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Meeting with Suara Coop August 21, 2019

Meeting with Suara Coop August 21, 2019

Aug 22, 2019

 

  • Introduce the project for Suara

    • Background - Trebor

      • In the last 10 years Trebor’s convened people for this topic of digital labour

      • 5 years ago we thought about how to do something beyond writing books

      • Proposal - push for coops entering the digital economy - what we call platform cooperatives

      • Introduced to Jutta, leader and founder of the IDRC, and applied to grant from Google Foundation together

      • To create a kit that would benefit coops and freelancers that would benefit those who want to start platform coops

      • Part of this is a resource library that has practical and academic aspects for coops to learn about this area, training material, etc

      • Tools with which we can assist these groups in launching platform coops

      • It’s a limited amount of money, but given the scale of the project its not a lot of money

      • We can customize tools, build tools, but the scope is a bit limited 

      • Methodology is to drive from the community - so domestic workers would drive the agenda

      • See if there are overlaps between all the groups we work with

    • How many countries?

      • SEWA in India

      • CoRise coop in Chicago

      • Cataki in Brazil

      • Cooperative Life in Australia

    • Where we’re at with different partners

      • We’re at different stages with each of them - we’re doing co-design with each of them to determine - what are their greatest needs in terms of digital tools

      • Trying to find overlaps between the different partners

      • For example, we’re hearing from different partners that learning commons is a tool

        • Right now we’re working on a resource library for the consortium website, and what we’re working on here is informing what we’re doing as a part of the partners’ learning commons

      • Another tool we’ve identified of interest is a “hub” or “dashboard” - first step towards a labour platform

        • A bunch of different tools can be brought together, gathering the data in one place

  • Circumstance - Trebor

    • The city council of very supportive of our work, and your work

    • They were excited about the possibility of a collaboration

    • Which I thought would be meaningful, because even if we just engage with the learning commons - whatever we do together - there might be more support from them - perhaps more funding

    • It might have a future

  • Jordi

    • We can see what we can do in 11 months, but perhaps we can continue to collaborate afterwards

  • Trebor - you mentioned something that the learning commons would be of interest?

    • Jordi - For us, what would be interesting - the need for us is the […]

    • For us, find a way to match the carers with the users / customers, based on different numbers of factors - location, competencies, etc

    • Finding the place where people live, and the place where social worker lives

    • They’re more interested in this tool

  • Dana - it’s still interesting to understand what your needs are around that matching tool

    • We’ve heard similar needs from SEWA in India, desire to have that type of functionality

    • It would probably be useful for others as well - CoRise

    • Challenge here may be - figuring out is what’s realistic in terms of our process

    • With our other partners, they’re running co-design workshops at their locations

    • We’re providing the structure around how to do that, working with them in their context, helping them with a co-design session(s) where they’re gathering those requirements - gathering needs of coop workers to see what they want from various tools

    • If you’re interested in that, we could do that

    • If that doesn’t sound like something for you, we can gather requirements in other ways - survey, etc

  • Trebor

    • Maybe you and Dana could have a small group of representative workers, workers that are standing in for your large workforce, and there would be a co-design workshop with a limited amount of people

    • Not only the workers, but also the other stakeholders - also the clients, and other people who you see play a role in your work

    • Dana - there are sometimes cases where - another one of our partners expressed a desire to have session with workers only, as well as a mixed session, depending on what they’re comfortable with, we leave that up to you

  • Jordi

    • Trebor, you said it’d be interesting to bring in this group - 

    • Trebor: Yeah, sometimes it would be useful if there was a technical equivalent from your office, a local in Catalan, communicate with the worker and be a part of the process

  • Michelle

    • Right now we’re looking to adopt tools

    • We’ll look for existing open source tools, and make it available for a hub

    • But to make it work for an individual coop, you’d need a tech person on your end

    • The toolkit isn’t itself going to be doing hosting

    • What’s being developed isn’t going to be immediately workable for your group

  • Can we write down expectations for both sides, agreement - like a memorandum of understanding

  • Next steps

    • Dana: Have another meeting where we can talk in more detail about what co-design session might look like, how to arrange the details of how we proceed

    • At that meeting, we can talk about any details about existing tools that you’re using, timing for co-design, prior to that IDRC can share some materials for organizing those co-design sessions

    • Plan this meeting with Alvaro and stakeholders

  • Timing for this

    • Could be 1-2 month to figure out the tools and to co-design