Co-designing Rules and Roles for a Thriving Reapp Platform.

The principal investigator for ‘Cooperativa Digital’ project, Rosendy Galabo, held the third workshop to 10 participants from 8 different NGOs on 30^th November at Orienta Consultoria.

At the beginning of the workshop, we informed them that this would be the last workshop and we would celebrate the end of the project the following week. There were two main objectives, the first one was to review the proposals for commons member roles and the reward system in the platform and propose suggestions if needed and the second one was to define parameters and mechanisms for their decision-making processes such as membership, in terms of who can join the platform and the requirements to be a commons member. We facilitated their discussion to decide how things should work in terms of managing the platform that will have shared governance and use.

Then we quickly showed them the key findings from workshop 2 and selected a few outputs they generated in the previous workshop to guide them in this last workshop. We used some of the governance terms they used in previous workshops to start the conversation on commons member roles by providing them with the organogram of the platform that we created based on our understanding. In the first activity, we asked them to review the commons member roles based on how the platform should be structured, which resulted in an organogram that is more aligned with their wording and social practices. In the second activity, we introduced the idea of a point-based reward system that was created based on the results of the previous workshop and asked them to provide feedback on it and generate ideas to refine the initial idea. This resulted in an updated point-based reward system that allowed commons members to purchase extra features that would motivate the group to collaborate and promote their social projects and the new Reapp platform. In the last activity, we asked them to decide on three things that were important to sustain the new Reapp: (1) Take decisions about the platform and decisions related to the point-based system; (2) Accept and reject new users; and (3) Join and leave the management team. One straightforward idea involved using the traditional voting system to join the management team, but there were some interesting ideas in terms of how they should allow new members to join the commons, such as initial volunteering before joining the official group.

Overall, this workshop provided us with an overview of the governance of the platform in terms of the institutional rules. In terms of the commons analytical framework we used to create the digital commons platform Reapp, we believe they designed most of the most important concepts that a commons should have to enable members to sustain and protect the new Reapp. We can further analyze the platform using the commons analytical framework to identify areas for improvement.

By delivering three co-design workshops, we addressed two research questions: How can we transform commons scholarship into useable tools that support this community to create a digital platform commons? and How does the community’s approach to discussing and creating greater equity inform understanding of the digital good? We will run a celebration event on December 7^th, where we will evaluate the project through an informal conversation to collect ways that they understand equity through the process to inform how digital platforms can be evaluated by outsiders.