Cooperativism and Human-Computer Interaction

Summary

If social, economic and environmental sustainability are linked, then support for the increasing number of non-profit groups and member-owned organizations offering what Trebor Scholz has called “platform cooperativism” [17] has never been more important. Together, these organizations not only tackle issues their members identify in the world of work, but also provide network-driven collections of shared things (e.g., books, tools) and resources (e.g., woodworking spaces, fab labs) that benefit local communities, potentially changing, not just use of resources at community level, but socio-economic structures on the ground (e.g., [15]). In contrast to for-profit services often associated with the sharing economy (e.g., Uber, Airbnb), platform co-ops attempt to advocate ecological, economic and social sustainability, with the goal to promoting a fairer distribution of goods and labor, ultimately creating a stronger sense of community. While some HCI sub-communities (e.g., CSCW) have started to explore this emergent phenomenon, especially leveraging ethnographic research methods, 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. This SIG aims to bring together researchers from different HCI sub-communities to identify future research directions in HCI around cooperativism and platforms.