The short version, if you’re skimming: Who we are and what we’re building The Open Co-op is a member-owned cooperative building PLANET — a Personal Network Manager that gives people and communities genuine ownership of their digital lives. PLANET is built on the First Person Project’s open protocol stack: decentralised identity, verifiable credentials, and trust …
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 what’s the point?None of it really goes anywhere. And if you’re honest, it doesn’t …
You’re Not Addicted to Your Phone – You’re Starved of Connection Read More »
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 on something the internet lacked – a way to know who and …
Relaunching The Open Co-op: Preparing for a Trust-Based Internet Read More »
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 engines are optimised to surface large brands with thousands of backlinks, not small, obscure, well-meaning projects quietly doing important work. …
Introducing CoBot: Your AI Guide to the Regenerative Economy Read More »
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 scale, humanity’s collaborative instinct is even more powerful. When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared in 2014, three …
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. Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Relationship Credentials (VRCs) are no longer theoretical curiosities—they are technically …
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 of speed and efficacy will be much harder to realize than is generally …
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 this second session addresses governance and stewarding in a collaborative, commons …
VIDEO: OPEN 2020 – Governance in collaborative projects Read More »
There are hundreds of thousands of groups and communities working on building a new economy, but no centralised control or coordination system – after all, that’s the whole point of a decentralised network, there shouldn’t be any central ‘nodes’! But because our projects are decentralised it’s often hard to find other people and organisations working …
VIDEO: OPEN 2020 – Coordination in decentralised networks Read More »
Every group, project or community needs digital tools to enable collaboration. But which tools should we choose? This is the first of two sessions looking at common infrastructure for the communities and organisations that are building the new economy. See also the slides and speaker notes for Sectors of work on the new economy and …
