Watch the Gap: Making code more intelligible to users without sacrificing decentralization?

The potential for blockchain technology to eliminate the middleman and replace the top down hierarchical model of governance with a system of distributed cooperation has opened up many new opportunities, as well as dilemmas. Surpassing the level of acceptance by early tech adopters, the market of smart contracts is now moving towards wider acceptance from regular (non tech) users. For this to happen however, smart contract development will have to overcome certain technical and legal obstacles to bring the code and the user closer. Guided by notions from contract law and consumer protection we highlight the information gap that exists between users, legal bodies and the source code. We present a spectrum of low-code to no-code initiatives that aim at bridging this gap, promising the potential of higher regulatory acceptance. Nevertheless, this highlights the so called "Pitfall of the Trustless Dream", because arguably solutions to the information gap tend to make the system more centralized. In this article, we aim to make a practical contribution of relevance to the wide-spread adoption of smart contracts and their legal acceptance by analyzing the evolving practices that bring the user and the code closer

Theorizing the emergence of platform cooperativism : drawing lessons from role-set theory

The growth of online labour platforms (e.g., Uber) and social media platforms (e.g., Facebook) has been accompanied by a growing chorus of voices critical of their socio-economic effects. While the initiation of lawsuits and enactment of legislation have been the preferred mechanisms for redressing the maladies of ‘platform capitalism’, in recent years, there has also been a growth of bottom-up, collective action against both types of platforms. One such effort is through the creation of cooperative, democratically controlled alternatives to corporate platforms. This article unpacks the underlying, fundamental motivations for the formation of platform cooperatives. It explores how Merton’s role-set theory provides fresh insight into the characteristics of platform capitalism and why users may seek alternatives such as platform cooperatives. The article begins with a tour of platform capitalism by signposting three of its distinguishing features: the concentration of power in corporate governance and markets, the construction and exploitation of digital profiles and personae, and the cultivation of role and role-set conflicts by the blurring of user statuses. I then apply role-set theory to a particular user – an Uber driver – to reveal the role and role-set conflicts they routinely encounter, and which is an important factor behind the precarious economic condition of many online labour platform users. I subsequently evaluate the prospects and limitations of platform cooperatives reconciling the aforementioned conflicts by conferring on users the status of ‘member’. While the member status does reconcile some of these conflicts, the literature on cooperative governance reveals that granting membership is not a cure-all and there is potential for new conflicts to emerge (e.g., conflict between director-members and ordinary members). I conclude with an analysis of how these potential conflicts faced by members may be overcome through best practises from cooperative governance (e.g., short term limits, role rotation).The research received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No. 865856)

Platform cooperatives and the dilemmas of platform worker-member participation

Published online: 27 May 2023Despite the surge of interest in platform cooperatives, we have a limited understanding of the dynamics of platform worker‐member participation in these cooperatives. Drawing on interviews with 21 senior leaders and founders of platform worker cooperatives, we investigate the dynamics of platform worker‐member participation, finding that these cooperatives experience some successes and many challenges. We then build theory about how four distinct features of platform worker cooperatives—the facilitation of multihoming, the physically untethered nature of work, the relatively high importance of scale as a strategic imperative, and the relatively low importance of initial platform worker‐member investment—influence these participation dynamics. We find that the platform and worker cooperative organisational models are in tension with one another when brought together within a platform worker cooperative, leading to positive and negative effects on participation.This article was published Open Access with the support from the EUI Library through the CRUI - Wiley Transformative Agreement (2020-2023). This research is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant Agreement No. 865856) and University of Victoria President's Chair (no grant number)

Policies for Cooperative Ownership in the Digital Economy

The past decade gave rise to the so-called 'gig economy'—a cluster of service sector jobs contingent workers fulfill through digital platforms. Firms like Uber, TaskRabbit, and GrubHub established themselves as two-way intermediaries between workers and customers with the promise of revolutionizing work itself. While the gig economy has provided some convenience and savings to customers and flexibility to workers, the rise of the gig economy has also been disastrous. Using legal loopholes, well-funded lobbying efforts, and publicity campaigns, platform companies have eroded labor protections, worsened environmental conditions, and undermined public services. In contrast to the early, high-minded dreams of a 'sharing economy,' the gig economy is in effect defined by precarity and exploitation.On the one hand, these problems have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 crisis. Gig workers were on the frontline of the emergency, delivering groceries, cleaning supplies, and preparing food. They were, however, also the workers who were most exposed to the economic dislocation of the pandemic.On the other hand, effective government response has caused a tightening labor market that leaves some platforms without a sufficient supply of cheap labor. The promise of tech companies was that they would become hegemonic service providers, and thus their losses would be justified with long-term profits. Many of these already unprofitable firms face a real danger of failure just as their aggressive expansion has weakened public infrastructure, leaving vital gaps in essential services.Our report provides a path forward at this critical juncture: the active promotion of platform cooperatives. Platform cooperatives are democratically-governed organizations owned by workers, customers, and other stakeholders. These entities match workers and customers and return a greater share of income to workers, increase worker protections, and build communities. Though still early in their development, platform cooperatives build on the proven business models of cooperatives to establish alternatives to the gig economy and its supporting digital infrastructure.Platform cooperatives are critical to creating a fairer economy and building back better from the pandemic. However, they require active government intervention to be able to compete with well-funded and established private platforms.This report suggests that governments on every level, from national to municipal, can take measures to empower platform cooperatives

