Scale Up&Go

PROPOSAL

Translate existing and very successful gig platform Up&Go into a decentralised protocol in order to make it portable to other cities around the world. Platform co-ops offer a near-future, alternative to platform capitalism based on cooperative principles such as democratic ownership and governance.

PROBLEM

This innovation will solve one of the biggest problems of our era addressing inequality by putting means of production into the hands of the workers. https://www.wired.com/story/when-workers-control-gig-economy/ This Dapp will put the empower women by empowering them to use digital economy behind the workers who were previously most exploited through extractive sharing and gig economy platforms owned by the privileged few and impoverishing many who worked for them. Cardano network could address this imbalance of power by providing the tools for fair collaboration.

Given that many gigs are performed by people who are invisible to customers in sectors such as home cleaning, especially women of color are seeing fewer benefits, lower pay, and hardly any opportunity for meaningful on-the-job skills training. Their rights as workers have stalled. Non-white workers remain unprotected against discrimination. The inequalities created by the gig economy are magnifying existing systemic injustice based on gender, ability, and race. Platform co-ops introduce economic fairness, training, and democratic participation in the running of online businesses by enterprising self starters.

SOLUTION

Up&Go Dapp would empower care economy globally and enlarge the scope of services, through adoption by a spectrum of other home care offerings such as carried out by the well established Australian self-funded care agency operating at various social support strata (eg. https://www.cct.org.au/home-care-services/dial-an-angel and http://www.dialanangelperth.com.au).

CONSORTIUM

Partners in this project come from the Global Platform Cooperatives network led by Trebor Sholtz at the New School, NYC and the Mondragon academy who are well positioned to take the Dapp through various legal and organisational innovation cycles online and offline in a network of localised cooperative initiatives worldwide (https://platform.coop). Original tech developer CoLab are familiar with the Cardano platform and willing to take on the challenge of adopting the protocol and collaboration with Cardano community teams (https://colab.coop) Porting legal and financial structures from US to UK and EU will be done by Smart.coop

BUDGET

The consortium of partners will use the grant to finance the administrator of this initiative who will act as the bridge in communication between a dozen well established European Cooperative organizations and the US developers of the original application. The consortium will contribute wholeheartedly in making the Up&Go portable to other worker groups around the world by hosting, incubating and disseminating output. Project management and collaboration on administrative side of legal and financial front - $18000

$162000, most of the budget, will be allocated to Cardano developers collaborating with our coop tech partner Colab in New York and https://joincircles.net/ scaling the application to a decentralized system, adding DeFin Adapay features, categorising federal entanglements between the existing and new gig cooperatives. UI/UX input needs to be adapted from whats been shown to work over the first two cooperatives over the years.

FRANCHISE

Portability issues at the coop business level and UX have been addressed by the redesign team at Colab in collaboration with the Centre for Family life in Philadelphia who are working on franchising another local US version of Up&Go as Brightly https://start.coop/additional-resources/case-study-brightly/ Brightly® franchise was founded in New York City as the first legal worker cooperative franchise in the United States, with a vision to transform the cleaning industry for workers throughout the country. Through a shared consumer brand, shared back end technology services and a very detailed operations manual, the Brightly® franchise model makes it easier for low-income entrepreneurs to launch new cleaning cooperatives, achieve economies of scale, and to grow their businesses.

This creation of a next generation business model based on Cardano protocol would represent a step change in both adoption and scalability of the platform coop model which at the moment is the best model for addressing structural inequality and power asymmetry in working environments.

PRESS

Up&Go and Brightly have attracted great deal of media attention at the local level. Taking the project global is only likely to escalate this attention. https://www.fastcompany.com/90370579/worker-owned-domestic-cleaning-businesses-are-gearing-up-for-a-massive-expansion