This work stream shapes the technology into things people actually use: working cooperative apps — a ride-hailing service, a delivery platform, a marketplace for freelance or care work — each owned and run by its members, and each designed to hold its own against the corporate platform it competes with. The economics, the design, and the software all come together here.
Developed alongside the infrastucture and governance
It would be natural to assume the apps come last — that the infrastructure and governance are built first, and the apps are added on top once everything else is finished. That is not how the project works. All three work streams run in parallel from the first months, and they shape one another as they go.
The apps work begins by gathering requirements from real cooperatives, and then passes those requirements to the infrastructure and governance work streams — so the apps help define what the lower layers need to provide, rather than simply consuming whatever they happen to offer. The seam between the economic rules and the governance system is worked out jointly: the cooperative side sets out what its economics needs from governance — ways to elect representatives, to protect certain rules from casual change, to tie decisions cleanly to transactions — and the governance side builds to meet those needs. And as the apps are tested, what is learned flows back into the infrastructure and governance designs. The relationship runs in every direction, not just upward.
Making cooperatives that work as businesses
Worker cooperatives are not a new idea, and the evidence that they can be highly effective is strong: they tend to match or exceed the productivity of conventional firms while offering more stable employment and far lower internal inequality. Yet cooperatives remain rare, and digital ones rarer still. Part of the reason is that they have lacked the technology to compete with platform incumbents — the problem the rest of Grassroots solves. But there is a second, subtler problem, and this work stream is built around solving it.
The challenge is designing a cooperative so that doing what is good for the member is also what is good for the whole. A platform owned by everyone can, if badly designed, give each individual little reason to work hard, invest, or contribute — since the benefit is shared but the effort is not. The economic model at the heart of this work stream, developed by Francesco Caselli at LSE, is built precisely to remove that weakness. It uses the cooperative’s own structure to keep members’ incentives aligned: shared income gives everyone a stake in everyone else’s effort, useful knowledge spreads because people gain directly from sharing it, and day-to-day decisions are delegated to managers the members elect and can hold to account. Democratic ownership becomes a source of efficiency rather than a cost.
Designed with cooperatives, not just for them
A platform that workers will actually adopt cannot be designed in a vacuum. This work stream is carried out together with people from the cooperative movement — organisations that form, run, and represent real worker cooperatives — from the very beginning rather than at the end. They bring hard-won knowledge of what makes cooperative platforms succeed or fail: the tendency for participation to dwindle, for a few members to dominate, for engineering costs to sink an otherwise healthy venture. Designing against these known pitfalls from the start, rather than rediscovering them painfully later, is one of the project’s central commitments.
It also means designing for how people really work. Many platform workers use several apps at once and are not tied to any single one; a cooperative app has to fit naturally into that reality rather than demand exclusive loyalty. A worker can run a cooperative app and an incumbent’s app on the same phone, and adopt the cooperative gradually — which means a cooperative does not have to displace an incumbent overnight to be worth joining. From the worker’s point of view, keeping the commission that a platform would otherwise take is an immediate and substantial pay rise, with no central infrastructure to pay for.
A range of apps on one foundation
The aim is not a single app but a portfolio, spanning different kinds of work, all built on the same underlying stack. Some are location-based, matching people who are near each other — ride-hailing, last-mile delivery. Others are not tied to location, matching instead on skills, availability, or task — freelance and care work, for example. Building several different kinds of app on one shared foundation is how the project shows that Grassroots is genuinely general-purpose: not a clever solution to one narrow problem, but a base on which the whole spectrum of platform services can be rebuilt on cooperative lines.
Where this work stands
This work stream runs from the project’s first months, beginning with gathering requirements from cooperatives and co-designing the apps with them, alongside formalising the economic rules so they can be built into the software. The goal is a portfolio of working cooperative apps, ready to be integrated with the rest of the stack and tested with real members in the project’s pilots.