Oliver Sylvester-Bradley

AI powered search for the Regenerative Economy

Introducing CoBot: Your AI Guide to the Regenerative Economy

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Across the world, thousands of projects are quietly building a regenerative economy: community gardens, repair cafés, ecovillages, food co-ops, social centres, organic farms and maker spaces. But regenerative organisations are often hard to find. Search engines are optimised to surface large brands with thousands of backlinks, not small, obscure, well-meaning projects quietly doing important work. …

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Collaborative Groups Protocol

Introducing The Collaborative Groups Protocol

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Humans were not designed to work alone. Cooperation is a natural aspect of our humanity. Research comparing children with chimpanzees reveals that children strongly prefer to work together to obtain food, whereas chimpanzees show no such preference. At scale, humanity’s collaborative instinct is even more powerful. When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared in 2014, three …

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Decentralised Trust Networks

2026: The Year of Decentralised Trust Networks

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The Dawn of Decentralised Trust Networks At The Open Co-op we’re starting 2026 with a sense of profound optimism. After years of foundational work on PLANET and related projects, the pieces are finally coming together to create decentralised trust networks. Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Relationship Credentials (VRCs) are no longer theoretical curiosities—they are technically …

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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 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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