We Don’t Yet Fully Know What Platforms Can Do: Ten points towards public platformation

In response to the Covid crisis and the continuing lack of PPE equipment available for the critical NHS workers in early 2020, Autonomy authored the brief ​ “Medisyn: A Platform for UK PPE Provisions.”​ The brief proposed a platform for coordinating rapid PPE production by 3-D printers and local SMEs, connecting these suppliers with larger NHS procurement systems and leveraging their nimble support for larger scale industry retooling efforts. Medisyn imagined a platform that would provide a more resilient, regenerative, and distributive inventory protocol for NHS provisions than the current portal system. It argued that algorithmic capacity could be leveraged to pool small suppliers to tackle big projects, coordinate services and needs across producers and purchasers, mediate supply and demand flows, automate bureaucratic hurdles, share innovations and research, and ensure compliance. The Medisyn platform would be a mechanism for coordinating production and purchase of assets at scale while supporting local work and economies.