Four new case studies were recently added to the Data Communities for Inclusion Toolkit, each highlighting creative, community-driven approaches to designing platforms and data governance tools that reflect the values of care, equity, and autonomy.
The first case study is about SEWA’s journey of making platforms work for workers. The case study features SEWA’s evolving digital strategies shaped by its members, LabourNet’s platform experiments to bring more structure and visibility to gig work, and Equal Care’s ongoing efforts to decentralize care work in the UK.
The second case study is about Equal Care Coop’s series of co-design workshops about creating a platform that supports both care receivers and caregivers. These workshops used a range of co-design methods to ensure the resulting platform prioritizes the autonomy of care receivers in building their own care teams, while ensuring fair work and wages for caregivers.
The third case study is about the development of a governance tool by Hypha Worker Co-operative. Hypha is developing a governance dashboard that brings together its various internal decision-making tools into one interface. As part of the work, they created a timeline of the co-op’s history to test how information could be meaningfully represented and shared. Their work emphasizes transparency and adaptability, and their documentation supports others looking to build similar tools; the timeline and dashboard are publicly available on their GitHub repository.
The last case study is about a farm to table app for the SEWA Federation. For the past five years, SEWA Federation has been running a farm to table initiative, connecting consumers with fresh vegetables grown by members of the Megha and Kheda cooperatives. Using WhatsApp as their main channel, the cooperatives coordinate orders, communicate with customers, and organize deliveries, all through a platform that’s familiar to the community. But while WhatsApp keeps the system going for the initiative, farmers spend significant time typing out vegetable names, calculating totals, and issuing invoices; to streamline the process, the communities asked for a simple and easy to use app that would automate the process.