Introduction to Town Hall 3 – “Data Co-ops as a Path Toward Data Sovereignty” as Part of Who Owns the World? PCC Conference at The New School 2019
Summary
Koray Caliskan introducing speakers and guests to Town Hall 3 at Who Owns the World Conference, convened by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium at The New School in November 2019.
Town Hall 3 – Data Co-ops as a Path Toward Data Sovereignty
About This Town Hall
Beyond the analysis of how surveillance capitalism is extracting data and controlling our lives, this session is pointing to a way forward for the democratization of digital infrastructure. Without ownership of the platform or protocol, how do we move from Big Tech’s data extraction to data sovereignty? From “smart cities” to the healthcare sector, music streaming and beyond, data cooperatives are becoming more relevant to founders who work to democratize the Internet through cooperatively owned digital infrastructure – from social media to cloud services and beyond.
Koray Caliskan is faculty fellow at the New School’s Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies and Associate Professor of Politics at Bogazici University. He received his Ph.D. with distinction from New York University’s Politics Department, with which he won the Malcolm Kerr Social Science Award from MESA. His book Market Threads: How Cotton Farmers and Traders Create a Global Commodity came out from Princeton University Press and focused on global commodity markets and relations of economization. He is the founder of mamame.com.tr, a social innovation project bringing together the organizational form of cooperative and limited liability in economizing under-represented women’s labor, which won the Entrepreneurship of the Year Award in 2017 from Microsoft Turkey. Currently, he works on blockchains and teaching design (and) economies at Parsons and NSSR. He is an Affiliate Faculty at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School.