Oliver Sylvester-Bradley

from Platforms to Protocols - How PLANET paves the way to a collaborative economy

Breaking Free from Walled Gardens: How PLANET paves the way to a collaborative economy

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Imagine a world where every individual and organisation working towards a regenerative future could seamlessly connect, share resources, and collaborate—without being trapped in a single platform’s ecosystem. This is exactly what PLANET is designed to enable, using open protocols instead of closed platforms. The Platform Problem  Traditional platforms operate as walled gardens, controlling the flow …

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PLANET 2025

PLANET building 2025

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As followers of The Open Co-op will know, since 2004 we’ve had a vision of a ‘cooperating system’ called PLANET, which would support a global network of local groups and help develop a collaborative, regenerative economy. The need for PLANET is now more urgent than ever so, our plan for 2025 is to run an outreach campaign to …

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PLANET Pioneers

Vision, Progress, Roadmap

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The Open Co-op was founded in 2004 and has a long history of organising events and running projects to help grow the commons. Everything we do aims to build towards our vision of a collaborative econ regenerative economy. We are especially focused on developing the tools, technologies, organisational and economic models and narratives which underpin …

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Google scans your email

If you value your privacy you should stop using Gmail

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Have you ever considered how much information Google harvests about you? Google creates ‘shadow profiles’ of every user by tracking, recording and analysing: Every email you send or receive via Gmail Every search you perform on Google search Every video you watch on YouTube Everywhere you go, the route you took and how long you …

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A new model for grant funding – to finance the collaborative Commons

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The conventional funding model, in which grant making bodies hand out six figure sums to qualifying organizations, is broken. At it’s best the standard grant funding model is woefully inefficient: Huge amounts of funds are wasted on ‘administration’ Time-poor NGOs and smaller orgs are forced to compete for limited funds, guaranteeing that the vast proportion …

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The self-reinforcing nature of cooperation and ethical business

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Business as usual is unsustainable. Capitalism has legitimised the externalisation of various ‘costs’ to such an extent that it has become normal for companies to exploit the natural world – and their customers at the same time. Take the example of a large video conferencing company that enables people to chat and run webinars. At …

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A Co-operative Privacy and Trust system for digital dignity

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Artists in every field want to collaborate with each other and with their own community-supporting audiences. But trusted collaboration without face to face interaction is difficult. Many of us let the major corporate social platforms manage the majority of our identity information, even if we prefer to work in trusted ‘peer-to-peer’ circles. Resonate‘s Community Credentials …

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DecentGov

Decent Gov Now

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By definition our government should be decent. But it is not. Being decent requires ‘conforming with generally accepted standards of respectable or moral behaviour’ or performing to ‘an acceptable standard’. But, according to MORI’s Trends showing satisfaction with the government from 1997 to the present it is hard to find a single occasion in the …

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