The introduction of Digital Tribulations, a series of intellectual interviews on the developments of digital sovereignty in Latin America, can be read here and the entire series can be found here.
During the month I spent in Buenos Aires, the last city I visited before finally flying back to Europe, I managed to get a firsthand look at its famous cooperativist scene, which extends to platforms. By “famous” I of course mean a niche that has accompanied platform studies since the sharing economy: platform cooperativism. I first came across it through the pioneering work of Trebor Scholz, and I became more familiar with it thanks to the prolific scholarship of my Brazilian friend Rafael Grohmann. He was the one who gave me Cecilia’s contact, along with the phone number of a fellow Italian, Stefano Tortorici, who is writing his PhD on platform cooperativism. As two Italian researchers in our semi-nomadic phase, I bonded with Stefano and ended up hanging out with his numerous artistic housemates, who shared a house not far from the gentrified Palermo neighborhood.
Cecilia was hard to reach – she has a chaotic good energy that comes through in the interview – but when I finally entered the base of the Código Libre Cooperative, on the third floor of an old building in the center of Buenos Aires, I was welcomed by a lovely crew with diverse backgrounds. It was around lunchtime, so they bought a box of empanadas and placed it in the middle of the table for everyone to share. After some chatting, I joined Cecilia in her room and started asking her questions about how her cooperative came about.
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How did you end up joining the Código Libre cooperative?
I am a psychologist. I came across technological cooperativism after having always worked in technology, although mainly in educational technology. I learned about FACTTIC while working as a teacher, researcher and outreach coordinator at a public university here, the National University of Quilmes.
For many years, I worked in what are known as “technology and social and solidarity economy incubators”, which is the terminology used here in Argentina. From the incubator, we began promoting the organization of technological cooperatives, and eventually I ended up working in one that had, to some extent, originated there. I continued working at the university for many years. I am not doing it at this stage, because my goal is to finish my thesis, after which I expect to return.
That is how Código Libre was founded. Código Libre has been operating for seven years; we will celebrate our eighth anniversary this year. It is a first-degree cooperative that is part of the federation. It is a worker cooperative dedicated to software development, with a focus or specialization in managing projects with a social impact and in issues related to a gender perspective.
This originated in a decision made by the cooperative after three years of existence: to consider the composition of its team from an intersectional perspective. We began carrying out searches specifically aimed at reducing gender stereotypes and forming partnerships with other organizations working on these issues. There had previously been some public policies in this area, although there are no longer any, but civil society organizations continue to work on it. We establish partnerships and conduct searches from a gender perspective, seeking to diversify the sector and to think about technology in terms of whom it is designed for and how it is designed, so as not to reproduce biases.
We have been part of FACTTIC from the beginning. In fact, the federation provided considerable support during the cooperative’s consolidation process, and we are now part of the federation’s board of directors. FACTTIC has a fairly dynamic structure. I am currently the vice-president. There are also different spaces in which people participate. There are no formal coordinators; rather, there are spaces in which people assume different levels of responsibility.
Could you tell us about the history of FACTTIC and what it currently does?
FACTTIC (Federación Argentina de Cooperativas de Trabajo en Tecnología Innovación y Conocimiento) is the Argentine Federation of Worker Cooperatives in Technology, Innovation and Knowledge. I understand that it is about fifteen years old. It was founded by five cooperatives and grew in a fairly steady and continuous way. From Deconstrucción, the federation’s gender-focused space, we prepared a report in 2024. Beyond the gender-related issues presented in the report, which are interesting in themselves, it was the federation’s first comprehensive report and established a baseline for understanding its growth and development. It is already out of date in terms of its territorial presence, since we are now present in more provinces.
Over the past two years, we have grown considerably, not only in the number of cooperatives but also in the number of sectors represented, which have become much more diverse. Most of the cooperatives develop software, but there has always been some working in communications, hardware or services. More recently, one cooperative working in engineering and another in telecommunications joined us, as well as a magazine focused on graphic design within the communications sector. The name encompasses a range of issues related to innovation and communication. This has happened quite significantly in recent years, creating the challenge of finding a common meaning and relating these activities to one another, because software development plays a major role in terms of cultural identity and the management of inter-cooperative work. We are now facing the challenge of thinking through these interactions.
