Collaborative platforms

New digital tools are emerging everyday, including technical and social innovation that target the collaboration processes. According to the TAPAS - There Are Platforms as AlternativeS research program, the distinction between “platform companies” and so-called “collaborative” or “alternative” platforms is that the former are characterized by vertical governance and the appropriation of most of the value created by the platform manager, meanwhile collaborative platforms are organized in a more horizontal manner and distribute bundles of rights over the resources created, according to the logic of sharing the commons. They outline a field that is likely to emancipate itself from purely commercial principles in order to better respond to the imperatives of social and environmental sustainability, by mobilizing a plurality of economic principles and by creating links with the initiatives of the digital commons and the social and solidarity economy.

Their synthesis note highlights, among others, the following characteristics:

• the idea is not to copy an existing platform model and put some "social or environmental value" in it but designing new models of social and environmental transitions. Example, distributing local and healthy food for ecological, social justice or health reasons;
• this strong social and/or environmental component represents their identity and their attraction for potential users;
• their goal is to federate different protagonists : consumers, producers, other platforms, offering tools based to respond needs expressed by the users;
• there is a territorial element that promote local links between groups and/or individuals;
• hybridation of resources: market, non market, non monetary, reciprocity, gift-economy;
• democratic governance based on the model of cooperatives and the open source and digital commons, opened to the platform workers and its users, volunteers, beneficiaries, funders, partners, and supporters, individuals or organisations;
• open source technologies and reciprocity licences.

Digital plaforms are present in different kind of sectors:

Food

Open Food Network (OFN) is a collaborative international network of local nonprofit organisations who codevelop open source software and knowledge, and make it available to food hubs worldwide through localized online platforms. The mission is to build shared digital infrastructure and shared knowledge to enable short food chain operators to manage their activities, cooperate more efficiently, and build food sovereignty. Just as consumers and producers come together to create food hubs in different forms (such as CSA – Community Supported Agriculture or Solidarity Biuting Groups), in OFN food hubs come together to create a digital infrastructure and share the use of it. We could talk about “Community Supported Software” and “Community Supported Knowledge”. The OFN community has documented the way it works, organizes, cooperates in this OFN handbook. I, 2021, at the European level, OFN was already present in several countries (UK, Ireland, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Switzerland) and “incubating” in others (Portugal, Sweden / Scandinavia, Poland, Netherlands and Russia).

Social market e-commerce and alternative currencies

APRES - le réseau genevois de l’économie sociale et solidaire - and Monnaie Leman - the local currency of the Lake Geneva region - created the SmartketPlace platform, a generalist digital marketplace. The software is free and open source. It is generic and replicable, i.e. it is easy to adapt to local applications: example: GE Consomme Local, was designed specifically for Geneva, but is replicable for other cities.

SmartketPlace has all the functions necessary for e-commerce: registration of individuals and companies (with a protocol for protecting data), sale/purchase of goods and services (constitution of a “basket”); payment in different means of payment (including complementary local currency); and home delivery.

Links

With Ripess NL articles or position papers

Among the articles of the thematic issue on Solidarity & Collaborative Digital Platforms in the Ripess Newsletter of January 2022:

• Open Food Network: from CSAs to CSS (Community Supported Software)
• SmartketPlace, everywhere in Europe?