Sustaining platforms as commons: perspectives on participation, infrastructure, and governance

Abstract

This work finds its place within Participatory Design (PD) as a specific approach to co-design that focuses on the politics of technological innovation and sociotechnical transformations. In particular, the article contributes to the repositioning of co-design in the age of platform capitalism by engaging with the question: how can participatory designers approach interventions for the long-term sustainability of platforms as commons? As the contradictions and limitations of platform capitalism become increasingly evident, to engage with such a challenge is a way to pursue PD's renewed political agenda. The article foregrounds the concept of platforms as commons to bring designers' attention towards those platform arrangements which are antithetical to platform capitalism exploitative ones. By building on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), as a paradigmatic case of platform as commons, the article outlines participation, infrastructure, and governance as relevant perspectives for framing broad areas of sustainability concerns; and it articulates them along four approaches for supporting long-term sustainability in practice: maintaining, scaling, replicating, and evolving.Ultimately, this article provides participatory designers with a map of possible orientations to frame and support their work, research or interventions around the long-term sustainability of platforms as commons.

Local tech mediators - a human access point to global crowdfunding platforms

“…Co-design projects have facilitated a more equal participation, such as a citizen-centric cityplanning (Light and Seravalli 2019); and commonfare.net, where underprivileged populations have been able to share their stories, and find dignity and meaning (Bassetti et al 2019). Non-extrativist alternative platforms, also understood as commons, have collectively managed resources that are used to benefit the users (Poderi 2019). Srnicek (2017) has categorised the different types of platforms with their own unique characteristics and issues, namely into; advertising, cloud, industrial, product, and lean.…”

“…While they offer much opportunity for growth, they also reinforce existing inequalities fostered through the digital divide (World Bank 2016). Digital platforms have been criticised for furthering the economic inequalities by exploiting their users to benefit the platform owners (Srnicek 2017;Poderi 2019;Wood et al 2019).…”

From Monopolizing Memory to Co-Creating It: Openness and Equity in The Digital Ecosystem

“…Establishing open public digital infrastructures and digital sovereignty (Floridi 2020), is a way to envision positive futures beyond the market and business domain with a greater degree of independence. Work on co-creation (Fuster Morell and Senabre Hidalgo 2020), participatory design and co-design (Marttila and Botero 2017;Poderi 2019) directs to reposition these practices in light of platform capitalism (Srnicek 2016), and highlights the importance of fair and community governance.…”

Re-Valuing Platforms, Reclaiming the Local

“…One critical advantage of such an approach is that it redirects our attention away from globally hegemonic corporate platforms and towards emergent practices of what we building on Brenner and Theodore (2002) call actuall e isting platformi ation : e perimental and sometimes makeshift initiatives that congeal around the platform as a programmed site of market-making and value creation, as well as an aspirational model for (re)organizing society from the ground up. While such local initiatives have proliferated over the past few years, they have thus far received little scholarly scrutiny (for exceptions, see Poderi, 2019;Falco and Kleinhans, 2018;Ansell and Miura, 2018;Scholz and Schneider, 2016). Another advantage is that this approach problematizes presumed oppositions between market and non-market , public and private , and indeed between local and global , pushing platform critique be ond its penchant for such dichotomies.…”