What is the difference between these cooperatives and capitalist enterprises?
We are worker cooperatives. Argentine cooperativism takes different forms: there are, for example, service, worker, housing and consumer cooperatives. From a legal and formal standpoint, the characteristic of worker cooperatives, in any sector, is that each person owns the enterprise. Service cooperatives, for example, may have employees. Banco Credicoop is one example: its members are the clients. In our case, we all own our enterprises.
That is the main difference from a capitalist enterprise. Cooperatives are enterprises made up of people, and each person has one vote. There is no share capital that would allow someone to hold half plus one of the votes. Any surplus and resources generated are distributed according to the criteria established by each cooperative.
Regarding the type of technology, although it is diverse, FACTTIC is oriented toward the development of free technology; many people come from the free software movement. There is also something specific about the relationship with technology: we are local. It is not possible to be a transnational cooperative. Development is rooted in one’s territory. There is always an interest in developing things that are useful in specific territories, whether at the national, regional or local level, in a neighborhood or a town.
The logic of a cooperative enterprise is necessarily territorialized. I think this is one of the most important aspects, because technology companies have taken delocalization to an extreme: “I am wherever I pay the least taxes,” or “I manufacture the hardware in China.” There is something about technology, especially digital technology, that seems to fit well with this logic because “it is in the cloud.” In fact, Cambá, one of FACTTIC’s cooperatives, used to offer a course whose title was: “The cloud is someone else’s computer.” We work extensively to anchor technology in social needs, whether in public universities, cultural centers or training workshops.
How is the federation organized technically and politically with regard to inter-cooperation?
FACTTIC has a board of directors that meets weekly. It also holds monthly assemblies on the first Tuesday of each month, attended by representatives of the different cooperatives. Then there is a second meeting, known as the “expanded board,” which is a more deliberative and decision-making space than the assembly.
The different spaces are dynamic and change according to interests and needs. They operate through Telegram or Mattermost groups. For example, there is an administration group where administrative teams can resolve management issues, especially in Argentina, where laws and the exchange rate change constantly. We are always working through the many twists and turns required to collect the money that is legitimately owed to us. The Deconstrucción space, which focuses on gender, was also very active. It produced the report and led to the amendment of the federation’s bylaws. These are the first bylaws of a federation of cooperatives in Argentina to incorporate a gender perspective.
Are there any cooperative-platform projects?
Yes, we are involved in six or seven projects at different stages of development, in partnership with the University of Buenos Aires and the Gino Germani Institute. Semillero COOP is a beta version of a platform designed to facilitate job searches for cooperatives. It originated in the gender space, because the cooperative technology sector is dominated by cisgender men. One part of the problem was that, when searches were conducted, other profiles did not appear. There are prior forms of discrimination, such as those present in university education or the exclusion of trans people from educational systems. 
But we also noticed something that was correlated with research on cisgender women: we tend to undervalue our own knowledge or feel insecure about it, which is often referred to as imposter syndrome. We looked for ways of asking questions that would not discriminate and of valuing forms of knowledge that are important to us, such as experiences in activism, political organizing or social movements. These people will become owners of the cooperative, just like us, so a match in terms of values is fundamental.
We also worked in partnership with the CoopCycle project, which involved adapting a tool and a federation of cooperatives that already existed elsewhere in the world. Following the philosophy of free software, it made no sense to develop something of our own when we could collaborate with an existing project. We learned a great deal and left the tool up and running.
This took place when delivery platforms began to become a major issue, particularly during the pandemic. Several colleagues were already taking courses on cooperative platforms in partnership with The New School in New York. Later, I also had the opportunity to participate in a research program at the Platform Cooperativism Consortium two years ago, and my thesis supervisor is also an associate researcher with that team. This is a very powerful feature of our spaces: they are woven together through research, work and political activism.
How do you manage commercial work and scale?
