# TAKING ROOTS: CODING & DESIGN FOR PLATFORM CO-OPS
**Huang SunQuan**
@Torondo University, Asian Institute


Thanks to Professor Lam’s invitation, I could have such an opportunity to visit Asian Institute. These experiences I am going to share with you, are not just my individual accomplishments. The credits shall go to those who have grown in the Martial Law era and have participated in the struggle for democracy in Taiwan. In other words, very proud of to say there is an activist community by my side.

My expertise is architecture. Since leading the first anti-urban renewal movement in Taiwan in 1997, Kahn Le Li, a community where was demolished in one month, of 3000 dwellers had lived for 50 years, I have drifted apart from the architect for design to a “societal” architect. I took a documentary for this urban movement, “Green Bulldozer”. Those materials not only serve as an evidence of the police’s violence but also record the reality of habitants for public broadcasting. I’ve never thought about of it’s objectivity and ethic. I have no idea what is a so-called documentary, I filmed just for the social movement nor for an art work. However, it has been shown in several film festivals and biennales. Truly, I’m surprised that it has become the required material for most of the architecture and urban planning department of Universities in Taiwan.




I am a media activist. In 1994, following the Village Voice in New York, I created POTS Weekly, which is the first and the only alternative free weekly in Taiwan. During the 1990s, after the Martial Law was terminated, there came a time we call “post-student movement” , in which the society, culture and economy grew rapidly. I worked for a left-wing Daily Lihpao as a journalist to earn my postgraduate’s fee. Soon, I became the convener of the cultural report team. At that time, it seemed to me that all the mainstream media, either right or left, only reflected the thoughts and ideas of the previous generation. I felt kind of emergency that we must report ourselves and harvest from ourselves. Therefore, with the understanding of my boss, we started to team up for Pots Weekly. In addition to critical issues, Pots Weekly also covered independent music, publications, arts, film, avant-garde theater as well as the support for broadly urban movements. The highest circulation reached to 80,000 copies per week, and you can find POTS in every universities, some high schools, city cafes, live houses, cultural centers, galleries, and even at the Taipei Metro for one year. We even had published a Chinese-English bilingual edition for 3 years. Moreover. POTS Weekly also was the first one that used the open source (durpal) to build website, all content and city activities listings are free. In 2010, we created our own app. Despite the fact that Pots Weekly ended up in 2014 owing to the prosperity of social media, it had fostered the biggest and the strongest anti-culture generation and the subcultural network in Taiwan.


I used to be a “semi - programmer.” When the Internet bloomed in 2002 in Taiwan, it came along with a progressive ideology which consists of the technology able to change the society and the media for all, which let us see the future of gift economy. At that time, the open sources community in Taiwan tried its best to promote the Chinese version of content management system (CMS), not only dealt with the translation, but also worked on Double Byte Character Set which had been ignored by the western developers. Anyone of you think of “input method” in mind when you are typing on computer’s keyboard?

Following this trend, I built up one of the largest blogger platforms, twblog.net, on which more than one thousand bloggers wrote and shared their articles. In the same year, I also founded indymedia.tw and took part in the largest anti-globalization campaign, the indymedia.org (independent media center). During the year of 2004 and 2005, when I was a visiting professor at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, I also helped a group of activists to stablish www.inmediahk.net, and even company with students to protest on street to against the WTO Ministerial Conference of 2005 in Hong Kong. Around 2013, I had the idea of building a database of visual archiving of Asian social movements, multitude.asia([vimeo channel](https://vimeo.com/channels/multitude/)) is the outcomes. With the cross-strait teachers and graduate students we carried it out slowly but gradually accumulated some achievements. We had organized several small exhibitions, we also hold a tent theatre at PSA just before the Shanghai biennial, and had 3 long documentary on line. If I have more time, I really want to show you the short version of a Taiwan workers band story

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It seems that these experiences bond strongly with social movement and new media.

The fall of the print media and the decline of the public sphere are quite obvious. The new technology once brought the hope of gift economy, but everyone has become the i-slave of Facebook and Twitter now. “Gift economy” has become sharing economy which has been monopolized by those unicorn-like digital companies and made everyone enjoy working hard on the keyboard for those global enterprises, no payment at all of course.

What about social movements? Concerning the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Sun Flower Movement in Taiwan, Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, Nuit debout in Paris, people looks more melancholic after retreating from the street. Recently, I organized an [artist cooperative](http://www.caco.tw/) in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and devoted myself to the empower of cooperatives in Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong. From a radical street protester to a tender dude focusing on cooperation, such a dramatic change, is simply caused by a tiny reason, which I learned from a group of Taiwanese female workers. Hualon Corporation female workers spent a few years lawsuit with the Taiwan government on demanding the wages they deserved due to the fraudulent bankruptcy. They lay on the rail, marched all over Taiwan, and lobbied in the parliament. In 2014, they finally succeeded in recovering the salary which they supposed to get nearly two decades ago. After they won the victory and walked out of the court, an acquainted female worker said to me, "The fight is successful, but I still have to go to the big supermarket and 24-hour convenience store to buy stuff tomorrow, continuing the capitalist life that once betrayed us.” I was extremely shocked.



We have been talking about a certain revolution and tried hard to change society for a long time. Why can’t we live a brand-new life right now?

> Everything is still the same, cleaning of the lowest remains, protesting for the human rights sustains. Let us imagine the end of all the protests. Face the first day after the success of a revolution, the first day after returning one’s home from the marching streets, the first day after having participated in the Biennale. After all the speeches and performances, here comes silence. How do we produce what we need? Does life go on via the convenience store and express delivery? Shopping at Taobao still? How to live with the revolutionary passion? How can the carnival become our daily routine? The live revolution begins with the first day after that REVOLUTION.

which is a statement of an art project of mine at the Shenzhen Biennale last year: "The first day after the revolution". One of the answers to the first day after that revolution is cooperative.

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Let us go into subjects then.

## 1 The social form of (technical) means of production

The coops symbolizes the destruction of capitalism, or more precisely, to fix the capitalism. Coop is a collective of economic justice and democratic politics. Coop has compensated those utopian socialists for their insufficiency even though it is still not enough. In short, platform capitalism is a kind of business model integrating self-employment and outsourcing by digital tools, such as Uber, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Topcoder, and Didi Chuxing（滴滴出行） in China. On the opposite side, the platform cooperativism which is the labors could self-organize through the technologically innovative and transparent platforms, in order to avoid the exploitation from the governance of centralized digital company. Citing the speech of Michel Bauwens, one of the founder of P2P Foundation, it’s all about the struggle between **commoners** and **netarchical capitalism**. As one of the key persons of PCC at The New School, Trebor Scholz has discussed about the lots of examples of platform cooperativism in the US and Europe with details in his book and several articles. The platform cooperativism which Trebor Scholz has been longed for is to connect each coop and thus build up an ecological system. Different kinds of coops work together and make the best of it.

