Sabot is an app for delivery drivers in the gig economy aimed at responding to information asymmetry in the workplace. It repurposes data collection to inform riders' decisions, creates a community of care as they are on the road, and generates greater capacity to collectively organise. Sabot - coming from the French sabotage - is an idea that emerged when organising with delivery workers in South London, who faced the problem of an inaccurate navigation system in delivery platforms. Along with riders and some members Independet Workers of Great Britain (IWGB), we started thinking if, and how, a riders’ app could be helpful to organise.
A prototype was developed in conversation with riders in 2022, who defined its features, experimenting and questioning new forms of political organisation under datafied and distributed workspaces. A riders’ app creates a real-time collective repository that can inform decisions, break up riders’ isolation, and contest the mechanisms of value extraction enabled by platform economy.
A riders’ app can assist in assembling evidence for strategic litigations and contribute to IWGB’s action roadmap. The proposal goes beyond the demand of transparency to platform companies, understanding that to reshape a system it is necessary to engage with it.
With the same outline, a feature the app has a feature for reporting accidents. Currently there are no official numbers, although a relation between injuries and time requirements on delivery apps is suspected.
Inverting the agent of evaluation, riders can evaluate restaurants on the basis of the treatment given to them when picking up orders. They can add comments to guide other riders on specificities of each restaurant.
By crossing data from payment invoice with geolocation, it is possible to fi nd out hourly pay for workers (information not currently given by apps), so they can track changes on the algorithm paying scheme. Th is page also calculates hourly rates subtracting costs of maintenance of vehicle. According to the number of deliveries performed, it displays an speculative value for all the data that drivers have produced while working. Data is an unaccounted source of income to platforms, by which they optimise algorithms and attract investment.
The app has been built using React Native, a javascript library popular among coders to create user interfaces and apps for Android and IOS. Before starting this project, I had a very basic understanding of code. So parallel to the research project, I started the project of learning a new language: javascript. In order to modify the code of the app as a developper it will be necessary to download it from the github repository and obtain an APIKey from GoogleMaps service and add it to the file in the repository: GoogleMaps APIKey in: Sabot\android\app\src\main\AndroidManifest.xml
The database to store and fetch data from the app has been built with Firebase, a GoogleCloud service that allows to create real-time databases. The structure to organize the information is shown in the following page. The database, unlike the code, is not public since it contains the data from riders, which should only be released to their disclosure. If the reader wanted to build her own database to work with this app, it would be necessary to obtain an APIKey from GoogleCloud Firebase and download the according json file to set up in the app.
You can download the app for Android here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YQTN0PJXtGXX72EGvuhWa8lJkqSm2JW4
You can download the code's explanation guide here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eWCXGvg22HyjtOuK_nc8UbfozL0qZ_jE/view?usp=sharing