Financing the Solidarity Stack

At the 2026 Solidarity AI Conference at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, researchers, AI developers, policymakers, union organizers, and digital rights advocates will explore how AI can be shaped by the communities it affects: through collective ownership, democratic governance, and solidarity-based infrastructures.

A key question is how to finance these alternatives. Today, the financial layer of AI is highly concentrated among a small number of corporations and investors, shaping who owns and benefits from AI systems. If communities are to build sovereign, community-owned AI infrastructure, they need not only technical and organizational capacity, but also viable models for mobilizing capital.

As part of the conference, Platform Coops eG will facilitate the one-hour workshop “Financing the Solidarity Stack.” Co-founders Andreas Arnold and Ela Kagel will invite participants to collectively map the costs and potential financing mechanisms needed to build community-owned AI infrastructure.

The workshop draws on Makowi, a project developed by the Platform Coops team: a marketplace for the cooperative economy, powered by a stablecoin designed to facilitate transactions among shared service providers and help retain value within the network.

The workshop builds on conversations from last year’s Cooperative AI gathering in Istanbul and contributes to the broader conference exploration of “solidarity stacks": interconnected layers of technology, governance, and labor that are collectively owned, locally governed, and designed to serve social rather than extractive purposes.