Designing Sharing Economy Platforms through a ‘Solidarity HCI' lens

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Despite sharing economy’s highly touted promise of a novel, inclusive and community building model of responsible production and consumption, sharing economy has been indicted for profiteering from previously private and occasionally non-monetized activities, creating precarious jobs and reproducing stereotypes. In the epicenter of such critiques are the ‘big’ and ‘limelight-ed’ platform firms, like AirBnB and Uber and the digital infrastructures they employ. Similarly, and to the best of our knowledge, the majority of related research focuses on SE platforms of this ilk. In response, while acknowledging that the problem is not the agency of the digital in the activity of sharing per se, but that the wrong people set the terms and benefit from this mediation, we find it timely to explore the existence of more self-organized and community-driven SE initiatives and explore how they use the digital to support their sharing ends. As a result, in this paper we report from our engagement with a community-run, self-organized ride-sharing initiative, called ‘Share the ride ;)’. ‘Share the ride ;)’ operates within a Facebook group since 2009 and is the most popular ride-sharing ‘platform’ in Greece. Extrapolating from our findings and while adopting a ‘Solidarity HCI’ approach, we participate in the ‘sharing discourse’ by providing design implications for the development of ‘Solidarity Sharing Economy Platforms’. We perceive those, as digital infrastructures which can favor self-organization and pluralism and which are developed for communities (existing and new ones) in order to facilitate multiple sharing activities and nurture a generative sharing ideology. To that end, we suggest malleability as a design affordance and the development of mechanisms which aim at supporting the formulation of enduring social ties among those platforms’ members. Finally, we underscore that in order to favor the establishment of strong relations, ‘Solidarity SEPs’ should avoid normalizing designs and on the contrary employ architectures which esteem pluralism and self-affirmation.