably unlikely to know about the cooperative movement or call themselves a cooperative.
Highlights
Shortly into these discussions, an intervention from a group member who leads a worker cooperative led us into a new direction — we were failing to consider how cooperatives would get certified and focusing too much on what a certification would look like.
who gets to define a certification? Would certifications enable certain gatekeepers to decide what is a platform cooperative and what is not? Is that approach too ‘top-down’ for a movement that is inherently democratic in spirit? And what are the incentives for small, struggling cooperatives to get certified in the first place?
As will be discussed in our summary of findings, these interviews proved invaluable to us in understanding how unique and different platform cooperatives’ goals and business models can be — lending the takeaway that rigid certifications could prove stifling to existing innovation within the platform cooperative movement
Instead, we would like to learn about the rights important to different parties in the platform cooperative space. Rights such as the right to be forgotten, the right to compensation, the right to transparency, and more can be expressed through legal means and may find varied expression in different jurisdictions
The other question asked about the biggest concerns or barriers that cooperatives face when deciding how or whether to work with data. There were concerns about data gathering, protection, and manipulation, but the two categories that were of the biggest concern were the monetization of data and the issue of which data to collect. These two major barriers are interesting because they underline the importance of — on the one hand — learning what data one should work with and — on the other hand — understanding how this data can be economically sustainable for the business
The representatives felt that such guidance would definitely be helpful, both
for technical aspects (such as data architectures that allow for shutting access off and on, even when data is transferred to an acquiring entity), as well as legal aspects (such as agreements that
enable a data trust to cut off access to entities that misuse their data). The key insight was that a
certification was not necessary to achieve this;They noted that many cooperatives, platform and otherwise, go through the same questions and issues in their early stages, and that having a set of standards could enable cooperatives to skip these discussions and reduce the barrier to entry for those interested in forming cooperatives.
After the core value proposition of cooperatives working with data is determined, and assessed for whether it is actually helping those who are part of them and affected by them, certification could then be taken on with the right timing to help accelerate the progress of the movement through shared assets.
This discussion led us to consider two themes to add to our inquiry: 1) focusing on best practices, given the nascency of platform and data cooperatives; and 2) defining what rights (i.e., right to be forgotten, right to compensation, etc.) that any attempt at standardization (through certifications, technical standards, or best practices) should be built upon. We also learned that we would have to distinguish between standards and specifications. By drawing upon web standards, such as those for working with native video on the internet, Mark helped us realize that specifications might provide guidance to cooperatives, but that it might take years to implement those specifications before they were to become a standard.
Most cooperative entrepreneurs that are taking the steps towards generating projects that fall into the newly defined “platform or data cooperative” category find themselves with more questions than answers in practice.
Despite the platform cooperative model appearing in more “cooperative mainstream” forums and even as part of the innovation of the social economy, it is still mainly an academic field.
The certification of a model in the raise will only be made possible if the collective of thinkers and frame builders is able to understand the needs of the practitioners and make sure that the certifying process becomes a value adding process not only for academic reflection but for everyday cooperative work.
