Matthew Cropp as Part of Who Owns the World? PCC Conference at The New School 2019

Summary

Matthew Cropp at Who Owns the World Conference, convened by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium at The New School in November 2019. Cropp is a speaker for 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.

Matt Cropp works as Co-Executive Director of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, a non-profit that promotes and fosters broad-based employee ownership primarily via the worker co-op and ESOP models. He cut his teeth in the co-op movement studying the origins of the credit union movement while getting his master’s in History, and is involved in a number of co-op movement roles, including chair of the Vermont Solidarity Investing Club, board president of Full Barrel co-op, and Community Operations Team Coordinator for social.coop. He lives in Burlington, Vermont.