There is a fact, the software and the technology used by platform capitalism is not a rocket science. They have already been applied in many communities and unions. We have seen a few sparks around the world but still not enough to bring about a huge blaze. Why?

Let me show you some examples. taxi-hailing service or ridesharing, makes its debut in Bologna, Italy. In 2005, 5,000 taxi drivers worked together and built up the online taxi booking service, [TaxiClick](http://www.taxitronic.com/en/taxi-apps/taxiclick/). In Tel Aviv, Israel, they use blockchain technology to develop the real-time-ride-sharing platform, [La’zooz](http://lazooz.org/). There are some other similar examples in North America and Asia: Union Taxi in Portland, Oregon, [Union Cab](https://www.unioncab.com/) in Madison, Wisconsin, [Coop Taxi](http://www.taxi-coop.com/en) in Montreal, Canada, Coop Taxi in Seoul, South Korea, etc. All of them are emerging carpool platforms which function as coop organizations. [Green Taxi Coop](http://greentaxico-op.com/index.cfm) in Denver, Colorado, USA, is the leader of the ridesharing industry. It includes not only the outstanding democratic management but also the largest share of the local taxi market. As of 2017, with more than 1,000 driver members, Green Taxi Coop has become the largest taxi company in Colorado and the largest ridesharing cooperative in the United States. These examples all come from the transformation of traditional unions and the upgrade of regional service technology.

Here’s the thing, platform capitalism carries a great amount of capital to absorb all the existing organizations, and even turns the gig economy, in which people are “emancipated” from the employment and become precarious workers, into the instrument of production without offering means of production. An obvious example of this is Didi Chuxing(滴滴出行). It integrates taxi drivers, self-employed drivers, and car rental companies into a convenient interface, and therefore becomes the biggest global transportation company with the most service offering. In Taiwan, Uber, which was once expelled but eventually returned, packages the self-employed drivers into company-employed workers under the cover of a car rental company. According to a statistic, an Uber driver’s income ranges from 10 to 20 dollars per hour, and 40 percent of the drivers say that they earn less than 15 dollars an hour. According to the statistics of Didi Chuxing Technology Co. in 2016, about 20 millions of people take the service on one single day (more than that of Uber’s global service per day), and it creates 17.51 million flexible employment opportunities, of which 2.384 million come from the capacity-removing industry. Ninety-three percent of the drivers say that they can make use of their time with flexibility. There are 2.07 million drivers whose daily income reaches to more than 160 RMB (about 23 US dollars) Per capita. However, we do not know the income of the rest 15 million drivers. This is still the statistics made by its own. During the decade, from 2005 to 2015, nearly 10 million jobs which had been released in the United States were temporary workers, contract workers, or freelancers. Hence, it is barely to see that the disappearance of the guaranteed contract work caused by neo-liberalism is the very reason for the emergence of platform capitalism.

Besides the function of fix, platform cooperativism is not the bright side of the moon of the technology in use. In my opinion, the key is to imagine the possible mode of digital share economy so as to pursue economic justice. Through the thought of Karl Marx, **platform cooperativism is to take back the social use of technical means of production, including the means of technology and the objects of technology.** Technical means are software, hardware, algorithm, and medium (such as mobile phones, websites, and platforms). Technical objects are users’ privacy and all the footprints of mankind in their lifetime. As for social use, it is about the socialization of such technical means of production, which means that the value of production should be shared more democratically, more openly and more equally. In short, not against the technical means of production, but against their use as means to exploitation.

Then what difficulties will we have when practicing the social use (a kind of social ownership)? On one hand, the network technology used by unions, organizations, and NGOs is still on community level scale. On the other hand, these organizations lack **network-organized** and **federalization** to resist the platform capitalism. We all know: the more the coops are, the mightier the platform cooperativism will get. Nevertheless, the cooperative alliance is not well-organized enough and the platform cooperativism will not always give birth to more coops. The number of coops, the mutual social bonds, the federalization (e.g. the Faircoop in Europe can afford to release its own encrypted coins, [Faircoin](https://fair-coin.org/)), and the innovation of platform cooperativism must work together. Today, the “successful” case of platform cooperativism is numerous, so I won’t give you all detail here, bthe examples here. But among these successful cases, some of them are not completely consistent with the norm of coops.

It’s crucial to create a fair platform with high quality service, which could bind the cooperatives organized by labors itself. For example, CoLab, a coop of international engineers, launched [Up& Go](https://colab.coop/work/upandgo/), which is a platform built for self-employed household servers in New York. Labors can decide whether to take the case or not. Fifteen percent of the remuneration from the case will be used to cover the operating costs of the platform, and the rest will be kept by the workers. In contrast to general platforms which take more than fifty percent of the remuneration, the condition offered by Up&Go is considered to be pretty ideal. However, it’s simply community software. We use the same app like Uber and Airbnb which can work all around the world, while labors could only offer service regionally. It’s annoying that there is such a gap which can never be bridged. The former can shuttle freely between nation-states without the problems of laws and taxes, while the local and bottom-up platforms are still restricted. Even though there are more and more middle class and autonomous citizens participating in it, the latter solely become the aspirin to ease the pain from platform capitalism, which just ends up as a means of fixing the capitalism regionally. It’s urgent to give a response to the shift from geopolitics to the regime of planetary stacks. In Platform CoopBerlin of 2017, one topic is remarked: why there shall be a centralized platform? As Fairmondo in Berlin, Germany tries to challenge Ebay in a alternative way, here comes another question: is it better to build up a decentralized network platform? Could individual and regional organizations truly replace platform capitalism? The sticking point is that globalized-consumption and localized-production are two poles which platform cooperativism shall confront.

## 2 Californian Ideology

As for the other problem, the difference between coops and technology group is on not only the pursuit of economic justice but also the inclination of cultures and politics. Coops ask for full participation, whereas geeks are in favor of the accomplishment by rarely seen talents. Coops are facing the threats of privatization and bureaucratization, while technical innovation now is a game of financial monopoly market. Coops pursue economic justice and equal relations of production, yet the technology chases after productivity. **Hackers don’t like the door which cannot be opened, meanwhile coops hope the door is always open**. They are not aware of the **communality** between them. They both long for mature and sustainable mode and rely on shared and co-beneficial achievements.