The alegality of blockchain technology

Published online: 16 February 2022Similar to the early days of the Internet, today, the effectiveness and applicability of legal regulations are being challenged by the advent of blockchain technology. Yet, unlike the Internet, which has evolved into an increasingly centralized system that was largely brought within the reach of the law, blockchain technology still resists regulation and is thus described by some as being “alegal”, i.e., situated beyond the boundaries of existing legal orders and, therefore, challenging them. This article investigates whether blockchain technology can indeed be qualified as alegal and the extent to which such technology can be brought back within the boundaries of a legal order by means of targeted policies. First, the article explores the features of blockchain-based systems, which make them hard to regulate, mainly due to their approach to disintermediation. Second, drawing from the notion of alegality in legal philosophy, the article analyzes how blockchain technology enables acts that transgress the temporal, spatial, material, and subjective boundaries of the law, thereby introducing the notion of “alegality by design”—as the design of a technological artifact can provide affordances for alegality. Third, the article discusses how the law could respond to the alegality of blockchain technology through innovative policies encouraging the use of regulatory sandboxes to test for the “functional equivalence” and “regulatory equivalence” of the practices and processes implemented by blockchain initiatives

Report on blockchain technology & legitimacy

This report synthesizes the insights explored within the ERC BlockchainGov reading group on “Legitimacy in Blockchain,” taking place bi-weekly from July 2021 until June 2022. The report investigates the role of legitimacy in blockchain systems from descriptive, conceptual, and normative perspectives. It summarizes the discussions and provides recommendations concerning the role of legitimacy in blockchain systems drawing from the talks held by the reading group. The organizers of the reading group are part of several initiatives, including a five-year-long (2021-2026), EU-funded (ERC grant of €2M) on ‘Blockchain Gov’ at the CNRS (France)/EUI (Italy), a Future Fellowship project funded by the Australian Research Council on ‘Cooperation through Code’ at RMIT (Australia) and the Coalition of Automated Legal Applications (CO-ALA). The “Legitimacy in Blockchain” report is one of a series that includes the “Blockchain Technology, Trust, and Confidence” report (De Filippi et al., 2022) and “Blockchain Technology & Polycentric Gover-nance” report (De Filippi et al., forthcoming)

Open Problems in DAOs

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are a new, rapidly-growing class of organizations governed by smart contracts. Here we describe how researchers can contribute to the emerging science of DAOs and other digitally-constituted organizations. From granular privacy primitives to mechanism designs to model laws, we identify high-impact problems in the DAO ecosystem where existing gaps might be tackled through a new data set or by applying tools and ideas from existing research fields such as political science, computer science, economics, law, and organizational science. Our recommendations encompass exciting research questions as well as promising business opportunities. We call on the wider research community to join the global effort to invent the next generation of organizations

Data cooperatives as catalysts for collaboration, data sharing, and the (trans)formation of the digital commons

Network effects, economies of scale, and lock-in-effects increasingly lead to a concentration of digital resources and capabilities, hindering the free and equitable development of digital entrepreneurship (SDG9), new skills, and jobs (SDG8), especially in small communities (SDG11) and their small and medium-sized enterprises (“SMEs”). To ensure the affordability and accessibility of technologies, promote digital entrepreneurship and community well-being (SDG3), and protect digital rights, we propose data cooperatives [1,2] as a vehicle for secure, trusted, and sovereign data exchange [3,4]. In post-pandemic times, community/SME-led cooperatives can play a vital role by ensuring that supply chains to support digital commons are uninterrupted, resilient, and decentralized [5]. Digital commons and data sovereignty provide communities with affordable and easy access to information and the ability to collectively negotiate data-related decisions. Moreover, cooperative commons (a) provide access to the infrastructure that underpins the modern economy, (b) preserve property rights, and (c) ensure that privatization and monopolization do not further erode self-determination, especially in a world increasingly mediated by AI. Thus, governance plays a significant role in accelerating communities’/SMEs’ digital transformation and addressing their challenges. Cooperatives thrive on digital governance and standards such as open trusted Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that increase the efficiency, technological capabilities, and capacities of participants and, most importantly, integrate, enable, and accelerate the digital transformation of SMEs in the overall process. This policy paper presents and discusses several transformative use cases for cooperative data governance. The use cases demonstrate how platform/data-cooperatives, and their novel value creation can be leveraged to take digital commons and value chains to a new level of collaboration while addressing the most pressing community issues. The proposed framework for a digital federated and sovereign reference architecture will create a blueprint for sustainable development both in the Global South and North

The promise and perils of corporate governance-by-design in blockchain-based collectives : the case of dOrg

Published online: 27 October 2023This chapter analyses the emergence of new collectivist organizations in response to the growth of the digital platform economy, with a particular focus on a blockchain-based software developers’ collective, dOrg. This chapter shows what alternative business structures, including cooperatives, collectives and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), can offer to the discourse on creating a more sustainable and stable future of work, while also highlighting how organizations such as dOrg innovate long-standing cooperative governance structures. First, the chapter constructs a case study of this transnational collective, describing how its governance structure innovates upon and departs from Rothschild and Whitt’s two ideal types of organization – the bureaucratic organization and the collectivist-democratic organization. Second, the chapter demonstrates how dOrg addresses agency problems by way of corporate governance-by-design. The last section explains how this concept varies from traditional corporate governance and evaluates the extent to which measures introduced to achieve corporate governance-by-design, such as reputation-weighted voting, address the governance challenges faced by collectivist organizations

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Pressing Corporations to Comply with CSR Instruments

Many corporations have adopted voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) instruments, but the extent to which they have been implemented is questionable. What are shareholders and governments doing to ensure stricter compliance