Working Group 1 meeting in Troyes, 24 June 2017
Working Group 1 is focusing on a systematic analysis of practices of digitally-mediated collaborative economies.
Its first meeting, organised in Troyes, France, on 24 June 2017, was dedicated to presenting the initial findings from submitted country reports and then discussing the next steps for the ethnographic research on the selected cases studies.
The meeting included presentations by the the COST Action chair, Dr Gabriela Avram and the WG1 Co-Leaders, Dr Penny Travlou and Dr Airi Lampinen, as well as a brainstorming session to support the participants working on the various components of the work plan.
Gabriela introduced the agenda of the meeting and welcomed the participants. Then, Airi presented the initial findings from the 24 country reports received; together with the participants, she discussed further definitions and types of collaborative economy per country and defined case studies’ typologies.
Airi’s presentation was followed by a mini-workshop on ethnographic research led by Penny Travlou. The focus was twofold: first, to present a general overview on ethnography and second, to showcase ethnographic tools that could potentially be used in the COST Action e.g. collaborative/p2p ethnography.
Elena Denaro, PhD student at London School of Economics, gave a short presentation of her ethnographic study with OuiShare, the international community for the promotion of collaborative economy and collaborative society. Before lunch, there was a post-it session where participants were asked to add further input on the case studies’ typology, themes and other suggestions.
After lunch, the participants worked in breakout groups together with the WG1 Leaders, discussing the planning of the ethnographic study and its next steps. In particular, the participants were asked to contribute to the themes/cases selection, identifying existing resources and requirements, as well as specifying whether they (and/or their research team) are interested to work on the ethnographic research.
The meeting closed with a presentation by our guest speaker, Nicole Alix from La Coop des Communs, who presented her work on the commons and social and solidarity economy in France.
Following this Working Group meeting, it was decided to:
- compile all the country reports into a single PDF file, and all case studies into another, making them publicly available.
- a small "task force” led by Penny Travlou will prepare a basic toolkit to guide our collaborative ethnographic research. A first version of the toolkit will be presented at the WG1 meeting in Madeira in November.
We are open to further expressions of interest for collaborating in the ethnographic research planned. If you are interested, please contact us via email by Friday 29th September.
