A Cooperative Model for Digital Infrastructure

Cooperatives are business owned and controlled by their members and workers. Historically, cooperatives have provided essential goods and services through sustainable management such as provision of natural resources like ground and surface water, forests and fisheries. In later years, cooperatives have also shown their capacity to maintain technological complex infrastructure such as provision of sustainable energy grids, especially from solar and wind sources. Following this, in the last decade, with the growing trend of the information and communications sector, cooperatives have also provided digital products and services, and more recently some of them have dedicated themselves to the production and maintenance of digital infrastructure. To learn more about how these cooperatives from diverse countries produce and maintain digital infrastructure, we conducted research that taught us about their contributions to different digital tools, libraries, frameworks and modules, essential for the provision of thousands of websites and platforms. As part of the results we are offering some recommendations directed to digital infrastructure projects that still may not have a business model in the hope that they consider cooperativism as an option to help them sustain their digital infrastructure projects.

You can check out a more complete summary, the full report and the recommendations here: https://infraestructura.digital/index-en.html We hope you find it useful.