It seems that the present Internet technology happens to be an upgrade of neo-liberalism, in other words, **accelerationism** and **solutionism**, which has been discussed in The Californian Ideology, 1995. As the authors of this article, Richard Barbrook teaches at the University of Westminster and Andy Cameron has a faith in Trotskyism. Originally they wrote for the new course on hypermedia in college and the rage toward the posture of which the Wired Magazine integrated liberalism, hippie culture and technological determinism, well, with the accompany of beers and marihuana. But it turned out to be a classic which concerned the critics towards the “dot-com” neo-liberalism and the Internet bubble. As former chief editor of Wired Magazine, Kevin Keely, whose performance combines with technologically missionary style, is quite popular in China Now. It’s obvious that the ideology of Hangzhou right now is exactly that of California in 1990s. You may not know that with such a beautiful lake, West Lake, and the admiration of the ancient poet, Hangzhou is not only the birthplace of Alibaba and NetEase but also the first offshore digital financial center as well as the birthplace of the e-payment system in China.

> “the Californian ideology has emerged from this unexpected collision of right-wing neo-liberalism, counter- culture radicalism and technological determinism - a hybrid ideology with all its ambiguities and contradictions intact.

This paragraph quoted form Californian Ideology is just exactly a picture of present, the hybrid ideas keeps up with different kinds of open sources, the liberalist innovations (especially the g0v in Taiwan), and open government data movements are developing. I have some respected friends from the g0v in Taiwan. Young social reformers’ energy fascinates the world. Without specific conveners, they complete several projects in which the citizens propose, team up and work together. For example, they collected the [senators’ property information](http://campaign-finance.g0v.ctiml.tw/) and proclaimed it on the Internet in one night through a game-like competition which recruited all Taiwan youth involved. Besides, the [Moedict](https://www.moedict.tw/%E8%90%8C) creates a dictionary learning mechanism through games which is benefit for all indigenous language learning.

In addition, g0v take part in the prosperity of global civil technology. The other day, at the [g0v summit 2008](https://g0v-summit2018.kktix.cc/events/conf) , they claim ”The largest civic tech event in Asia" in Taipei, we can see there is a wide spectrum of social economy of geek’s version. This could be seen as another automatic society. It makes me recall that when blog bloomed in 2000, those professional reporters who hate civil journalists and we the media like to use the **Infinite Monkey Theorem** to mock. So as to say, let a monkey hit keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time, and it’s sure that it will almost type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. Apparently, the civil society makes the city a city. An automatic society needs those citizens who are conscious rather than authorizes the infinite citizens and praises God (or probability) for determining the fate of all mankind. Try to give it a think. If there are only one or two companies who own the strength of **planetary computing and data of all humans**, such as those employees of Google and Apple, what can’t they do? They can not only complete the whole series of Shakespeare’s works but also monopolize the intellectual property rights of those kind of works in future. It’s easier to organize online collective labors because they won’t ask for the payback of money and relations of goods. This is the so-called cybernetic communism, instead of cyber communism.

<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/157715400" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p><a href="https://vimeo.com/157715400">Richard Barbrook: Californian Ideology 20.2</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/vernetzterleben">.vernetzt#</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

* As a biologist, the grandfather of **Aldous Huxley**, the author of Brave New World, also brought up the similar idea: first, let **six monkeys** hit the keys randomly on a typewriter keyboard. On a certain time point after dozens of trillion years, they will surely type a given text, such as the all the collections in the British Museum.

## 3 Coopathon 2

And it is under this context that I have a dream, one that mobilizes the cooperatives and the hackers altogether. It is through such kind of mobilization that we can begin to challenge our “automation society,” making possible the emergence of a stronger oppositional force that takes its roots from our civil society. On both the 28th and 29th of September 2018, I helped organize [the Platform Coop Consortium (PCC-HK)](https://plaftorm.coop/2018) that was held in Hong Kong. In PCC, I brought together representatives of co-operatives based in Taiwan and China. At the same time, I organized a two days event of Coopathon, that is, coops + hackathon. This is the second time that I organized Coopathan. The first one was in Shanghai in 2016.



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Before this coopathan, we did a lot of research. What we learned from the Shanghai Coopathan is that regardless of our initial goal to bring together as many cooperative as possible from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Korea, Japan, and elsewhere, there was still a huge gap between the ideals of cooperative and its realization by means of new technologies. Indeed, the gap was larger than expected. For the Hong Kong Coopathan, we were better prepared.

we have edited some important artices of platform cooperatives into Chinese, published an e-book on Gitbook , ***let's coop!*** it's free.


We first provided five different local panel discussions, or what I called 拍腦會(local panels) in Chinese, literally meaning an auction for brains or innovative ideas, in Taipei, Kaohsiung, Hong Kong, and Hangzhou. During these panel discussions, different kinds of cooperatives and programmers gathered together, shared their concerns, discussed their needs, and figured out new ways to bridge their needs and build new forms of cooperation. The end result of these panel discussions was published in a small booklet, written in both Chinese and English, and was introduced to the PCC. At the same time, I also sought to reorganize or regroup different teams of cooperative representatives and programmers based on their similar needs. In so doing, hackers and coopers have the same right to raise a proposal which depend on if can success to team up. Hackers is the main subject on proposal stage, coop members are to help them to do things right. This time we balance two key concepts : **do the right thing and do things right**. We developed the new guideline for technology of cooperation. The guideline is this:

> “If individual participants fails to find group members during the very initial stage, he or she needs to join other teams. Everyone has an obligation to help out with the realization of the dream of others.”

This defines the spirit of our Coopathon.





It’s difficult to gain a great concrete outcomes from coopathon. It’s mainly because there is no funding for further development. We try to raise funds to support the winner for the following work this time. Basically, coopathon starts with a certain procedure: proposal, discussion, grouping, execution, presentation, review, and prize-winning. Then the winner can get the funding for follow-up work. We also set up the goals of coopathon is **feeling empowered !**

* to learn self-organized,
* develop coop platform,
* create the accessible resources,

and the criteria of award is :
* interesting
* simple but useful
* extendable.

