I am Luca Sciascia, I am from Italy and I am currently pursuing the CEMS Master in International Management with NOVA School of Business and Economics in Lisbon being my home school. My internship at IYWTo represents my very first work experience. Majoring in Social Enterprise, I aim at contributing to IYWTo by providing my knowledge and skills in the field. In return, working at IYWTo will allow me to learn more about everything that is around cooperatives, sustainability and digital altogether. In addition, it will help me build practical knowledge that will play a crucial role in my professional development.
Platform Cooperativism for IYWTo
After one year running as a service owned by Cleanweb ltd, IYWTo is now facing several challenges to bring forward the platform faster and in a more effective way while adequately rewarding all those people who contribute to it and all those who will in the coming future.
Hundreds of digital platforms that rely on multi-lateral contributions are being created worldwide and some of them are considered very successful by the general public, say, Wikipedia. Other platforms, such as Uber or Amazon Mechanical Turk, although being financially successful, are widely criticized. In particular, most of the critics raised argue that instead of maintaining the promise of the digital economy to provide people with greater job opportunities and a better distribution of wealth, these platforms only super-exploit their workers while concentrating centrally the wealth created.
Given its collaborative and digital nature along with its potential capability of creating significant value and wealth, IYWTo wants to prevent this situation from happening. Further, the needs of fairly recognizing the various contributions, harnessing the diversity of the community and engaging new groups of stakeholders in the project do push the platform toward a new chapter of its life. Therefore, IYWTo now needs to set the conditions for a healthy and fair organization to thrive. That being said, over the last three weeks, we have been studying new governance and legal structures that would help us best reach this goal. Throughout the process, we have attentively analyzed and decided to espouse the values put forward by the platform cooperativism movement. The movement stands up against the business models used by companies such as Uber or Amazon Mechanical Turk (http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/scholz_platformcooperativism21.pdf ) and proposes principles and concepts to design platform cooperatives. In short, platform cooperatives combine a cooperative business structure with an online platform to deliver a real-world service while sharing the value they create with the users they depend on (adapted from Neal Gorenflo).
We have assessed a number of governance structures and come to the conclusion that a cooperative whose members are the current and future collaborators is the solution that would better leverage the potential of the platform and lead the way to a flourishing and just business.
Given this, we are now drafting the statute that we will circulate among potential members for discussion and refinement. Using Loomio as our collective decision making platform, we will make our next steps toward the creation, set-up and implementation of the cooperative.
Stay tuned for the next developments.
