Meeting with Suara Coop August 21, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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