The Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC) has announced the 2026 Solidarity AI conference, which will be held at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, 12-15 November.
Co-convenors PCC Global, PCC Thailand and regional partners say the event will bring together movement builders, researchers, co-op and credit union leaders, technologists, policymakers, union organisers, and digital rights advocates.
It follows the 2025 Cooperative AI conference in Istanbul, which explored how collective ownership and democratic governance might reshape not only the use of AI but its underlying infrastructures.
The PCC says this year’s event will turn the conversation toward Asia and the majority world, “helping to decentre AI debates historically shaped by a narrow set of geopolitical power centres”.
It added: “Across many regions, digital systems increasingly determine who is paid, tracked, replaced, or rendered invisible. Decisions about data, infrastructure, and algorithmic systems are often made far from the communities whose lives they shape.
“Solidarity AI names a choice: whether AI will be governed by distant systems of power or shaped by the communities who live with its consequences.”
The conference will on how to build technologies with, by, and for the communities they affect, said the PCC, “ensuring that those who build, maintain, and are governed by AI systems meaningfully participate in shaping them – from the extraction of raw materials to the design of algorithms and the governance of digital infrastructures.”
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Bangkok has been chosen as a venue because the city “is a site of living intellectual and political traditions that reframe technology through responsibility, sufficiency, and collective autonomy,” the PCC said.
In this light, the conference will draw on “traditions that have long resisted extractive techno-solutionism. Buddhist ethics foreground interdependence and care. Thailand’s sufficiency economy challenges growth at all costs. Gandhian decentralism and Ambedkarite critique insist on justice and structural transformation.”
The event will explore “solidarity stacks”, an alternative to extractive systems that offer “interconnected layers of technology, governance, and labour systems that are collectively owned, locally governed, and designed to serve social rather than extractive ends”.
Examples given by the PCC include farmer-led data co-ops in India, Vietnam’s national AI stack, multilingual AI systems in Indonesia and Malaysia, worker organising in the platform economies of the Philippines, and platform co-ops in Spain.
In Thailand, there are initiatives such as TechTransThai, a community-driven technology project supporting transgender communities through free software, decentralised data tools, and public-interest digital infrastructure..
For the conference, the PCC is calling for “scholarship and practice grounded in lived experience and embedded knowledge, with a strong focus on research and real-world experimentation in platform co-operatives and adjacent solidarity enterprises”.
Submission deadline is 30 April, with notice of acceptance on 15 May and full materials due on 15 September.
