Loading the next page…
A research paper reviewing data cooperatives as democratic models for collectively managing and benefiting from data.
New democratic organizations increasingly need governance models for shared data, not only shared businesses.
Platform co-op founders, data governance researchers, and policy makers exploring democratic digital infrastructure.
Heirloom Library entries are summaries and wayfinding notes. The original source is the best place to read the full resource.
Open original resourceRelated
arXiv
An academic paper examining whether peer production projects become more oligarchic as they grow.
International Cooperative Alliance
An ICA governance paper on how cooperatives can balance democratic principles, flexibility, resilience, and complexity.
Platform Cooperativism Consortium Resource Library
A governance and economic model for self-sustaining, mission-oriented, distributed organizations.
This open-access paper connects cooperative principles to the problem of governing data at scale, distinguishing data cooperatives from data trusts, data commons, and data unions and surveying applications in health care, agriculture, and construction.
The source remains arXiv version 1, submitted April 14, 2025; the authors' institutional publication list also identifies it as an arXiv preprint rather than a later journal or proceedings article. Treat it as an early literature review and conceptual framework, not as peer-reviewed evidence that the proposed governance model works at scale.