Web-based platforms dominate our daily lives, offering new customer-friendly services cheaply and conveniently. But the standard platform business model relies on extractive financing, the monetisation of user data and often disregards privacy and workers’ rights. It’s time for an alternative.

Over the last nine months, Nesta and Co-operatives UK have convened groups of experts and pioneering practitioners to explore the potential for cooperatively owned and operated platforms to create a more equitable and socially beneficial alternative to ‘platform capitalism’.

We also launched of our joint research paper “Platform Coops - Solving the Capital Conundrum”.

This was an informal gathering of practitioners and champions from across the sector. We discussed our research findings and shared a new programme of work to establish new funding models for platform co-operatives in 2019, supported by Open Society Foundations.