The Coopathon join participants together into eight teams running nine projects:

1. Minutes Coop “Let’s Coop!”,
2. Smart Agri Asia “Bean Coin”,
3. Alliance of Taiwan Foodbanks “Food Bank System”,
4. Hong Kong Mobile Co-learning Class & Non-violent Communication “Mobile Co-learning Class”,
5. UnitedH2O & ThoughtWorks “Green Go”
6. and “Little Stuff”.
7. There are also “Smangus Recourse Planning” by Taiwan Late Night Nerds, which assists Taiwanese Aboriginal community Smangus;
8. “Get a Ride Co-op” by ducker from Taiwan and Nantang Co-op from Mainland China;
9. last but not least, Co-git, two coders from Mainland China, assists Homemakers Union Consumers Co-op from Taiwan to improve their website.











Different from typical hackthon, the difficulty of doing a coopathon is to bridge coders and members of co-ops whose working approach and interpretation of the society are very different. Through intense communication, coders could realize the meaning to apply technics to a local community or co-op and widen their imagination about the world except computing and efficiency; co-op members could learn from coders as well, recognizing the new possibility coming with technics. **It is not only the communication between society-culture and technics, but also communication across fields and generations (most coders are young generations and most co-op members are in middle-ages or elders)**. Most important of all, it connects “new man” who have been transformed by social moments and “new human” who are digital natives.

## 4 How to design? an appropriate technology and using cooperative to afford new technology

The Coopathon is designed for solving problems. How to design? We should take two points into consideration: appropriate technology and the necessity of using coop to afford new technology.

Let me take an example. Chuan Ming(all people) Taxi Drivers Association was established in 1993, Taiwan. Assembling through ham radio, they have launched countless democratic movements. The picture shows their demonstration against Uber in 2016 just at presidential Hall.


There is always an alternative. Either using social media or an e-hailing app, people prefer the tool which is much cheaper and more practical, rather than the fascination of high-technology. Taiwan Chuan Ming Taxi Drivers Association use ham radio to gather on the street and to engage in the revolution of democracy in Taiwan. In Thailand, “text revolution”is the people contact each other and go together on streets through text messages. Cubans use hard disks to circulate Hollywood movies and latest software. Kenya has adopted the mobile payment system two years earlier than China. The most important is the demand. The value of technology is on its use, not relying on invention. Technology doesn’t make the network become a platform; instead, users’ demand and network make it possible to build a platform.




Obviously, speaking of the aid of technological object in agriculture, from using a drone to spread manure, setting a server for moisture sensors in fields, to weather forecasting, only through cooperatives can we reduce the cost and share the benefit brought by new technology. What’s more, if it were not through cooperatives to access new technology, innovative technology could possibly breed **another Monsanto** and make **digital gentrification** more serious.

## 5 Cooperatives under Chinese context

Here, the second part, I wish to talk about different forms of cooperatives in the Chinese context. You can also understand these forms as different manifestations of social code.

### 5.1 Cooperative as a policy instrument

The first form of cooperatives that I want to discuss is one which serves as a policy instrument in both China and Taiwan. The theories and thinking of cooperatives were first introduced from Europe to China in the 1910s, exactly a century from where we are now. The Cooperative Act was first promulgated in 1934 by the Chinese Nationalist Party, seeking to “enhance the cooperative system and promote cooperative enterprises to facilitate the development of national economy and improve social welfare.” During the National Constituent Assembly session on 25 December 1946 in Nanking when the fifth and current Constitution of the Republic of China was officially adopted, cooperative activities, systems, and enterprises, mentioned in Article 108, Article 110, and in particular Article 145, gained further significance not only in terms of policy making, but also in the major role it takes in the development of the nation.

As a policy instrument, the cooperative was introduced by the state to tackle problems related to insufficient funding, non-competitive development, and tax reduction in agricultural communities. As such, instead of having a bottom-up relationship with the people, this kind of cooperative should be regarded as one that consolidated a hierarchical top-down relationship between the state and its subjects. Mainland China has gone through the revolution, and rushed to get rid of the collective trauma of the people's communes. It was not until 2007 that cooperatives become legal in China, but only in the form of agricultural cooperatives. In Taiwan, foundations and non-profit organizations have become mainstream social charities. That is, both give up the most important nature of cooperative - economic justice and democracy. Even with the relative democratization of Taiwan, where social movements and the freedom of speech are tolerated, the development of cooperatives not as a state-directed project but one where the seeds of democracy and justice can be sowed is still obstructed for various reasons. Right now, there are over 6,000 cooperatives in Taiwan. Two-thirds of them however are consumer cooperatives which follow and reproduce the logics of neoliberalism.

The case of PX Mart, a former government-run military personnel consumer cooperative that was only privatized in 1998 and has since then become one of the most successful corporate business in Taiwan, with its fast concentration of power and accumulation of capital, might serve as one example. With the nationalist and capitalist connotations of the term, cooperatives fails to be regarded as a site for social change and democratization in the eyes of youth and social activists in Taiwan. In light of this predicament, let me draw your attention to another form of cooperative whose development can be traced from indigenous communities.

### 5.2 indigenous common

In Taiwan and China proper, there is a heterogeneous body of indigenous communities, each shares a more radical and progressive history of cooperative than the one developed in the Han Chinese. In contrast to what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined community,” something that is highly mediated by different processes of nationalism and capitalism, what I would like to call the “indigenous common” is based on the idea of sharing. This act of sharing should not be confused with one that is embedded with the neoliberal logic of possessive individualism. That is to say, instead of understanding the act of sharing as a gesture that allows the possessive individual to accumulate more capital and prosper, we should understand sharing through the lens of what the “common.”


Let me further elaborate on what I refer to as the “indigenous common” through the case of indigenous Thao community in Taiwan. Constituted of less than around 300 people now, the Thao community has developed their own form of democratic determination, one that is not based on the self but on the common, since the Japanese colonial period. For example, during the New Year festive activities, each Elder of the seven major families of the Thao community will gather together, look at each other’s eyes, and determine how the New Year celebration, particularly the time spent on it, should be prepared. There is no need for a voting process, and even words become unnecessary. Their community is operated on the basis of social networking and interconnections, important elements that ensure the continual survival of the community as a whole. For the indigenous communities in Taiwan, “the common” itself is equivalent to their community. It serves as the basis that guides the relations of production in the community, one that strives for mutual survival but not possessive individualism.