The most important and most frequently meeting space is the GSU (Grupo de Soluciones Unidas), antes llamado FIT (Flujo Intercooperativo de Trabajo). This is where we meet to think about inter-cooperative work. The vast majority of FACTTIC cooperatives have a very high percentage of inter-cooperative projects.
This makes sense because smaller cooperatives do not have enough profiles to take on very large projects. Since each cooperative decides how much and in what way it wants to grow — understanding growth as adding new owners, not simply hiring employees — inter-cooperation makes it possible to respect each cooperative’s own pace while still delivering high-quality responses to large projects. It also serves as a form of internal technical training: you work with people who have more experience, without a serious mistake made in front of a major client becoming definitive for your cooperative.
During periods of crisis, we reorganize our strategies. We currently have a more active policy of developing our own commercial tools and avoiding the fluctuations of a global market that tends toward concentration. We work on “business verticals,” such as AgroTIC, which focuses on software development, automation and drones for the agricultural sector. There are cooperatives such as Tecso, in Rosario, which has between 150 and 200 members and significant developments in artificial intelligence and agricultural automation. Another line of work involves considering national and regional partnerships.
What is the challenge of starting a cooperative in Argentina today?
Administratively, I do not think it is difficult. The legal framework is still functioning, and everything is digital and online. Although the body that regulates cooperativism, INAES, is no longer promoting it as actively, it is not blocking registrations. Creating a cooperative is relatively simple: you need six people, and then maintaining it from a tax perspective is relatively inexpensive.
The greatest challenge is finding a place in the labor market and identifying a market niche. A recurring mistake is for a cooperative to be organized solely by people from the IT world. To manage a cooperative, you need administrative, commercial and institutional profiles. During periods of full employment, this is easy, but in difficult times you need commercial capacity. Código Libre would not have survived without FACTTIC. Joining the federation saves you from making mistakes and allows you to ask questions of people who already have the answers. You can join projects with other cooperatives and receive specific training through the work itself.
The “founding moment” is also crucial: deciding to channel all of your economic activity through the cooperative. There is a freelance and individualistic logic that is deeply rooted culturally. For example, I transfer my research projects to the cooperative, including one on artificial intelligence that I won with colleagues from Manchester and my thesis supervisor, funded by Geneva. The money I receive goes to the cooperative, and my hours belong to the cooperative. It is a political and technical decision. I want to work less, distribute everything and be happy.
Where does the strength of cooperativism in Argentina come from?
They were already there when I was born. The official history found in books links this tradition to Italian and Spanish anarchist immigrants who brought these models with them. The first cooperatives were related to the sectors in which those migrants worked. Compared with Brazil, our law is better, although Uruguay’s is superior. There is a great deal of housing cooperativism there, even in the capital, which shows that space is made for it. In fact, housing cooperativism is very widespread and very strong. For example, in the capital of the country, where access to housing is completely commodified, the existence of housing cooperatives shows that they are genuinely given a place within the system. This makes things much easier: establishing a cooperative is not very expensive and it does not require a very large number of people. All of this makes the cooperative a legally accessible tool for organizing and reproducing work.
There is also an issue connected to recovered enterprises. A great deal is said about them, and there is extensive literature on the subject. My thesis supervisor, Nikita Parán, worked for many years studying recovered enterprises around the world. Her doctoral thesis was on this subject. The concept refers to enterprises that were abandoned or bankrupted by their owners and were subsequently recovered by their workers, generally in the form of cooperatives. I think this is an important factor: during periods of crisis, when companies go bankrupt, workers decide to recover them through cooperatives. There were also public policies that supported this process.
I began working at the university in that context. I was already a teaching assistant at the University of Buenos Aires, where people work for free to a considerable extent. During the governments of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández, several new public universities were created in areas where there had previously been no access to higher education, where class barriers prevented people from traveling to Buenos Aires or La Plata to study. These universities created jobs for many professionals, including me, because there were no salaried positions at the University of Buenos Aires. While I was working at the University of Quilmes, the Argentina Works program was implemented. It promoted the creation and training of cooperatives.
