What we are building
Grassroots Peoplenet is a project to build a complete technology stack that lets digital platforms run entirely on the smartphones of the people who use them, with no central company in the middle. The same architecture can support the full range of today’s platform services: ride-hailing, delivery, freelance and gig work, marketplaces, accommodation, social networks, digital currency and more. The difference is who owns the platform and who keeps the value it creates.
On today’s platforms, a single company controls the infrastructure, sets the rules, takes a commission on every transaction, and owns the data. Grassroots removes that company. Each platform is owned and governed by its own participants — the drivers, the couriers, the freelancers, the members — who connect directly with one another and decide collectively how their platform is run.
Why this matters for economic growth
The case for Grassroots is, first and foremost, an economic one. Digital platforms typically extract around a quarter to a third of the value of every transaction and route it to a small number of very large operators. When that value stays instead with the workers and communities who generate it, more money circulates in local economies, more small enterprises can compete, and the incentive to innovate is restored: when the people who build something useful are the ones who benefit from it, they have every reason to keep improving it.
A common assumption is that worker ownership trades efficiency for fairness. The evidence does not support that. Worker-owned firms have repeatedly been shown to match or exceed the productivity of conventional firms, while delivering greater employment stability and markedly lower internal inequality. They tend to adjust pay through downturns rather than resort to layoffs. The obstacle has never been that cooperatives perform poorly. It is that they have lacked the technological foundation to compete with platform incumbents, and that company founders have had private incentives to choose ownership structures that maximise their own share rather than total value created. Grassroots addresses the first problem directly, and is designed around an economic model that addresses the second.
An economic model of incentive-compatible cooperatives, developed by Francesco Caselli at LSE — builds market discipline into cooperative structure, so that self-interested members still have strong reasons to work hard, invest, and stay committed. Democratic governance becomes a source of efficiency rather than a drag on it: shared income creates mutual accountability, workers share productivity-improving knowledge because they directly gain from it, and decisions are delegated to elected managers with real authority.
How it works
Grassroots is built as a layered technology stack. The lower layers — a programming language and runtime for smartphones, and the social-networking infrastructure that lets phones find and communicate with one another directly — turn an ordinary phone into a node in a serverless network. On top of these sit the layers that make a platform a cooperative: a constitutional governance system through which members set their own rules, rates, and budgets and amend them by vote; the economic rules of the incentive-compatible cooperative; and a federation protocol that lets independent cooperatives join together — by sector, by region, or both — into larger structures while each remains in control of its own affairs.
Because there is no central server, there is no single point that can be monitored, charged a fee, or switched off. Each platform runs on infrastructure its members already own. And because the software is open source, anyone can inspect it, run it, or improve it.
Where the project stands
Grassroots is at an early, pre-commercial stage. The scientific foundations — across distributed computing, the mathematics of democratic decision-making, and cooperative economics — have been developed and published over several years. The lower layers of the stack are at proof-of-concept; the upper layers are specified and ready to be built. The goal of the current phase of work is to bring the whole stack to a working proof of principle, and to demonstrate it through real pilots: a portfolio of cooperative apps, tested with real members, and then federated together.
Who is involved
Grassroots is led by the London School of Economics, where the project draws on the Departments of Mathematics and Economics. The principal investigators are Ehud Shapiro and Francesco Caselli. Shapiro’s work on grassroots distributed systems provides the project’s architectural and mathematical foundation. Caselli is author of the incentive-compatible cooperative model that underpins the project’s economics, and they are joined by Andrew Lewis-Pye (LSE Mathematics) and Idit Keidar (Technion University), who work on the consensus protocols at the heart of the governance layer. We are in discussions with several potential partners, including the University of Amsterdam, the European confederation of industrial and service cooperatives (CECOP), the bicycle-delivery cooperative federation CoopCycle, platform-cooperative organisations in Germany and Italy, and a worker-owned software cooperative.