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