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Technology isn’t necessary for bars or farms to become better co-ops, but it can help.Two coalitions that embrace co-design — civic tech and online organizing — can offer lessons on how to build better tech.At the same time, co-op theory and history offer a model of how to own, control, and share the value generated by the tech we build.

While each area has its emphasis, each can learn from the other, too:Civic tech is a coalition for better citizenship, trying to achieve citizen engagement. An example is southbendvoices.com, an automated call-in system. Yet tweeting the city to shut off sprinklers after the rain is a far cry from building better neighborhoods. What could it add? Economic solidarity.Online organizing is a digital approach to social change, trying to achieve community power. An example is 18millionrising.org, a group running rapid-response campaigns for racial justice. What’s missing? Platforms that support lasting effort with multiple allies.The co-op movement is about democracy in the workplace, trying to achieve real ownership, control, and value for the people doing the labor. An example is the Arizmendi Association, an umbrella group supporting six worker-owned bakeries. It’s a model that only the Enspiral network has replicated in New Zealand. What potential remains untapped here? Widespread relevance.How might all three of these areas become better, together?

There are co-ops, and then there is cooperation. Shane from CCA asked “what counts as a co-op?” and Willow Brugh from Aspiration Tech described a multi-stakeholder project in Africa that supports self-determining small businesses. I mentioned how Enspiral exemplifies the first co-op principle of open and voluntary membership better than most legally-recognized co-ops with a quarterly auto-email to their 30 member organizations that simply asks, “Do you still feel like a member?”

But in terms of vocational shifts or better business practices, it’s unclear what #platformcoop has produced. The original excitement is giving way to unmet expectations.

In Baltimore, a group of returning citizens — men and women who were formerly incarcerated — faced ridiculously unfair barriers to employment. And so, over the past two years, they formed Core Staffing, a staffing agency with 12 members.

When I asked about where Core Staffing is investing its energy lately, Joseph said, “we’re trying to figure out how to foster close relationships and community while managing a distributed workforce. What will keep people engaged outside of profit?” Core Staffing currently has 15 members, fewer than virtually any other platform co-operative, but these tensions are already very present.

Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that billions of people use every day. Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares. Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their News Feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.

Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. I’m disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders. And I’m worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them.

We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American.It is time to break up Facebook.

Fed up with this heartless model, some tech activists are developing online workplaces that operate as worker-driven communities. Daemo, a pilot program incubated at Stanford University’s Crowd Research Collective, is one such worker-driven crowd-labor platform. Since 2015, Daemo’s developers have been building on MTurk’s interface with a communications system aimed at allowing for more equitable “matching” between work requesters and digital taskers. As a non-hierarchical, nonprofit framework where workers control the operations, Daemo is designed for fairer working conditions, with a minimum wage of $10 an hour, which is a major improvement on MTurk’s precarious labor-outsourcing system.

Some former participants in Daemo’s project recently aired sharp criticism of the platform in response to a largely favorable article in Wired. In a collectively authored article on Medium, they argued that, in their practical experience with the platform, decision-making power rests with a “platform team” of researchers and leading developers. Though Daemo has established a Constitution that theoretically is open to amendments and revision based on workers’ input, critics say the day-to-day management remains tightly controlled by researchers.

“Whenever they talk about the decentralization, they talk about technical decentralization, like block-chain or decentralized platforms, but most of the time they overlook the governance level, which is more important,” Hashim says. “So it’s about who takes the positions, it’s about who has the right to access information. If you don’t have a well-informed society, you don’t have democracy.”