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We write about systems change, project updates and ideas to encourage collaboration at scale.

our key topics cover

Relaunching The Open Co-op
Relaunching The Open Co-op: Preparing for a Trust-Based Internet
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...
AI powered search for the Regenerative Economy
Introducing CoBot: Your AI Guide to the Regenerative Economy
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...
Collaborative Groups Protocol
Introducing The Collaborative Groups Protocol
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...
Decentralised Trust Networks
2026: The Year of Decentralised Trust Networks
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....
Decentralized Identifiers
PLANET Research - Decentralized Auth Solutions
TL;DR From Centralized SSO to Decentralized Auth: Traditional Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions are complex and create single points of failure. Decentralized authentication and authorization offers self-sovereign identity, reducing reliance on central...
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
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...
Platforms vs Protocols
A Protocol for sharing Offers & Wants between networks
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...
PLANET Pioneers
Vision, Progress, Roadmap
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...
catalysing collaboration at scale
Catalysing collaboration at scale 
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...
Google scans your email
If you value your privacy you should stop using Gmail
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...
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Everyone is welcome at The Open Co-op.