Workshop contributions by:

• Hjalte Betak, PhD student, Kooperationen & Roskilde University: Techno-Social Imaginaries: Towards Data Democracy in Platform Knowledge Work.

This session explores complementary strategies of individual and collective approaches to data democracy through the specific case of data cooperativism in knowledge-based platform labor. -- Labor platform cooperatives of various types have, for the last decade, gained attention among academic scholars and cooperative practitioners as an alternative to capital-based platforms by offering means of digital organizing which emphasize worker rights, wellbeing, and democratic governance. Our case study investigates a certain characteristic of freelance platform cooperatives; namely their ability to act as data cooperatives (e.g. Buhler et al 2023; Scholz 2023). Data cooperatives are conceptualized as a specific type of data intermediary, which allows for collective governance and control of the cooperative members’ (consumers, producers, workers) specific data in relation to their business operation. The data cooperative, by means of cooperative ownership, thus provides a legal and operational entity under which data is stored, accessed, analyzed, and put at use due to collective decisions by the data subjects themselves and agreements based on the cooperative principle of one member, one vote. This break-out session builds on our data collective proposal, which was awarded in a European idea contest by the Finnish Innovation Fund SITRA. We will explore how human-centric strategies of data governance can benefit platform workers both individually and collectively, as well as contributing to societal impact in interrelated ways. Through the lens of techno-social imaginaries, our objective is to examine how platform workers can be protected and empowered with greater autonomy over their work lives through cooperative ownership and control of platform data. Possibly achieved through local data governance strategies that focus on data tools, leveraging legal rights, and collective benefits from aggregated data insights. And complementing cross-regional strategies for European standards of interoperability allowing for data portability within and across domains of skills. Structured content of break-out session Industrial Ph.d. student Hjalte Betak will give a short presentation of the data collective proposal linked to his work: an action-research, multi-stakeholder exploration about potentials of platform cooperative organizing of knowledge workers in Denmark. Furthermore, he will introduce concepts and examples of data democracy related to platform labor by covering various, but complementary strategies of data governance. This will ensure a common language and conceptual framing for group discussions. The break-out session will collectively inquire which types of data are of critical importance in relation to freelance platform knowledge work throughout platform processes of matching, negotiating and executing. Furthermore, our group will discuss potential benefits, barriers, and application of complementary collectively and individually oriented data governance strategies in the specific case of knowledge-based platform labor. Finally, our group will explore how these specific types of platform labor related data, as well as strategies of local governance and technical application, potentially interoperate with data sovereign intermediary models at European level such as Data Spaces, 2-grade Data Cooperatives, Data Unions or Data Markets.

This workshop is an pre-event of the MyData 2025 conference and it is open to all conference ticket holders without separate registration. Others interested in this workshop may register for a spot here.