There were many discussions about the type of cooperatives being created and their capacity for self-management, since they were self-managed but created by the state, which is somewhat of an oxymoron. Even so, the initiative made sense. I worked on it through the university because the program involved not only creating cooperatives but also providing training. Five or six public universities formed teams of hundreds of teachers who provided training in the social economy, self-management and cooperativism to people who were joining cooperatives. The situation was: “I am now a cooperative member, but I do not know what a cooperative is.”
The logic of the program was to break with clientelist relationships based on individualized social assistance, which often led to corrupt practices. Instead, the aim was to organize work collectively and accompany it with training. It was a very interesting experience because you worked in working-class neighborhoods with people who had often had negative educational experiences in the past or had not completed secondary school. Through this initiative, they had the opportunity to reconnect with educational processes. Many people became motivated, continued studying and eventually completed university degrees. 
Most of them were women, many of them around fifty years old, who had spent their lives raising children or working in precarious jobs and who found an opportunity there to resume their studies. For me, it was a deeply transformative experience to see a fifty-year-old woman receive a university degree and hand it to her granddaughter. In addition, these universities had a very high proportion of first-generation university students. It was clearly a policy of social advancement linked to the promotion of cooperativism. The form of enterprise chosen was not the capitalist enterprise but the cooperative as a model for organizing work. So I understand that all of this was the result of a synergy between historical factors and different public policies that moved in the same direction.
Fig 1. A picture on the wall at Código Libre.
How does this relate to digital sovereignty? Is it a popular perspective, like that of the MTST in Brazil?
Yes, explicitly. FACTTIC’s main objective is technological sovereignty; it is the foundation of everything. As I was saying, cooperatives are necessarily local. This is not only a matter of values but also a logic of survival: it is what we are. It could not be otherwise. In this sense, the idea is to have technology developed by workers and used by workers, which is very close to the notion of popular digital sovereignty proposed in Brazil. I read that book and really liked the concept. We did not use that term ourselves, but I think it is very powerful. In fact, I set myself the goal of translating it, or at least preparing a summary to share, as part of an agreement we are working on through Código Libre — although I see it as something that could be extended to the federation as a whole — because we feel that we can make a contribution there by facilitating those connections.
When we talk about sovereignty, there are also different ways of understanding it. There is the more traditional conception, associated with the state, and there is another that is more closely linked to popular power and autonomy.
Europe prioritizes joint regulation and negotiation as a bloc in relation to powers such as the United States, although it neglects its industrial policy. Latin America, by contrast, lacks this kind of organized regional consolidation. Despite the consensus around the need to cooperate, regional integration remains a pending task.
Within FACTTIC, at least in the political debates we have had, there is a range of positions that have not been fully systematized or unified. Unlike the MTST, which is a political organization and has more explicit or synthesized debates, FACTTIC does not organize its day-to-day work around this discussion. It is organized primarily around how to sustain and develop the cooperatives’ work. Different perspectives therefore emerge in the spaces for debate. They are not contradictory, but they place different emphasis on different issues. Some people associate sovereignty more strongly with free software and the development of our own technology. Other cooperatives, while not opposed to this, do not prioritize it in their everyday practices. 
This is clearly visible in the IA4COOPS space, where we work on issues related to artificial intelligence. Some cooperatives use existing tools, such as Copilot, to speed up their work, while others focus more on developing their own infrastructure, adapting models or exploring alternatives. Some have a more restrictive position regarding the use of tools developed by large corporations, while others are more flexible.
I am not presenting this as a value judgment, but rather as different levels of commitment to certain principles. In practice, FACTTIC as a federation does not block any of these positions. Each cooperative is autonomous and decides how it wants to work. There are debates, and experiences and tensions are shared, but there is no centralized control or system of sanctions. For example, a cooperative has never been excluded because of such decisions. The logic is instead to share what can be shared and respect autonomy in other areas.
How are FACTTIC cooperatives connected internationally and regionally?
We, the FACTTIC cooperatives, have historically built connections with different networks: in Europe, the United States, Canada and the region itself. For example, a Chilean software-development cooperative participates in the federation. It is Chilean, but it has moved closer to FACTTIC because it is practically the only technology cooperative known in Chile. So there is also a strong connection with the southern part of the region and with cooperatives in neighboring countries.
