Cooperativism and Human-Computer Interaction

ABSTRACT

If social, economic and environmental sustainability are linked, then support for the increasing number of non-profit groups and member-owned organizations offering what Trebor Scholz has called "platform cooperativism" [17] has never been more important. Together, these organizations not only tackle issues their members identify in the world of work, but also provide network-driven collections of shared things (e.g., books, tools) and resources (e.g., woodworking spaces, fab labs) that benefit local communities, potentially changing, not just use of resources at community level, but socio-economic structures on the ground (e.g., [15]). In contrast to for-profit services often associated with the sharing economy (e.g., Uber, Airbnb), platform co-ops attempt to advocate ecological, economic and social sustainability, with the goal to promoting a fairer distribution of goods and labor, ultimately creating a stronger sense of community. While some HCI sub-communities (e.g., CSCW) have started to explore this emergent phenomenon, especially leveraging ethnographic research methods, researchers have called for more diverse HCI approaches to address the growing scope of challenges within platform co-ops, member-driven exchange systems, and cooperativism more broadly. This SIG aims to bring together researchers from different HCI sub-communities to identify future research directions in HCI around cooperativism and platforms.

References

1. Fleura Bardhi and Giana M. Eckhardt. 2012. Access-based consumption: The case of car sharing. Journal of consumer research, 39(4), pp.881--898.
2. Victoria M.E. Bellotti, Sara Cambridge, Karen Hoy, Patrick C. Shih, Lisa Renery Handalian, Kyungsik Han, and John M. Carroll. 2014. Towards community-centered support for peer-to-peer service exchange: rethinking the timebanking metaphor. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2975--2984.
3. Susanne Bødker, Peter Lyle, and Joanna Saad-Sulonen. 2017. Untangling the Mess of Technological Artifacts: Investigating Community Artifact Ecologies. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Communities and Technologies. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 246--255.
4. John M. Carroll and Victoria Bellotti. 2015. Peer--to-Peer Exchange and the Sharing Economy: Analysis, Designs, and Implications. Interaction Design and Architecture (s), 24.
5. Tawanna R. Dillahunt and Amelia R. Malone. 2015. The Promise of the Sharing Economy among Disadvantaged Communities. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2285--2294.
6. Tawanna R. Dillahunt, Xinyi Wang, Earnest Wheeler, Hao Fei Cheng, Brent J. Hecht, and Haiyi Zhu. 2017. The Sharing Economy in Computing: A Systematic Literature Review. PACMHCI, 1(CSCW), pp.38--1.
7. Anton Fedosov, Jeremías Albano, and Marc Langheinrich. 2018. Supporting the design of sharing economy services: learning from technology-mediated sharing practices of both digital and physical artifacts. In Proceedings of the 10th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 323--337.
8. Airi Lampinen, Vilma Lehtinen, Coye Cheshire, and Emmi Suhonen. 2013. Indebtedness and reciprocity in local online exchange. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 661--672.
9. Airi Lampinen, Victoria Bellotti, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Coye Cheshire, and Alexandra Samuel. 2015. Studying the "Sharing Economy": Perspectives to Peer-to-Peer Exchange. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW'15 Companion). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 117--121.
10. Airi Lampinen, Victoria Bellotti, Coye Cheshire, and Mary Gray. 2016. CSCW and the Sharing Economy: The Future of Platforms as Sites of Work Collaboration and Trust. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Companion (CSCW '16 Companion). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 491--497.
11. Airi Lampinen, Christoph Lutz, Gemma Newlands, Ann Light, Nicole Immorlica. 2018. Power Struggles in the Digital Economy: Platforms, Workers, and Markets. In Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference Companion on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW'18 Companion). ACM
12. Airi Lampinen, Moira McGregor, Rob Comber, and Barry Brown. 2018. Member-Owned Alternatives: Exploring Participatory Forms of Organising with Cooperatives. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2, CSCW, Article 100 (November 2018), 19 pages.
13. Ann Light and Clodagh Miskelly, 2014. Design for sharing. Northumbria University/The Sustainable Society Network.
14. Ann Light and Clodagh Miskelly, 2015. Sharing Economy vs Sharing Cultures? Designing for social, economic and environmental good, IxD&A, 24, 49--62
15. Ann Light (forthcoming): Designing the Economics of the Sharing Economy: Towards Sustainable Management. Handbook of the Sharing Economy, edited by Russell Belk, Giana Eckhardt ,Fleura Bardhi, and Edward Elgar.
16. Lone Malmborg, Ann Light, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Victoria Bellotti, and Margot Brereton. 2015. Designing for Sharing in Local Communities. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2357--2360
17. Trebor Scholz. 2016. Platform cooperativism. Challenging the corporate sharing economy. New York, NY: Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
18. Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider. eds., 2017. Ours to hack and to own: The rise of platform cooperativism, a new vision for the future of work and a fairer internet. OR books.
19. Emmi Suhonen, Airi Lampinen, Coye Cheshire, and Judd Antin. 2010. Everyday favors: a case study of a local online gift exchange system. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work (GROUP '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11--20.

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)