Another indigenous community in Taiwan called the Smangus is another successful example. A community in the mountains, Smangus used to be a rather segregated community because of the lack of infrastructure. With the infrastructure and internet services in the area, however, members of Smangus were able to form coalitions among different families. They began to share the fruits of their labor and take care of the land in the community. In the end of the day, the Smangus community became one of the most successful case for the operation of cooperatives. It does not only revive the ancestral practice of communal survival but I would argue, turn itself into a site where communism can be realized.



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There are more than 300,000 indigenous people in Taiwan. The “common,” I believe, can find its more radical roots from the indigenous communes. We can indeed learn more from the indigenous populations in Taiwan and elsewhere.

### 5.3 From tax reduction movement to a collective

In addition to the idigenous communes, I would also like to mention another case which is the Nantang Cooperative in China（中國安徽阜陽南塘合作社）. Located in Fuyang city, Anhui Province, the cooperative was established in 1998 by local farmers trying to organize farmers' rights associations against the government’s excessive taxation. It later became a frontline organization for the agricultural tax reduction and exemption movements. In January 2006, the abolition of the agricultural tax became possible thanks to the waves of protests from farmers associations across China. In 2007, “Farmers’ Cooperatives Bill” (農業專業合作社法) came into force to replace the former juridical regulations on agricultural taxation. For more than ten years, the Nantang Cooperative was transformed into a diverse community, famers had learn the 《Robert’s Rules of Order》hardly meanwhile. Not only have they organized an Association for the Elderly and the Women’s Art and Cultural Performance Association. In 2007, they registered under the name Xingnong Cooperative(興農合作社) and expanded their influence throughout eight administrative unites and four villages. Right now, they have around 4000 members, that is, two-third of the villages, who became shareholders of the cooperative. Under this newly expanded Cooperative, facilities and associations including a community library, consumer cooperative, financial resources help center, kindergarten, pub, artist residencies, and more, were organized. Furthermore, some members from the Xingnong Cooperative have mobilized themselves into a Construction Team, collaborating with a group of Taiwanese architects to build their own social activities center, with a multipurpose conference room, library, and classrooms build into its structure.






### 5.4 The alternative beautify countryside

The China government’s active plan, beautify countryside projects, in solving the problem of poverty in rural areas has resulted in the reproduction of numerous homogeneous landscapes and same village cuisine, the same type of nostalgia. Under the state-directed project of rural poverty and landscape reform, only a few villages and townships gained economic success and fame. Wuzhen(烏鎮), for example, which earned UNESCO recognition, was transformed into a town of “fake” historical site and tourist attraction. Rural villages that managed to achieve economic and social equity through development were all related to the implementation of a cooperative social structure.

One example can be found in Puhan community（河南蒲韩乡村社区，蒲韓有機農業聯合社）that covers two townships, Puzho and Hanyan（蒲州镇和韩阳镇）, in the Province of Henan. The Puhan Cooperative has 3800 household members, a number that is equivalent to 58% of the two townships. In 1998, a couple, Zheng Bing(鄭冰) and Xie Fuzheng(謝福政) established “Zhaizi Technology Center” (寨子科技中心)which mainly provide agricultural technology consultation to the members of the cooperative without any charge. In 2001, they initiated a Women Association that focused on cultural and art performances and entertainments for women; two years later, with the help of other villagers, the couple managed to organize a Farmer Association that developed gradually from the Women Association. In June 2004, the cooperative officially registered their name with the Bureau of Civil Affairs in Yongji City（永濟市）. Later, 35 villages surrounding the Zhaizi village where the cooperative is located began to adopt similar modes of development, organizing their own cultural and entertainment center, environmental governing bodies, and diverse economic development projects. In 2008, the Puhan community as a whole officially recognized the cooperative form of development as a basis for their ten-years development project, seeking to incorporate civic needs and public services into their plans for achieving economic success. This is indeed a valuable case study in which an innovative mode of mutual cooperation brought forward positive results to a farmer village under the process of urban process.




Another case that exemplifies the interrelations between cooperatives and urban development can be found in the village of Hecun, located in Lankao in the Henan Province. (中國河南省開封市蘭考縣葡萄架鄉賀村) The case that I want to draw your attention to this time is a mutual fund cooperative which was established when Hecun was first built in accordance to the design of the China Rural Construction Institute. Under the initial design of the Institute, a comprehensive mutual fund assistance system was established in Hecun as a mean to ease the temporary financial and production difficulties facing the villagers. The mutual find cooperative now expands its services and assists villagers with problems related to housing, farmland occupation, disaster preparations and earthquake relief responses. Furthermore, it provides villagers a mutual housing construction system which facilitates a better allocation of funding to those who lack financial resources to build their homes. This cooperative financing housing model effectively mobilizes rural surplus labor into sustainable new rural construction and it improves the loan relation between the bank and farmers.




Hao Tang village(郝堂) is another similar story. In 2009, like other tens of thousands villages in China, Hao Tang was a desolate rural area: garbage and sewage were flooded, lands were fallow, the elders, children and some village cadres were left behind. In the first phase from 2009 to 2011, China Rural Construction Institute assisted the villagers in setting up a pension fund mutual aid cooperative, through the built-in financial resources, and rebuilding the village community. From 2011 to 2013, with the foundation of property rights restructuring and financial capital, there is the ability to build new homes. They invited Taiwanese architect Xie Yingjun (謝英俊) to transform the toilets in Haotang Village Primary School into urine-diverting dry toilet(尿糞分集廁所), bring in the concept of ecological energy conservation, and specifically produce organic fertilizer through the toilets, so that children can learn the farming skills such as growing vegetables, and gradually affect the villagers’ thinking and living habits. The setting of eco-toilet brought a new wave of visitors, and the village was also eager to build new houses with financial aids. Xie Yingong cooperated with villagers to build the tea house and wind and rain bridge as well. Since then, the village gets rid of its shabby past and turns into a popular tourist site.





### 5.5 The Rise of urban middle class

Consumer Movement, an organized effort to promote consumer rights through urban movements, has served as a major force that facilitated the promotion and establishment of consumer cooperatives across the globe. In Taiwan, the emergence of the [Homemakers Union Consumers Co-op](https://www.hucc-coop.tw/ (HUCC 主婦聯盟) was directly related to the local manifestation of such movements. Following a series of environmental and food contamination scandal in Taiwan, one in particular involved rice contamination, HUCC was founded in 2001 by a group of housewives who sought to “get safe food from trusted farmers.” In their pursuit of food safety, HUCC began to visit farms around Taiwan searching for sustainably grown or organic food product. They then sold products directly brought from the farmers to the members of their cooperative. Right now, HUCC has 70 thousand members, which makes them the biggest consumer co-op in Taiwan. In addition, they have facilitated a lot of sub-unions, foundations, coops and associations, including a housing coop and a green energy coop. It’s no exaggeration to say that women hold up half sky of the cooperative.

