Want to Hire a Worker-Owned Co-op? There's an App for That

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/36553-want-to-hire-a-worker-owned-co-op-theres-an-app-for-that

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.”

How did the Cornell Tech group link with workers at Si Se Puede! to develop the app in the first place? That connection was made possible by Robin Hood, an organization dedicated to fighting poverty in New York City. Robin Hood focuses on the employment landscape and supporting low-income New York residents who do task-based work, making Si Se Puede! the perfect candidate for application of the research they had done with the grant awarded to develop the app. We spoke with Robin Hood’s Steven Lee, one of the principal organizers of the collaboration between Si Se Puede! and the Cornell Tech development team. Lee says Robin Hood facilitated the project as an opportunity to develop an app that could provide the much-needed technology that could help take cooperatives to scale, thus allowing low-income workers to penetrate the tech “sharing economy” field.

According to Lee, the partnership has been in the works for almost two years. In past technology development projects, he says, “workers can’t really benefit to the extent to which they should because the platform developers take a slice off the top.” What Robin Hood hopes to do instead is allow the workers themselves to “get more” from this app, meaning that the new platform gives workers increased wages and ownership rights.