The short version, if you’re skimming: Who we are and what we’re building The Open Co-op is a member-owned cooperative building PLANET — a Personal Network Manager that gives people and communities genuine ownership of their digital lives. PLANET is built on the First Person Project’s open protocol stack: decentralised identity, verifiable credentials, and trust …
You pick up your phone to do something.Twenty minutes later, you’re still scrolling – and you’ve forgotten what it was you meant to do. You’ve seen hundreds of posts.You can’t remember any of them. You almost shared something — but didn’t.Because what’s the point?None of it really goes anywhere. And if you’re honest, it doesn’t …
You’re Not Addicted to Your Phone – You’re Starved of Connection Read More »
For over twenty years, at The Open Co-op, we’ve been working towards a vision of a cooperative, regenerative economy — one that is owned and governed by its participants, and designed to serve people and planet over profit. That vision has always depended on something the internet lacked – a way to know who and …
Relaunching The Open Co-op: Preparing for a Trust-Based Internet Read More »
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. …
Introducing CoBot: Your AI Guide to the Regenerative Economy Read More »
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 …
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 …
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 …
Breaking Free from Walled Gardens: How PLANET paves the way to a collaborative economy Read More »
It was almost 2.5 years ago that Ivana started a thread about marrying needs and offers on The Open Co-op Loomio, which is one of the most read and commented on threads in the forum presumably because a lot of people agree that better sharing of Offers and Wants is a key stepping stone towards …
A Protocol for sharing Offers & Wants between networks Read More »
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 …
In his brilliant book, How The World Really Works, Vaclav Smil concludes: …of all the risks we face, global climate change is the one that needs to be tackled most urgently and effectively. And there are two fundamental reasons why this combination of speed and efficacy will be much harder to realize than is generally …