## 6 The platform society is coming？

If time allows, I would like to conclude in this way.

Since 2016, I have done research on Taobao Village(淘寶村) in China. The term “Taobao Village” comes from an e-commerce platform which run by Alibaba Group. Since Alibaba claimed Taobao Villages appeared in 2015, more than 2000 Taobao Villages have emerged in China over the past 3 years. There are two elements which could be used to define a Taobao Village. One is whether there are more than ten percent of a villagers selling things on Taobao, and the other is whether there is an annual trading volume of more than 10 million RMB. Either the underprivileged farmers or old ladies, even the returning youths, they all strive to sell on Taobao. There used to be gentry in Chinese villages, but now they have been replaced by Taobao University which taught the villagers how to trade on line, and thus became the UN successful model of eliminating poverty.




**Platform is a machine which serves to interpret all the flows of mankind**. We are going to reverse McLuhan’s words: **Human is the infinitely extended sensors of the machine**. We even don’t bother to move our fingers in order to upload our own data to the cloud. Marx once pointed out in his book ***The Poverty of Philosophy***, he said:

> “The hand-mill brings a society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill gives birth to a society with the industrial capitalist.”

Hence, will the internet creates a society ruled by platform empire?

Among the top 100 global enterprises, more than 60% of the company's main income comes from the platform business. Amazon, Apple, Tencent, Alibaba and other giants have adopted the platform model in their operations. The platform is no longer a technical phenomenon. It is a new thing that is diffused in the process of economic development. It is an enterprise in terms of organizational form, but in terms of its function, it is more like a user’s market for trading. The platform combines the attributes of the enterprise and the market. The winning code is to get enough users, the more users, the more important they are to the user, the more they can penetrate into the user's life. This is a **platform envelopment**, the platform is a "**modern monopolist**", the **platform is eating the world**. Nick Srnicek, published in the journal Juncture in 2017 entitled "***The challenges of platform capitalis: Understanding the logic of a new business model"**, pointed out: Platform business model which is depend on the amount of data, these data are limited only by ignoring privacy (usually workers' rights) and constant outward expansion. Privacy disclosure has become an essential feature of platform capitalism, as we know of facebook and google leaks. **The platform needs more and more data, just like the old iron ore monopolist swallowed coal.**

Those concerns and critics are not only challenges platform capitalism, but also a warning to the platform cooperativists. If platform cooperativism could not take the technology which is more effective to maintain personal privacy and distributed datastorge, then it would just be another platform.

Openbazar (https://openbazaar.org/ ) is a good example which is worth thinking. This is a free transaction platform using blockchain and cryptocurrency. All of the transaction and privacy are reserved in distributed nodes through p2p. For existing and future platform cooperativism, there is still a lot to be desired.

Anyway, we have seen the possibility of combining internet technology and cooperatives. Let me reapeat the Marx’s reminding,

> “It took both time and experience for the workingmen to learn to distinguish between machinery and the use made of it by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against their use as means of exploitation.”

But we have to connect **production of space and production of internet**, **the place of production and space of flo**w, **new man** who is transformed by social movement and **new human kind** who is digital native. This is the very turning point. In brief, we need platform cooperativism in order to enable post-humans to learn a new **social-living life**. Therefore, we need more social movements, more cooperatives, and more symbiosis of platform cooperativism. To put neoliberalism to an end, we need to create rather than to resist. **We must take our living labor as independent variables instead of dependent variables.**

For social activists, conflicts reconstruct the world and create the new man; for architects, it is necessary to master the technics of starting the world; for artists, they reshape the world with senses; as for hackers, improve the codes means change the world they are. Perhaps they forget that the world is not only behind the doors they are looking at but also in-between them. The present social life is built on the basis of the imagination upon the future social life. Where there is no future, where there is no ever.

We can trace back to Californian Ideology and contemplate such thought-provoking words,

> “It is now necessary for us to assert our own future - if not in circumstances of our own choosing.”

And maybe we can fulfill it in opposite way.

---

# A list of platform cooperatives
**lai HsiaoYing**

==Art & Culture==
|NO.| Organization | Region| Introduction |
|--------| -------- | -------- | -------- |
|01|[SMart](https://smartbe.be/fr/)|Belgium|SMart is a non-pro t organisation created in Belgium in 1998 which is developing itself in 8 European countries. It aim to simplify and support the professional paths of creative and cultural workers. Its principal goal is to assist freelance workers to develop their own activity through a secure system. It offers multiple services such as information, trainings, legal advice, a social professional network, co-working spaces, etc.
|02|[Stocksy](https://www.stocksy.com)|Canada| Stocksy uses a curated editing approach to select useful and authentic photos.The co-op differs from other stock photography firms by its stated focus on fair pay and creating sustainable careers for its members.
|03|[Resonate](https://resonate.is)|Germany|Resonate is a music-streaming platform co-op based in Berlin. Built using blockchain technology, Resonate offers streaming meant to provide a better deal for artists - a so-called ‘stream to own’ model; rather than a monthly subscription, listeners pay each time they play a track, until eventually it’s theirs to download.
|04|[meerkatmedia](https://www.meerkatmedia.org)|New York|Meerkat Media Collective is an artistic community that shares resources and skills to incubate individual and shared creative work. They are committed to a collaborative, consensus-based process that values diverse experience and expertise. They support the creation of thoughtful and provocative stories that reflect a complex world. Their work has been broadcast on HBO, PBS, and many other networks, and screened at festivals worldwide, including Sundance, Tribeca, Rotterdam and CPH:Dox.Founded as an informal arts collective in 2005 they have grown to include a cooperatively-owned production company and a collective of artists in residence.|
|05|[THE ARTIST COOP](http://www.theartistco-op.com)|New York|The Artist Co-op is a coworking space for performing artists, uniting New York City’s actors directors, dancers, playwrights, and more, with programs and services to support the performing arts community.|
|06|[ARTENRÉEL](http://artenreel.com)|Strasbourg|Based in Strasbourg, Artenréel is the first cooperative combining artists and cultural activists in France. Believing in mutual assistance instead of playing alone hand, they construct a system to train young artist and to develop their own business model. Besides, Artenréel also guarantees the monthly income with the labor contract.|
|07|[la Coopérative du Zebre](http://lezebre.info/la-coop/)|Lyon|Gathering people from fields of art and culture, la Coopérative du Zebre provides a space for organizing concerts, exhibitions, theatres, and even cuisine. |
|08|[ Coopérative Artistique 109](https://www.cooperative109.fr/fr/a-propos-de-la-cooperative-artistique-109/)|Brest|Coopérative artistique 109 (109 Artistic Cooperative, formerly “coopérative artistique Marmouzic” is an association (acc. to french law 1901) grouping several artistis or artistic groups or teams (companies, collective groups..) for a common way of managing their different projects, with common ethic values. It was created by artists to serve the idea of a diversified and professionnal artistic creation, open to everyone and for a large audience.|
|09|[SUPERMARKT](https://supermarkt-berlin.net)|Berlin|SUPERMARKT was founded in 2010 by Ela Kagel, David Farine and Zsolt Szentirmai as a platform for digital culture, collaborative economies and new forms of work. SUPERMARKT’s program increasingly focuses on the intersection of technology, money and society. The Free Culture Incubator program, which was developed in conjunction with the transmediale Festival for Arts and Digital Culture, was the starting point for an ongoing exploration of the price and value of freelance creative work and the increasing financialisation of our culture.|
|10|[CO-ART CO-OP](http://www.caco.tw)|Kaohsiung|In order to make art a force which initiates a life of holisticity, CACO is the first co-op to be formed by artists that has applied for and successfully been registered by the department of social welfare in Taiwan. This is a Co-op which confronts the society head on, we make lists of the fundamental needs of every one of our members. From daily needs to job opportunities, from disputes to creative production desires, as well as methods for collective proposal resolutions,” they harvest theirselves”.

