What were your main objectives during this reporting period?
- Launch the new Platform Cooperative website
- Co-design with partner cooperatives
- Design and develop platform the Labour Platform architecture
- Design and prototype the Learning Commons
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The needs of our participating cooperatives are incredibly diverse, and their readiness to adopt new technologies and platforms differs greatly. Our project's goals are ambitious, complex, and highly dependent on recruiting a community of contributors to help grow and sustain the effort. As a result, we are working very closely with our partner cooperatives and the larger platform co-op community throughout the design and development process, using iterative and open source methods. Our design process typically starts with the creation of the simplest possible intervention into the problem space—a sketch, a prototype, a workflow or journey—which we then share openly with co-designers and the co-op community to critique, help refine, and transform our initial assumptions. We build from small successes, and aim to design simple, constantly-evolving artifacts whose provisionality invites greater feedback and improvement from our community. Over the course of many iterations throughout the project's timeline, these designs are extended to provide new features, greater robustness, and to respond to emerging needs.
During this reporting period, we:
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Several prototypes of the Learning Commons user experience have been designed, at varying levels of fidelity and functionality. These prototypes will be used as part of the co-design process with participating cooperatives, and our co-designers will have the opportunity to adapt and create their own prototypes prior to our implementing the full Learning Commons software. An interactive Learning Commons prototype is available on the web, and a collection of different experimental paper prototypes, which were elaborated with members of the platform cooperative community, have been posted as well.
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Throughout the process of creating the Platform Cooperative Development Kit, we are engaging our partner cooperatives to help us co-design each of the project's deliverables. This process takes different forms, from periodic brainstorming sessions and crits over video conferencing to more formal in-person activities and workshops. Over the last six months, we have developed an embedded co-design kit that is intended to provide cooperatives with the tools and activities to organize and run their own internal co-design workshops.
Our Platform Cooperative Development embedded co-design kit includes a collection of activities, worksheets, facilitation advice, and a suggested structure that cooperatives can use to help identify and concretize their highest priority needs for the Learning Commons and Labour platform. The CoRise cooperative has scheduled their first co-design session for later this summer, and other partners such as Cataki and SEWA will organize their events later this year. The results of these embedded co-design sessions will be shared back, synthesized, and used to drive the development prioritization for the project.
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A primary challenge during this reporting period, once again, was in recruiting team members to the project. We experienced delays in hiring a Senior Inclusive Developer to work on the project. Toronto is a highly competitive tech market, and we needed someone with experience working in our unique context—particularly with experience building open source software and contributing to open communities. Hiring takes time. We were lucky enough to hire Ned Zimmerman, an experienced open source developer who is a well-respected contributor to WordPress, Pressbooks, and other projects. This hiring delay resulted in a slower than anticipated start to the implementation of the new Platform Cooperative website, which has now been launched. As a result of this delay, we had to push back the start of of the Learning Commons and Labour Platform implementation by two months, and we anticipate having to reducing reduce the scope somewhat and recruit outside help for the Cooperative Map deliverable scheduled later in the project timeline. We have also brought on an additional developer from the IDRC to the project to help with the backlog. Further, as discussed above, we will continue to address the larger gap between our capacity and the vast needs of the community by focusing on developing the technological infrastructure most needed by and most in common amongst our co-designers, and placing greater emphasis, as described above, on recruiting contributors and catalyzing an open source project.
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A final challenge that we faced while developing the platform.coop website was in balancing and addressing the needs of so many different prospective audiences. It can be very challenging to design a single user experience and information architecture for such diverse stakeholders as in our case—academic researchers or idealistic technologists have very different interests and focal points than do, for example, worker/owners or labour unions. Designing for one may confuse or drive off others. In order to address thisAs a result, it took us longer than originally anticipated to design for this requirement. In response, we specifically designed a section of the new site, How Platform Co-ops Can Benefit You, that provides personalized information and starting points for each of our primary audience demographics.