INTRODUCTION
Against the phenomenon of digitalisation- the integration of digital technologies within the value chains of various economic sectors, often producing new forms of revenue- and the subsequent entry of all information as data points into the ontological paradigm of datafication (Mejias & Couldry 2019; Sadowski 2019), there is a growing need for the recognition of data as an economic resource, and its governance through a community rights framework (Singh & Gurumurthy, 2021). Additionally, the value data possesses emerges from its pooled and processed form, and hence, demands both a regulatory and epistemological framework that views data within digital capitalism1 as a community resource.
The imperative of ensuring economic gains made from pooling of data are enjoyed both by the individual and the community has been recognised by several scholars who critically examine the growth of platform capitalism (Papadimitropoulos, 2021). One such narrative of challenging the sharing economy comes from the school of platform cooperativism (Scholz, 2016); emerging as a worker-led and owned alternative to platform capitalism, platform cooperativism aims to develop an iterative version of the cooperative movement- historically embedded in the Global South for several decades- as a means to transform the exploitative economic dialectics of today’s platform economy