==Transportation==
|NO.| Organization | Region| Introduction |
|--------| -------- | -------- | -------- |
|01|taxiclick|-||
|02|[LA'ZOOZ](http://lazooz.org)|Tel Aviv|La’Zooz is a decentralized, community-owned transportation platform that turns a vehicle's unused space into a variety of smart transportation solutions. La’Zooz uses cryptocurrency technology to provide a “fair share” reward system for its developers, users, and backers. By synchronizing available seats with local transportation needs in real time, La’Zooz delivers a great ride-sharing experience to like-minded people for a fair fare.
|03|[green Taxi](http://greentaxico-op.com/index.cfm)|Denver|Green taxi Cooperative opened for business in 2015 as Denver County's Third driver owned Cab Company and has since built a reputation of quality service and customer loyalty through the dedication of drivers that operate with a company that not only serves the communities of Denver County but is also owned and operated by the drivers themselves. All the vehicles that are operated for Green taxi Cooperative are owned by individual drivers contracted as full-time drivers.
|04|[UNION TAXI COOPERATIVE](http://www.uniontaxidenver.net)|Denver|Union Taxi Cooperatives is a driver-owned taxi fleet where each driver has a personal stake in providing exemplary service. Furthermore, its continued investment in technology has allow it to provide timely service and keep passengers informed.
|05|[union cab co-op](https://www.unioncab.com)|Madison|Union Cab is a worker cooperative; each worker shares a vested interest as a member owner. Its Mission: “To create living wage jobs in a safe, humane, & democratic environment while providing quality transportation services.”|
|06|[coop taxi](http://coop-taxi.kr/union/union04.php)|Seoul|Former lawmaker Park Gye Dong, chairperson of COOP Taxi, developed a system to give drivers an alternative to the exploitation of taxi companies. The system brought together 184 cooperative members who together invested 4 billion won ($3.3 million). Each driver invests at least 25 million won ($21,413) to become a part of the cooperative, and then receives a dividend proportionate to the initial investment as well as profits earned. In contrast to the traditional system, there are no daily fees that force drivers to share their daily earnings with the company.
|07|[TAXI COOP](http://www.taxi-coop.com/en)|Montreal|Founded in 1980, Taxi Coop Montreal is one of Montreal's most popular taxi companies. Taxi Coop Montreal, it’s also a mobile application. Built by the coop itself, this application is fully integrated to their GPS dispatch system and allows customers to order a taxi without delay.
|08|[CoopCycle](https://coopcycle.org/en/)|France|CoopCycle aims to become a numerical common well. It belongs to its users (couriers, shop owners) and its contributors (developers). They administer it democratically. They are providing a software that enables customers to order and to be delivered by bicycle.|

==Daily Service Offering==
|NO.| Organization | Region| Introduction |
|--------| -------- | -------- | -------- |
|01| [LOCONOMICS](https://loconomics.com) |San Francisico|Loconomics is a platform cooperative that allows service professionals working in areas like dog walking, home care, child care, massage therapy, and tutoring to connect and offer their services on a platform that they own.They not only build the website and app, but also provide tools, marketing, and community to their owners, empowering them to thrive in their work as local service professionals.
|02|[fairmondo](https://www.fairmondo.de)|Germany|Originally founded in Germany in 2012, Fairmondo aims to federate and expand to create a global online marketplace, but with ownership firmly in hands of their local users. The German coop currently gathers over 2000 members who have invested over 600,000 euros in shares. It is open both to professional and private sellers and the products on offer have no general restrictions unless they are illegal or run counter to Farmondo’s values. The core values are fairness and the promotion of responsible consumption. Rather than having to find fairly sourced products from a variety of places, Fairmondo practically gathers them in federated, democratic platforms. The fairness of the products in question is assessed by a shared criteria which remains open to discussion and improvement by the members and the Fairmondo user base. The platform also includes certain products which are not necessarily fair trade, for example books, with more than two million on offer.
|03|[FairCoop](https://fair.coop/en)|-|FairCoop is an open global cooperative that organizes itself through the Internet outside the boundaries and controls of nation-states. It combines the advantages of new decentralized technologies with ethical principles and experiences of activists and groups trying to create a new economic system based on cooperation and economic justice.
|04|[OpenBazaar](https://openbazaar.org)|-|In April of 2014 at a Toronto hackathon a project called “Dark Market” was created. Amir Taaki lead a small team of developers to build a proof of concept for a decentralized marketplace. The software was completely peer to peer with no central organization controlling it. The Dark Market entry won the hackathon, but Amir and his team decided not to continue work on the project.After founding the company OB1, they start OpenBazaar as an open source project developing a protocol for e-commerce transactions in a fully decentralized marketplace. It uses cryptocurrencies as medium of exchange and was inspired by a hackathon project called DarkMarket.
|05|[HANSALIM](http://eng.hansalim.or.kr)|Korea|Hansalim is cooperative established by the producers and the consumers. The producers farm and produce products believing human and nature as well as the urban and the rural area is connected with the string of life. And the consumers use the products understanding the mind of producers. It becomes harder to set the healthy table due to the climate change and natural disasters. The market gets bigger and the fundamental of our agriculture is in danger. Hansalim is active in direct trade between the producers and the consumers based on life giving agriculture. Hansalim is also doing the meaningful daily action which saves our lives and earth through the efforts to live together with our neighbors in need, the living culture in harmony with the nature and the humble consumption.|
|06|[Japanese Consumers' Cooperative Union](https://jccu.coop)|Japan|Japanese Consumers' Co-operative Union (JCCU) was established in March 1951 as the national federation of consumer co-ops in Japan. Today, about 320 consumer co-ops and consumer co-op unions join JCCU and the total of gross sales of the member co-ops is about 3.4 trillion JPY, with total 28 million members. JCCU is the largest consumers' organization in Japan.JCCU mainly operates supermarket-type stores and it also provides lots of community service all over Japan.|
|07|[Homemakers Union Consumers Co-op](https://www.hucc-coop.tw)|Taiwan|Following a series of environmental and food contamination scandal in Taiwan, one in particular involved rice contamination, HUCC was founded in 2001 by a group of housewives who sought to “get safe food from trusted farmers.” In their pursuit of food safety, HUCC began to visit farms around Taiwan searching for sustainably grown or organic food product. They then sold products directly brought from the farmers to the members of their cooperative. Right now, HUCC has 70 thousand members, which makes them the the biggest consumer co-op in Taiwan. In addition, they have facilitated a lot of sub-unions, foundations, coops and associations, including a housing coop and a green energy coop.|

