A nice talk by Loomio‘s Ben Knight at the 2015 Bioneers Annual Conference Emerging in response to the need for a scalable way to make inclusive group decisions during the Occupy movement in 2011, Loomio, an activist-driven tech co-op, developed an open-source tool for democratic organizing now used by 80,000 people in 93 countries. Change-making …
Self-Organizing Community Democracy for the Internet Age Read More »
Alanna from Loomio met Romain Chanut at POC21, a 6 week innovation camp in France focused on open source hardware for sustainability. Romain was there with his “Do It Together”JerryCan – a low cost computer you can assemble from recycled materials. We took a break from hacking on hardware to learn more about his other …
How the Digital Nomads of Social Media Squad Run a Distributed Co-Op Read More »
Enric Duran of the Catalan Integrated Cooperative has taken the time to comment on Michel Bauwens’ recent article on Open Coops, contrasting Bauwens’ proposals with the practical realities already under way in the CIC’s own forward thinking cooperativist environment. Guerrilla Translation, as a sister collective to the P2P Foundation has copy-edited Duran’s replies. Bauwens’ summary …
Cooperativa Integral Catalana as a living model of open cooperativism Read More »
By Nathan Schneider and originally published on Shareable Image from OpenSource.com’s post, “Don’t Build a Better Mousetrap. Change the Business Model.” One chilly morning last winter, I reconnected with an old friend, Joel Dietz, on a video chat. We hadn’t seen each other for years, and we’d each had several starts and stops in our lives since. He began …
Can Cooperatives Build Better Online Tools to Disrupt the Disrupters? by Nic Wistreich (and originally published on Grassroots Economic Organizing) Uberfication has become shorthand for many new concepts—from the sharing economy to any significantly disruptive digital business model. But what exactly did Uber do that was materially different to earlier disruptive digital businesses? In short: …
The best thing about going to the Co-op Bank Crisis: Ways Foward for the Co-operative Movement conference organised by Co-operative Business Consultants was getting introduced to Rory Ridley-Duff by Mark Simmonds as someone else who is interested in multi-stakeholder co-ops. I’ve since met with and spoke with Rory quite a few times now, learning all …
The best new thing I learnt about at OuiShare Fest 2014: The Age of Communities was Open State. Here is the video of Dominik Wind’s presentation about it: The idea is to create a fully operating replicable cell of a future-proof society. I’m really excited about the Open State Camp: A 5-week-camp near Berlin, Germany, …
this article originally appeared in Stir Magazine illustration by Daksheeta Pattni In 2002 I described United Diversity as “a member owned and stakeholder governed network of mutual advantage.” In truth, it was aspirational. At the time, the flexible off-the-shelf legal structures and open source tools needed to make such a network a reality simply didn’t …
Open Co-ops: Inspiration, Legal Structure and Tools Read More »
Back in 2004, Gary Alexander from the Open University, Tom Salfield and Josef Davies-Coates from United Diversity, and Oliver Sylvester-Bradley from Defacto Design together launched The Open Co-op. We described ourselves as a Co-operative Open Organisation. Ten years on and everyone seems to be getting in on the act: Ed Mayo‘s Number 1 trend for co-operatives in 2014 is: “The …
