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.