==Argricultur==
|NO.| Organization | Region| Introduction |
|--------| -------- | -------- | -------- |
|01|[Nantang Cooperative](https://tw.weibo.com/5611088402)|China|Located in Fuyang city, Anhui Province, Nangtang cooperative was established in 1998 by local farmers trying to organize farmers' rights associations against the city government’s excessive taxation. It later became a frontline organization for the agricultural tax reduction and exemption movements. In January 2006, the abolition of the agricultural tax became possible thanks to the waves of protests from farmers associations across China. In 2007, “Farmers’ Professional Cooperatives” was introduced as a bill to replace the former juridical regulations on agricultural taxation. For more than ten years, the Nantang Cooperative was transformed into a diverse community, following the Robert’s Rules of Order. Not only have they organized an Association for the Elderly and the Women’s Art and Cultural Performance Association. In 2007, they registered under the name Xingnong Cooperative and expanded their influence throughout eight administrative unites and four villages. Right now, they have around 4000 members, that is, two-third of the villages, who became shareholders of the cooperative. Under this newly expanded Cooperative, facilities and associations including a community library, consumer cooperative, financial resources help center, kindergarten, pub, artist group, and more, were organized. Furthermore, some members from the Xingnong Cooperative have mobilized themselves into a Construction Team, collaborating with a group of Taiwanese architects to build their own social activities center, with a multipurpose conference room, library, and classrooms build into its structure. |
|02|Puhan Cooperative|China|Puhan community that covers two townships, Puzho and Hanyan, in the Province of Henan. The Puhan Cooperative has 3800 household members, a number that is equivalent to 58% of the two townships. In 1998, a couple, Zheng Bing and Xie Fuzheng, established “Zhaizi Technology Center” which mainly provide agricultural technology consultation to the members of the cooperative without any charge. In 2001, they initiated a Women Association that focused on cultural and art performances and entertainments for women; two years later, with the help of other villagers, the couple managed to organize a Farmer Association that developed gradually from the Women Association. In June 2004, the cooperative officially registered their name with the Bureau of Civil Affairs in Yongji City. Later, 35 villages surrounding the Zhaizi village where the cooperative is located began to adopt similar modes of development, organizing their own cultural and entertainment center, environmental governing bodies, and diverse economic development projects. In 2008, the Puhan community as a whole officially recognized the cooperative form of development as a basis for their ten-year development project, seeking to incorporate civic needs and public services into their plans for achieving economic success. |
|03|[Shih An Community Cooperatives](https://shihanrice.tw)|Taiwan|Situated in north Tainan, Shih An Community used to be a dilapidated farming village, with ageing populaton and insufficiency of infrastructure.Through the idea of cooperative, the chief of village encourged the villagers growing organic rice and turned the surplus into ageing nursing. After two years of efforts, they finally achieve the goal of economic independent and complete the community support. |

==Programm Developing & Technology Support==
|NO.| Organization | Region| Introduction |
|--------| -------- | -------- | -------- |
|01|[COLAB cooperative](https://colab.coop/work/upandgo/)|New York|CoLab is a worker-owned digital agency that started in 2010 in Ithaca, New York. It designs and develops technology for mission driven organizations and entrepreneurs, , including Seventh Generation, Cornell University, and the Unitarian Universalist Association. CoLab has team members in Ithaca, New York City, Austin, Oakland, Montreal, Toronto, Taipei, Izola, Jakarta, and Chandigarh. Recently, it launchs Up&Go which is platform for professional home cleanings in New York city.
|02|[RChain](https://www.rchain.coop)|-|RChain is a fundamentally new blockchain platform rooted in a formal model of concurrent and decentralized computation. The RChain Cooperative is leveraging that model through correct-by-construction software development to produce a concurrent, compositional, and massively scalable blockchain.
|03|[sharetribe](https://www.sharetribe.com/about.html)|Finland|Finnish software startup Sharetribe, which is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and organisations to create their own sharing-economy platforms.

==Related Organizations==
|NO.| Organization | Region| Introduction |
|--------| -------- | -------- | -------- |
|01|[Plaform Cooperativism Consortium](https://platform.coop/about/consortium)|-|The Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC) supports the cooperative platform economy through research, experimentation, education, advocacy, documentation of best practices, technical support, the coordination of funding, and events. The Consortium is built upon the concept of platform cooperativism, which is anchored in collective ownership, democratic governance, a decisive commitment to the global commons, inventive unions, social justice, as well as ecological and social sustainability.|
|02|[P2P:Foundation](https://p2pfoundation.net)|-|The P2P Foundation is a non-profit organization and global network dedicated to advocacy and research of commons-oriented peer to peer (P2P) dynamics in society.|