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

This resource, “Management, Cooperation, and Sustainability: Unpacking the Data Practices of Housing Cooperatives,” is a research paper published in the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’25) proceedings. It is authored by Priyanka Verma, Mohammad Rashidujjaman Rifat, and Samar Sabie, affiliated with the University of Toronto. The paper reports on an in-depth study of how housing cooperatives use financial, social, and building-upkeep data, and how those practices affect cooperation and long-term sustainability.

The authors examine a non-profit cooperative housing organisation in Toronto, Canada, anonymised as “NXI.” NXI is a long-standing student housing cooperative that operates with democratic governance and is self-funded through member payments. The study is based on a 16-month ethnographic engagement, including participant observation and 24 semi-structured interviews. The research analyses how day-to-day maintenance and operations, cooperative decision-making, and sustainability goals depend on data practices—and where shortcomings in data and tools create tensions.

NXI relies on a mix of paper-based and digital systems to manage operations, including maintenance work orders, invoicing, tracking supplies, and member communications across multiple channels. The paper highlights inefficiencies created by fragmented records, duplicated workflows, and information overload. Staff describe an accumulation of “historical stuff” in software systems, a large volume of physical files, and difficulties finding information quickly, contributing to missed tasks and additional work. The study also points to the importance of data granularity: members and external institutions may require more detailed breakdowns (e.g., capital repairs by discrete tasks) than the cooperative typically records.

The cooperative model shifts housing costs from “rent” to “membership fees,” framing payments as a collective resource for services, utilities, maintenance, and house-level budgets. Membership fee data is described as central for internal communication and decision-making during annual budgeting, and as an external credibility signal for banks and insurers. The paper documents participatory budgeting practices at house level (for example, combining a shared physical list with a Google Form to propose and vote on purchases). It also describes an emergency relief fund that supports members struggling to pay, where decisions may rely more on trust and goodwill than on detailed financial documentation.

Sustainability is discussed across social, financial, and cultural dimensions. The paper documents how cooperatives preserve social memory through both digital and non-digital “data” (e.g., house guides, scrapbooks, alumni traces), while also experiencing organisation-wide losses when records are not digitised or are difficult to access. Limited access to older financial records can constrain long-term planning and member participation. A key concept is “data dissipation”: older project documents (such as past feasibility studies and cost estimates for infill housing) can become less actionable over time as circumstances and costs change, leading to wasted effort when projects are paused and later revisited.

The authors argue that existing financial and administrative tools may be designed around landlord–tenant assumptions and can misalign with cooperative values of openness, distributed participation, and “member economic participation.” The paper proposes design implications for tools that better support cooperative governance, including more distributed access to records, improved visibility of tasks (e.g., shared calendars and checklists), and systems that account for temporality by separating working repositories from archival repositories and enabling better linkage between financial data and long-term repair or planning contexts.