The difference is clearest at the end of a booking. With a conventional car-hire company, the customer uses a vehicle, returns it and waits for the company to take care of the rest. If the car is dirty, they report it; if something is missing, they complain; if they spot a fault, they raise an issue. The relationship is clear: one party consumes the service and the other maintains the asset.
Som Mobilitat also lets people book and use vehicles through an app, but that is where the similarity ends. It is a cooperative, so those who use the cars are not merely customers of an outside company. They are members of an organisation they collectively own and govern, and the vehicles form part of a service that belongs to them too. The cooperative publicly defines the project as a non-profit organisation in which every member has a voice and a vote and participates in decisions about the future of the service: Som Mobilitat — Som Cooperativa.
Our work has helped Som Mobilitat turn that difference in ownership into an operating model: specific fleet needs are connected with members who are already nearby and have enough context to act. This improves processes, extends the service to more areas and increases capacity without expanding the central structure at the same rate as activity.
That changes the question. It is no longer just a question of how the technical team can best maintain the fleet for its users, but rather how the community can take care of a fleet that belongs to them without turning every small need into a new task for the central structure.
When growing means multiplying the structure
The problem appears when the cooperative grows. More members mean more bookings, more kilometres and a wider geographical presence, but they can also mean more checks, cleaning, incidents, messages and exceptions for someone to manage.
If each new need ends up in the same team, growth has an almost inevitable consequence: the structure must expand at the same pace as the activity. More people are needed to coordinate, more processes to distribute the work, more controls to verify it and, over time, more layers to support the previous ones. The cooperative gains dimension, but runs the risk of losing precisely what makes it different: proximity, participation and the ability to act collectively. The service can scale and, at the same time, move away from the cooperative model that gives it meaning.
The alternative is not to appeal vaguely for volunteers, publish a list of tasks and trust that someone will handle them. Nor is it simply a matter of offering points or discounts. The reward is the visible part; the real work underneath is the design of a system of trust.
The community is already where the work happens
Members use the vehicles, arrive at their parking locations and see the state of the fleet before and after each journey. They are present at the very place and time when many needs arise—needs the central team would otherwise discover only later, through a message or incident report.
This proximity contains an operational capacity that normally remains untapped. A person who is already going to use a vehicle may be in a better position to carry out a simple check than someone on the team who would have to travel specifically. It can also provide recent information, confirm that a previous action has worked, or warn that a problem continues.
But being close is not enough. For this ability to become a useful contribution, the person needs to know what they must do, why the system proposes it, what limits the task has and how the result can be verified. Without that context, participation depends too much on individual interpretation and ends up generating more coordination than it saves.
The reward is only part of the system
We worked through this with Som Mobilitat. The starting point was to observe the daily operation: how a need is detected, what information exists, who knows the context, which tasks require professional intervention, which a member can resolve and what reaches the team only because the system could not resolve it earlier.
This work produced a reward system through which members themselves can help care for the fleet. It is not a generic list of errands, but a way of relating each need to the vehicle, the time of use and the person who can act with sufficient information.
A task only makes sense when it appears with the appropriate context: what vehicle needs it, what has happened during its last uses, where it is located, what specific action must be carried out, what level of risk it has, how the result can be demonstrated and what other signals will allow it to be confirmed later.
The reward recognises the contribution, but cannot replace any of the above. Rewarding every declared action encourages activity, but not necessarily care. If the task is poorly defined, the system may reward work that is irrelevant, incomplete or impossible to verify.
Richard Ryan and Edward Deci's research on motivation helps explain why this nuance matters. The effect of a reward depends not only on its value, but also on how it affects a person's autonomy, sense of competence and relationship with the community. A reward can recognise a contribution or turn it into an external obligation; design and context largely determine how it is understood: Self-Determination Theory — Intrinsic Motivation.
The goal, therefore, is not to get more tasks done. It is to ensure that the real needs of the fleet are better resolved.
Validate without rebuilding the bureaucracy
Let's imagine a simple cleaning need or a low-risk check. The system can relate it to a reservation, explain what is expected, collect evidence, and use feedback from subsequent users to increase or decrease confidence in the result.
