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As event organisers the safety of our community is paramount and for the last few weeks we have been closely monitoring the rapidly changing situation around Coronavirus (COVID-19) and the advice from Public Health England and the NHS. Due to the current...

The following blog is a guest post from Daniel Heery, from Charge My Street – a platform co-op that installs and operates community chargepoints for electric vehicles, which is currently raising money through community shares. An the first Open...

The main challenge we need to solve in the platform co-op community is how to reach critical mass… and how to pass users from one platform to another. Fairbnb.coop is a platform co-op whose name precedes it. Everyone’s heard of the venture-capital-backed...

I see a real need for “scaled connectivity” to advance our work as part of a viable ecosystem. In the run up to OPEN 2020 in London in June, we interviewed Sarah, Mckinley, Director for European Programs for The Democracy Collaborative and the European...

In my previous post on making groups work I argued that a centralised, cooperatively owned platform could be one of the most effective ways to catalyse the co-creation of a new economy, right now. My argument for centralisation is based wholly on practicalities...

What would a sustainable, universally beneficial economy look like? “Like a doughnut,” says Oxford economist Kate Raworth. In this eye-opening talk, she explains how we can move countries out of the hole, where people are falling short on...

There is a growing consensus that enabling groups, and networks of groups, to work together, is essential to delivering exponential impact in collaboration and solving humanities multiple challenges. The Magical Number Seven, ideas about committees, decision...

This excellent animated video came out in 2010 in response to the failed 2009 Copenhagen Summit. It advocates a network of organisations that together could crowd-source solutions to the climate crisis, namely: A Green Knowledge Trust – A green...

In his paper on ‘Democracy and E-Democracy – A discussion of the possibility of supplanting traditional representative democracy with e-democracy’, Ehud Shapiro asks “Why has an Internet revolution of democracy not yet occurred?” He concludes that...

One of our key projects at The Open Co-op is The Open Credit Network, which evolved out of OPEN 2018 and our previous work on ideas for a co-op coin. Having tested a proof-of-concept and visited Sardex, a successful mutual credit network in Sardinia,...