# Cooperative Approaches to Data Sharing and Analysis for Industrial Internet of Things Ecosystems
## 4 Findings
### Roles of the Cooperative and Members  
Based on the first series of interviews with existing business networks, it was possible to derive a catalog of roles that are potentially relevant for the cooperative and the ecosystem, which we also consider fitting for an IIoT data cooperative. Unsurprisingly, the number of roles in the various cases and their distribution varies widely as a result of the different industries in which cooperatives are active. We observed a continuum of options between centralized models in which the cooperative takes over a wide set of roles and fully decentralized models in which the cooperative is only active as a coordinator between the members and external service providers. While we have no clear decision rule so far as to when to centralize and when to decentralize, we see the decentral model more in small ecosystems that can only carry a more lightweight cooperative. _Finding 4: A cooperative plays a coordinative role. It can also play a variety of additional roles, especially in larger ecosystems._  
The coordinator's role can manifest in various forms. In CO3, the cooperative coordinates the construction of new bakeries and is thereby the interface to architects, civil engineers, and investors. Most cooperatives are entrusted with tasks of procuring or trading goods for their members, such as cooperatives in CO6, CO12, and CO13 in product distribution, e.g., power saws (CO12). Some also handled the production of, for instance, the winery of CO1. For a data cooperative, this would imply the procurement of not only IT services (hardware, software, development, operations) but also the procurement distribution of information products. _Finding 4a: Next to coordination, the procurement and distribution of goods is a common role for a cooperative._  
We also find some roles connected to the provision of financial services and not just for cooperatives in the banking sector. The identified roles include the capital provision, investment management (CO2, CO5, CO8), insurance (CO5), payment processing (COS), and deposit protection (CO3, CO5). In DS2, data sharing is directly linked to the handling of loans (depending on the data of the fish). _Finding 4b: A cooperative can also provide, or coordinate financial services._  
Moreover, large ecosystems sometimes come with a complex hierarchy of additional organizational bodies, such as member representation (CO1) or strategy formation (CO8 and CO11). In the latter case, a \"second-order\" cooperative was founded by a large number of smaller cooperatives. From a more long-term perspective, such settings might be interesting for the data cooperative world. In the CO3 interview, the cooperative was found to also have a consulting role with a focus on legal questions. The CO7 cooperative offers education and training services for complex open-source solutions in the field of real-time data streaming. _Finding 4c: A cooperative can act as a consultant for the ecosystem members._  
Some IT-related roles were also found in the interviews, most importantly an infrastructure provider (CO1, CO3, CO5, CO6, CO7, CO9, and CO12). In these cases, there is a separate data center that is available through the cooperative (in fact, the infrastructure provider here is a joint subsidiary of the cooperatives). An application provider was identified in CO12, and a data analyst was active in CO1. In the CO5 and CO9 interviews, a data provider appeared in the form of an organization that provided data for analyses. In the evaluation workshops, the participants voiced strong concerns against the suggestion to insert an IT provider as an additional member of the ecosystem; the IT-related roles are seen either as located within the cooperative itself or at least as being coordinated by the cooperative. An IT provider is regarded as coming into a position with too much power, thereby destroying the balance of and trust in the ecosystem. _Finding 4d: A cooperative can become an infrastructure and application provider.