As autonomous workers grow in numbers and become more vulnerable to precariousness, cooperative structures flourish to allow those workers to mutualize risks and resources, thereby creating spaces of protection and autonomy. We argue that cooperatives of autonomous workers, in order to expand the range and quality of their services and to overcome the challenges that came with their increased size, need to engage in a formal design of their services, using a business modelling approach. Cooperatives of autonomous workers have never been the subject of a specific ontological development, nor have they used an ontological approach to help them solve business challenges. With this project, we take on both these issues in collaboration with a large cooperative of autonomous workers based in Brussels (i.e. Smart Coop), following an Action-Design-Research methodological framework.
Desguin, S., & Laurier, W. (2020). Modelling services of cooperatives of autonomous workers to create a space for autonomy and security. C E U R Workshop Proceedings, Vol-2574, 233. (Original work published 2020)