ABSTRACT
Cooperative forms of organizing have coexisted with more traditional profit-driven enterprise in market economies for decades. Yet, cooperatives are fundamentally different in that their ownership and governance model is distributed across the members. Instead of private ownership over labor and the means of production, cooperatives aim to share the wealth and responsibilities among member/owners. There are thousands of sharing economy projects, some technology enabled and some no or low-tech, which have embraced more of a commons approach to sharing, although they generate much less media attention than the deathstars. The governance models for sharing startups range significantly, from traditional corporate structures to collaborative governance models to cooperative models. This of course is one of the categories that most directly distinguishes platform capitalism from platform cooperativism. There is a growing movement of technologically enabled "activists" who see platform coops as a potential direction response to the abuses of platform capitalists.
