Economically and institutionally it is more distant from the radically distributed, non-market mechanisms of commons-based peer production promoted by Yochai Benkler.,[8] although they share some ethical considerations.
It has also been argued that, as the spread of platform cooperativism "will require a different kind of ecosystem—with appropriate forms of finance, law, policy, and culture—to support the development of democratic online enterprises".
Some potential categories include: transportation, on-demand labor, journalism, music, creative projects, timebank, film, home health care, photography, data cooperatives, marketplaces.
Projects like Wikipedia, which rely on unpaid labor of volunteers, can be classified as commons-based peer-production initiatives,[12]: 31, 36 which are distinct from platform cooperatives since they don't employ the same institutional framework and governance.
For example, there are numerous driver-owned taxi apps that allow customers to submit trip requests and notify the nearest driver, similar to Uber.
In a pilot project, post-bariatric-surgery patients are able to upload data to the platform, including their weight and daily step count, and follow their own post-surgery progress.
[35] Both Scholz and Schneider would later credit the work and provocations of other researchers and digital-labor advocates as their inspiration, including, among others, lawyer Janelle Orsi of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, who had "called on technology companies in the so-called "sharing economy" to share ownership and profits with their users", and Amazon Mechanical Turk organizer Kristy Milland who had proposed a worker-owned alternative to the platform at the "Digital Labor: Sweatshops, Picket Lines, Barricades" conference in November 2014.
[38] The same year Mayo Fuster Morell published an article named "horizons of digital commons" in which she pointed to the evolution of commons-based peer production merging with cooperatives and the social economy.
Democracy", at The New School in November 2015,[45] and edit a book, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet.
[51] Researchers and labor advocates argued that platforms such as Uber and TaskRabbit were unfairly classifying full-time workers as independent contractors rather than employees, thus avoiding legally granted labor protections such as minimum-wage laws[52][53][54] and the right to join a union with which to engage in collective bargaining,[55] as well as different benefits offered to workers with employee status, including time off, unemployment insurance, and healthcare.
[66] A March 2016 international event by BarCola (node about Collaborative Economy and Commons-Based Peer Production in Barcelona) produced a set of 120 policy proposals for European governments.
Integrated as concrete actions for the Municipal Action Plan of the Barcelona City Council, following a consultative online participatory process, as well as aiming at other local authorities in Spain and the Government of Catalonia, the resulting document criticized the organizational rationale of "multinational corporations based in Silicon Valley" which, though similar to collaborative-Commons economic models, "behave in the style of the prevailing globalized capitalist economic model, based on extracting profits through networked collaboration".
Outputs from that process have resulted in specific measures like the incubation of new collaborative economy initiatives following a cooperativist model, or the possibility of new funding schemes for civic projects via transparent "match-funding".
[68] Under his leadership, the NYC Council unanimously passed the "Freelance Isn't Free Act", which provides freelance workers with a right to full and timely payment, along with new tools for enforcement, and amendments to the NYC Human Rights law to clarify that employment protections apply to independent and contingent workers.
[69] In his report, NYC Council Member Brad Lander presented platform cooperativism as a model to help laborers in the digital economy.
[68][67] The US Department of Agriculture appeared to offer its support for the platform cooperativism movement with a feature story in the September/October 2016 issue of its magazine, Rural Cooperatives.
[70] "Rural Americans have been organizing cooperatives to develop countervailing economic power against larger investor-owned corporations for more than a century.
The next step is to craft policy that encourages the link between research universities like those, and creating spaces that foster innovation with a cooperative lens, in a similar vein to the uniquely enabling environment Silicon Valley provided the original gig economy.
"[84] Rufus Pollock expresses similar concerns that platform coops will face major challenges reaching adequate scale, particularly given their inability to raise traditional equity capital.
Evgeny Morozov writes that "Efforts at platform cooperativism are worthwhile; occasionally, they do produce impressive and ethical local projects.
But there is also no good reason to believe that this local cooperative can actually build a self-driving car: this requires massive investment and a dedicated infrastructure to harvest and analyze all of the data.
"[86] While this may be true in certain sectors, Arun Sundararajan claims that, "Economic theory suggests that worker cooperatives are more efficient than shareholder corporations when there isn't a great deal of diversity in the levels of contribution across workers, when the level of external competition is low, and when there isn't the need for frequent investments in response to technological change."
Using Uber as an example of a dominant platform, he continues: "Cab drivers, after all, offer a more or less uniform service in an industry with a limited amount of competition.
"[87] Regardless, the possibility of dominant platforms turning the flows of data they receive from their larger user-bases into market-securing technological innovations remains a challenge.
For example, Uber seeks to use the data they currently collect from drivers using their app to automate the taxi industry, thus eliminating the need for their workforce altogether and likely dropping the value of a ride below that on which a human laborer can survive.
Among those he mentions is Fairshare, a stakeholder model that differentiates between founders, workers, users, and investors, each with distinct voting rights, payouts, and permissions to trade shares on the open market.