Social and solidarity economy and shared knowledge: facilitating and integrating the collaborative adoption of digital commons in Catalan coops

Abstract

While centralised digital infrastructures and corporate platform ecosystems continue to dominate the digital landscape, raising concerns around data governance and dependency, various initiatives within the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) are exploring alternative pathways. These efforts do not offer a wholesale emancipation from mainstream systems, but rather introduce modular, context-specific adaptations grounded in Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) and shared digital commons. This article presents a case study of the Catalan multi-stakeholder cooperative femProcomuns, which since 2017 has facilitated the adoption of ethical digital tools among SSE entities, particularly through its cloud service SomNúvol (CommonsCloud). Drawing on our experience as practitioners and researchers, we analyse the adoption of the Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management (ERP-CRM) tool Dolibarr by various cooperatives from the SSE sector, representing diverse organisational models, including service provision, production, and consumer distribution. Our participatory action research methodology combines digital activism, collaborative documentation, and ethnography. By foregrounding shared knowledge practices in collaborative sessions and facilitation processes, we trace strategies that enable commons-based governance and strengthen digital intercooperation. Our findings contribute to debates on alternatives to platform capitalism and highlight how SSE actors can scale digital infrastructures without compromising ethical or democratic values. This case demonstrates the potential of FLOSS and commons-oriented approaches to support the growth of digital solidarity economies while fostering sustainable, self-managed, and replicable models of technological development.