Originally published on Community-Wealth.org, this article by The Democracy Collaborative's Michelle Stearn highlights the work of Si Se Puede!, the Robin Hood Foundation, and a Cornell Tech graduate student program, all of whom converged as a team to develop an app for worker cooperative bookings:
The app, known fondly as “Coopify,” began as a dream to connect low-income workers to the “digital sharing economy,” not as precarious cogs in an impersonal machine but on their own terms. Melina Diaconis, one of these Cornell Tech candidates who helped develop the app also spoke at New York City’s Platform Cooperativism conference, shedding light on the key features of the platform and the process by which they designed them. “At its base, Coopify is a way to get worker coops in New York City off their existing databases,” she said, which will allow scalability because the companies won’t have to rely on the bottleneck of office managers for bookings. In accordance with the core values of cooperatives, Diaconis assured that “money is going to the worker, not the business of the Coopify platform.” Read full article.