Management, Cooperation, and Sustainability: Unpacking the Data Practices of Housing Cooperatives

Despite significant work in HCI on understanding the role of data tools for non-profits and grassroots communities, there has been limited focus on cooperatives. This paper examines the role of financial, social, and building upkeep data in a non-profit cooperative housing organization in Toronto, Canada (alias named NXI). Through a 16-month-long ethnographic study, including 24 interviews, we investigate the role of and tensions in data practices related to NXI’s daily maintenance and operations, cooperation, and sustainability. We find that NXI’s current data practices are functional and meaningful—sometimes requiring team workarounds—in the short term. However, various tensions and deficiencies in data practices hamper NXI’s sustainability. By contextualizing the temporal affordances of data, we propose design implications for data tools to align effectively with the practices of cooperatives and enhance organizational sustainability. Finally, we discuss how data designers and researchers, organizations or grassroots communities, and financial technology designers can benefit from our work, especially with regard to the maintenance and sustainability of small-scale organizations.