I am more referring to discoverability here.
Here we go…
A lot of people don’t know CoTech exists. A lot of people don’t know what Co-operatives are. A lot of people don’t know that Technology Co-operatives are possible. If they do they hardly know what we do.
There is so much awareness raising to be done. Then once people know we exist, then we need to have a place to match what they want with what we offer (e.g. I want a shared hosting, what co-op does that). Then once you have that, you need each co-op to have clear documentation: where are the servers, what is the GDPR thing, do you do backups, etc. etc. etc. We need to account for individuals and institutions who have vastly different needs.
We are all banging away at getting our own co-op websites up to speed with this info but we could be coordinating this. Look at what Welcome to the CHATONS website | CHATONS are doing (a “chaton” is a hosting provider):
In Librehosters, we tried to define a data spec to list some things that a collective should say about itself and then load that into a common website so that people could have ease of discovery. See librehosters / librehost api · GitLab.
These are all good attempts but I don’t they’ve gotten far enough. Both CHATONS and Librehosters have faced internal organising issues which led to a lot of stagnation as far as I understand. Maybe we’re the same!
Another example: look at this tweet that we found recently https://twitter.com/jackyalcine/status/1395075948601479170?s=03:
This person sent us a mail shortly after saying “yeah that sounds great but I have no idea how to actually get a shared hosting from you”. That’s on us to fix.
So yeah, back to bread & butter co-operative propagandising is what I am talking about. But not without backing that up with clear information, sign up flows, the full “I want a thing” to “I have a thing” pipeline for people in search of technology done by not megacorps.
Who wants to start the CoTech Propaganda Work Group?
