What is it about?
We have looked at a lot of platforms supporting sharing economy and grouped their features to get an understanding of the main features that are offered. Then we compared that to what the literature says about platform economy, and we noticed that supporting "collectivity" is missing in current platforms. Yet, features to support collectivity may be very important to support in particular grassroot initiatives interested in autonomous cooperation (not disciplined by capital and aiming at social change)
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Why is it important?
There is a lot of work discussing the sharing economy, but not from the technical poit of view, not adressing how the technical platforms are designed. We aim at understanding how the platforms function, in order to be engaged in building platforms for a caring economy that values cooperation as an emancipatory practice. Our ultimate interest is to create a catalogue of functionalities that can be explored as alternatives and possible means of achieving a certain objective and that helps communities to better reflect their options and make design decisions towards improving their technical infrastructures.
Perspectives
This article was written with two outstanding authors, Susanne Bodker (Aarhus University) and Alexander Boden (Fraunhofer FIT) who are also part of the European COST Action (network) called Sharing&Caring http://sharingandcaring.eu/ that supported this work. I was very happy to be able to write a paper that describes the work we have done as a network. I hope some grassroot initiatives or local communities could make use of it.
Myriam Lewkowicz
Universite de Technologie de Troyes
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: What’s in a word? Platforms Supporting the Platform Economy, October 2020, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3419249.3420167.
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