In this way, a review does not only serve to describe the current state of the car. It can also help validate the previous contribution. Each use generates more than just a completed reservation: it provides information about the fleet, confirms that a need has been resolved or detects that the problem is still open.
This form of validation is important because an exclusively central check would recreate the same problem you are trying to solve. If the team must manually review each contribution, the work doesn't disappear; it simply moves from doing the task to checking it. The cooperative would have distributed participation, but would retain a central bottleneck.
Trusting without verifying is not an option either, because it can erode service quality and trust between members. Validation must combine several signals: the vehicle's context, the evidence provided, consistency with its history and observations from those who use it afterwards. When the signals agree, confidence increases. When they conflict, the case becomes an exception that needs review.
Elinor Ostrom's research on the management of shared resources found a similar pattern in communities capable of sustaining them over long periods: the rules worked best when they were adapted to local conditions and when the users themselves were involved in observing both the resource and its use. It does not alone demonstrate how a carsharing fleet should be managed, but it does corroborate the importance of combining context, participation and distributed verification: Elinor Ostrom — Nobel Lecture.
The system does not remove control. It concentrates control where it adds value.
Technology coordinates; the team retains the criteria
That's where technology comes in handy. Not to decide that everything is fine because someone has uploaded a photo, nor to replace the team's judgement in matters of safety, nor to turn cooperation into a points video game.
Its role is to connect dispersed information, interpret observations, propose tasks, detect contradictions, organise evidence and direct human attention towards the cases that genuinely need it. Artificial intelligence can form part of this architecture when it provides context or reduces interpretative work, but it is not the protagonist of the system.
The World Cooperative Monitor study on digitalisation and participation reaches a compatible conclusion: digital tools can make it easier for members to take part in co-creating services, but they do not in themselves replace the cooperative relationship or guarantee participation. Technology opens up the possibility; the organisation must still design how people contribute and to what end: World Cooperative Monitor — Digitalization, participation and democracy.
The real protagonist is a different way of organising capacity. The central team no longer has to receive every small need and can focus on designing rules, protecting safety, resolving exceptions and continually improving the operation as a whole.
Members, for their part, do not become free labour. They voluntarily participate in defined actions, receive recognition for their contribution and help take care of a shared asset from which they also benefit.
That balance is delicate. A poorly designed reward can reduce a cooperative contribution to a simple transaction; an ambiguous task can generate frustration; opaque validation can break trust; and unlimited autonomy can send to the community responsibilities that should continue in professional hands.
Distributing capacity does not mean distributing everything
Not all tasks have the same risk or require the same knowledge. Repeatable, low-risk, and easy-to-verify actions can bring the community closer. Decisions related to safety, liability, conflicts or exceptional situations must remain under the control of the team.
Scaling is not about getting members to do everything, but about no longer forcing the central structure to do everything. The distinction seems small, but it completely changes the operating model.
The function of automation also changes. Rather than trying to replace people, it serves to separate ordinary cases from exceptions, provide each participant with the information they need, and preserve context between one intervention and the next. The organisation can expand its capacity without cluttering the operation with unnecessary steps, approvals, and dependencies.
When each new member also adds capacity
In a conventional company, each new customer usually adds demand and the organisation must build capacity to serve it. A cooperative has another possibility: each new member can add demand, but also local knowledge, presence, observation and a small measure of distributed capacity.
This effect does not arise automatically simply because there are many members. It has to be designed. Diffuse needs must become concrete tasks, participation needs context, validation must avoid new bureaucracy and rewards cannot strip the contribution of meaning. Each intervention must also return information to the system so that the next decision is a little better.
When all of that fits together, growth no longer means only more work for the team. The same community that uses the fleet helps observe it, care for it and keep it available for the members who come next.
Because the cars are not merely maintained for the members. They are cared for by the members.
The cars are yours.
Sources cited
- Som Mobilitat — Som Cooperativa.
- Som Mobilitat — 3a Trobada de socis i sòcies, public record of rewards for support, cleaning and maintenance.
- Self-Determination Theory — Intrinsic Motivation.
- Elinor Ostrom — Nobel Lecture.
- World Cooperative Monitor — Large cooperatives: Digitalization, participation and democracy.