Jonas Pentzien from platforms2share appointed Research Fellow at The New School by Trebor Scholz

Picture: by Beyond My Ken licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

The newly-founded Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy researches the potentials and obstacles of democratically owned organizations in the Digital Economy. In his position as the Institute’s research fellow, Jonas Pentzien will develop a comparative study of legislative obstacles for platform cooperatives in the United States, France, and Germany

Governments around the world increasingly make use of public policy to shape transactions and interactions in the digital economy. How do these policies affect platform cooperatives? In order to investigate this question, Trebor Scholz (Associate Professor for Culture & Media at The New School in New York City) has appointed Jonas Pentzien from platforms2share as a research fellow at the newly-founded Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (ICDE) at The New School for the Academic Year 2019. 

The Institute will be launched officially in April 2019 and aims at providing prospective and existing platform co-op communities with essential research, education, advice, policy analysis, movement building, technical standard-setting, and evaluation. The purpose of the Institute, according to its founder Trebor Scholz, is to ensure that the potential of the global platform cooperativism movement is realized and expanded.

As part of his fellowship, Jonas Pentzien will travel to New York City’s New School twice this year in order to discuss his research with an international group of scholars working on similar issues. In April 2019, he will participate in the Institute’s launch event and in November 2019 he will give a presentation at this year’s Platform Cooperativism Conference, jointly organized by The New School and Columbia University.

Content-wise, Jonas Pentzien will identify political and legislative obstacles for platform cooperatives in the United States, Germany, and France. To do so, he will conduct expert interviews with founders and members of platform coops and engage in a comparative policy analysis. By comparing three policy frameworks, he aims at increasing our understanding of the obstacles that platform cooperatives face in different circumstances – and at sketching out possible ways for overcoming them


09/04/2019