we promote new governance structures
The Open Co-op is working to promote new governance structures, which provide democratic methods to steward our collective endeavours. Cooperatives, and Platform Co-ops, provide a blue-print for democratic business in which all members get a say in how the business is run.
Our two main projects in this area are Co-op Data Club and Meet.coop, which are both member-owned.
A co-op of co-ops that flips the standard data model
via inter-coop marketing and promotions.
Open source meeting and conferencing tools,
powered by renewable energy
Read more about our work on governance in the posts below:
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...
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....
Artists in every field want to collaborate with each other and with their own community-supporting audiences. But trusted collaboration without face to face interaction is difficult. Many of us let the major corporate social platforms manage the majority...
By definition our government should be decent. But it is not.
Being decent requires ‘conforming with generally accepted standards of respectable or moral behaviour’ or performing to ‘an acceptable standard’. But, according to MORI’s Trends showing satisfaction...
OPEN 2020 took place entirely online over two days of talks and discussions and even some poetry – the videos are below in chronological order. You can also view them in the OPEN 2020 playlist on our YouTube channel – which includes all the...
OPEN 2020 was run using an open source video tool, managed by a new platform co-op, meet.coop.
But how should this co-op, and other collaborative projects, be stewarded and governed to best effect?
Following on from the first session on The tools of collaboration...
In this webinar we hear from Ferran Reyes of Vocdoni.
Vocdoni is a FLOSS project building a privacy-centric platform for digital governance using digital voting with maximum guarantees of anonymity, and a toolset to manage the relationship of organizations...
In this webinar we hear from Grace Rachmany, Hedayat Abedijoo and Guillem Cordoba about Holochain.
Holochain enables a distributed web with user autonomy built directly into its architecture and protocols. Distributing the storage and processing of data...