Week 16: Final Presentation
For our final presentation, we included the milestones and the highlights of our semester-long journey to tell the story of Common Ground.
We wanted to keep the presentation simple and straightforward so that even those people who were not at all familiar with our concept would be able to understand it with ease. We started by introducing our topic, income inequality and its connection to the landscape of service work. To explain the importance of the problem, present-day statistics of the people employed as low-income service workers was really powerful.
Next, we wanted to give our audience a quick overview of the research we had been doing over the course of the semester. We briefly touched upon the different kinds of people we spoke to and the key things we learned from them that translated into opportunities for us.
It was important to explain our definition of empathy and the relationship between solidarity and empathy.
Solidarity
A bond between individuals or groups formed by uniting people around common goals or principles. In the conventional consumer-service worker relationship, interactions are brief and transactional– the inherent power imbalance creates sympathy at best. It provides little opportunity for empathy.
Solidarity has the power to recognize asymmetry while bringing groups of people together by providing common goals that they can work towards. In this way, solidarity feeds empathy.
Dignity of Labor
For us, the dignity of labor encompassed a more holistic ideal of social, political and economic inclusion at the workplace.
Co-operatives might not be a familiar concept for some people so in this presentation we explained the concept of co-ops before introducing our solution.
Co-ops
A cooperative is a value-based business, owned and operated for the benefit of its members, not outside investors.
Co-ops gave us an opportunity to tackle empathy at 3 levels:
System: Economic framework enables equity. All co-ops have seven principles that create a framework for social, political & economic inclusion.
Group: At a group level, it creates a community based on a shared understanding of the co-op structure.
Individual: At an individual level, diverse members can connect around shared values.
Common Ground
Common Ground is a platform for community-owned businesses that helps people work towards shared values.
Common ground aims to blur the line between employees and consumers–helping all ‘members’ along a journey to commit, connect and contribute around the community’s goals.
Commit
Common ground helps nudge users from being ‘consumers’ to being ‘members’, from extrinsic rewards like benefits, discounts and tangible value to more intrinsic motivation from enacting shared values and seeing collaboration turn into real change. To achieve this, it helps members manage their memberships and benefits. Also, their contribution — such as buying something at a store, join an event, or even participating in a discussion — ties to the contribution level which is shown on the membership cards as a medal.
In order to help members commit to more co-ops, we helped them find all easily organized in one place. Members can discover coops — based on place, values or distance. In the co-op page, videos are shown — The videos are an opportunity to learn about the culture of the co-op and the stories of the members.
Connect
On this platform, not only do members find values that they share in common, but they can also find co-op and event recommendations that help them connect offline and online with others from the co-op. This helps them support people and activities that align with their values.
Contribute
Common Ground also helps members contribute. Custom-built for the co-operative model, discussions on Common Ground are inherently designed to build consensus. Each new discussion is endorsed by members intelligently selected by the platform, that ensures the contribution is relevant and enriching for the community. This check and balance also reduce the likelihood of excessive posts by over-zealous members, which was much appreciated in our evaluative research.
Some of our conversations with existing members of co-operative communities uncovered two latent needs. Showing appreciation, as our conversations showed, can be an important way for the community’s members to provide affirmations to each other’s work. We also discovered that even within co-ops, there were some situations where employees felt more comfortable discussing topics anonymously. So we included this consideration within our discussion feature.
Even though our focus was between service workers and consumers, management is usually responsible for the decision making in co-ops.
So we used all of these conversations between members to become actionable data that aligns with the co-op’s goals and helps management make decisions on behalf of the community.
Leveraging Technology for Scale
As we mentioned earlier, co-ops currently employ 10% of global workers. Technology can play a crucial role in helping them scale by removing barriers to discovery and participation. Not only connecting members within a co-op, the platform can also connect co-ops across sectors or geographies to collaborate and achieve efficiencies.
What Success Looks Like
Our future envisioned is a world where there is inclusion on three levels:
Social: People connect and collaborate around shared values.
Political: Passive consumerism is replaced by empowerment & solidarity around community goals.
Economic: Co-ops as dominant ownership structure enables social, political & financial inclusion.