We also participate in regional networks, particularly networks of incubators in the Americas that are affiliated with the ICA, the International Cooperative Alliance, and are strongly promoted from Uruguay. We have participated in these spaces, events, activities and concrete projects organized through international cooperation, especially with cooperatives from different countries in the region.
What challenges do you encounter in these collaborations, particularly in relation to the Global North and Latin America?
Within this framework, we are trying to build things. In particular, this is something that interests us greatly at Código Libre: thinking about how to create forms of collaboration that do not reproduce colonial logic. Today, there are much more accessible channels for providing services to Global North. As a colleague from another cooperative once said: “We ended up solving the gringos’ problems.” This is facilitated by the international division of labor.
Something similar happens in software to what happens with food: you export raw materials and then buy the finished product from Global North. By contrast, channels for regional collaboration are much less developed. That is why several cooperatives — and we in particular — are investing a great deal of energy in thinking about forms of collaboration that are not merely symbolic or political. There are many events, conferences, forums and research projects. Many people come to study us, which is fine, but we also want there to be economic feedback.
This is interesting because some of us are a little “amphibious”: we work in academia and in cooperatives. So we think about how to create bridges through which real value can circulate. Ultimately, the survival and multiplication of technological cooperativism depend on this. It is not easy. When you try to do it, many barriers appear: cultural barriers, colonial barriers and different ways of understanding relationships. For example, when I traveled to Africa, I realized that I had much more in common with African countries than with countries in the Global North. And yet we tend to build more connections toward the North because that is where we place value, money and work.
In practice, there are also legal and regulatory barriers to inter-cooperation between countries. Cooperative platforms face the same problem: scale is designed for capitalist enterprises. The logic of globalization favors those enterprises, which have the political, legal and cultural tools needed to expand. Uber is everywhere in the world. Cooperatives operate according to different logics. That is why it is interesting to think about these points of connection. CoopCycle, for example, is one case. Another is the relationship between Brazil and Argentina, the two largest countries in the region. Mercosur provides a framework, but we are interested in thinking about what we can do through cooperativism and self-management to build relationships that are not merely symbolic but also material and economic.
Otherwise, Brazil and Argentina end up consuming technological services from large corporations when they could be developing their own capacities. It is not easy, but at least it means stopping thinking that it is impossible and beginning to move in that direction. Introducing the economic dimension is essential because it makes it possible to see where the real obstacles are. One example is the work with the MTST in Brazil. They have training centers for software development, but the only employment option available to the people trained there was to work for private companies. In other words, the value they generated was appropriated by others. They have now created a civil association to channel this work, and we are signing agreements to develop software together. The idea is to think about joint projects between Brazil and Argentina. For example, we could bid for public contracts, which involve a significant volume of work. This requires building consortium capacity among cooperatives so that we can take on these projects.
Finally, how does artificial intelligence enter this picture within FACTTIC?
Last year, we created a new space called IA4COOPS, which has a website where the issue is explained in greater detail. In general terms, many cooperatives are currently developing their own artificial-intelligence projects, especially using local servers and processing. For now, these experiences do not have direct commercial objectives. They are primarily spaces for experimentation, technological appropriation and political positioning: demonstrating that things can be done differently.
At the same time, most cooperatives use existing tools to program faster or better, often tools provided by our clients themselves. The debate therefore concerns how these tools are used: whether one depends directly on external models or tries to develop or adapt one’s own models.  There are different positions at the level of each cooperative. At the federation level, the aim is to enable projects that we would not be able to carry out individually. This creates space for broader debates and for thinking about more ambitious initiatives, whether for social or commercial purposes.
We also closely follow the broader political debate. For example, we look at the financing of large technology companies, which is often connected to the military industry or to other highly controversial industries. This makes clear that there is no such thing as “pure” technology. Everything is shaped by power relations and forms of financing. The challenge, then, is to think about how to appropriate these tools or develop our own alternatives without becoming completely subsumed into that model. That is more or less where the debate stands at present. As the research progresses, we will probably gain greater clarity.
Fig 2. A flyer.