Governance

connection

You’re Not Addicted to Your Phone – You’re Starved of Connection

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 »

Relaunching The Open Co-op

Relaunching The Open Co-op: Preparing for a Trust-Based Internet

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 »

Collaborative Groups Protocol

Introducing The Collaborative Groups Protocol

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 …

Introducing The Collaborative Groups Protocol Read More »

Decentralised Trust Networks

2026: The Year of Decentralised Trust Networks

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 …

2026: The Year of Decentralised Trust Networks Read More »

A Co-operative Privacy and Trust system for digital dignity

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 of our identity information, even if we prefer to work in trusted ‘peer-to-peer’ circles. Resonate‘s Community Credentials …

A Co-operative Privacy and Trust system for digital dignity Read More »

DecentGov

Decent Gov Now

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 with the government from 1997 to the present it is hard to find a single occasion in the …

Decent Gov Now Read More »

VIDEO: OPEN 2020 – Governance in collaborative projects

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 »

OPEN 2020 Webinar – Vocdoni as an engagement tool for cooperatives

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 and their social base. It allows us to increase the engagement of any social economy organization …

OPEN 2020 Webinar – Vocdoni as an engagement tool for cooperatives Read More »

OPEN 2020 Webinar – Holochain

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 can change how we coordinate and interact. With digital integration under user control, Holochain liberates our online lives from …

OPEN 2020 Webinar – Holochain Read More »