Quick alert to sign up for the CECOP (European Fed of Coops in Industry and Services, i.e. worker and social coops) events, running alongside Coop Congress, starting 2 weeks today. Registration is free and it gives access to the Congress events as well (and vice versa so if you are already going to Congress you can attend the CECOP session)
Registration link is at CECOP General Assembly - 9 June 2020 - ONLINE
Quick resume:
Thurs 20 Reception at Holyoake House, bus trip to Suma, celebration dinner at On the Eighth Day worker coop (Mike Rudge from Delta-T is bringing his violin and Britta Werner from Unicorn is looking for other unplugged musical intervention)
Fri 21 Formal General Assembly and review of 40 years of CECOP / looking to the future
Sat 22 am: joint CECOP/Worker Coop Council session, presentations below:
9:30: Welcome and introduction Diana Dovgan + Sion Whellens - 10 min
9:40 Panel 1: Governance innovation in worker, social and multi stakeholder coops - 30 min
• Abbie Kempson, Unicorn Grocery workers cooperative (UK)
Introducing sociocracy, and how we are applying it
• Bob Cannell, Cooperative Business Consultants (UK):
People theory vs system theory: new thinking about management in cooperatives
• Giuseppe Guerini, Confcooperative – Federsolidarieta (IT)
The emergence of the social coops in Italy, and how to organise governance among different categories of stakeholders in social coops
10:10 Q&A 20 min
Refreshment break 10.30-11.00
11:00 Panel 2: The challenge of democratic ownership for self-employed and freelance workers - 20 min
• Pat Conaty - Fellow, New Economics Foundation (UK)
Not Alone: how the cooperative and union movements can support precarious workers
• Anne-Laure Desgris, Smart (BE)
Governance and ownership challenge for ‘atomized’ workers
11:20 Q&A - 15 min
11.35 Panel 3: Democratic ownership of technology and information - 20 min
• Colm Massey, Solidarity Economy Association (UK)
How Linked Open Data can support solidarity economy network building and emergence locally and regionally
• Sean Fensom, Manchester Digital (UK)/Graham Mitchell, MC3 (UK)
Can we take on the tech giants? Cooperative cloud services, fibre and 5G infrastructure.
11.55 Plenary Q&A/plenary – 20m
I was to come to Manchester for one day the agenda for Saturday above looks like it would be a potentially more useful day than the Friday? The main congress timetable is here:
Blimey - this is the first time I’ve seen this level of detail. There’s only a broad outline available on the CECOP website. So the session with Shaun (aka Sean) Fensom is going to go ahead then? That’s useful to know. I’m seeing him on Monday so we may even have some time to put something together for this.
@Graham, Sean F and Colm Massey gave the last three presentations on Saturday and I think they had quite an impact - thanks to them, and I’ll include this link in my report back to Solidfund on the event. @chris what did you make of what you saw?
I think it is too early to know what might, or might not, come out of the suggestions / ideas put forward by @Graham and @shaun… hopefully something will…
I had an interesting chat with Colm about the semantic mapping work they are doing and it would be very interesting to apply their tools to CoTech data to generate a more meaningful map for the CoTech website and perhaps this is something that could be done in the future…
I had a good conversation with Dianna immediately after the session and I’m putting together a brief for her now so that she can take it forward and win some broader buy-in to the idea. She was talking about me going to the ICA event in Rwanda in the autumn, though I’m less clear about how that trip might be financed…
I’m also increasingly excited about the potential of the mapping work that Colm and SEA have been doing, especially when he said access to the data can be controlled, which got me thinking about how a solidarity economy data commons could be used to grow the movement and accelerate system change.
That sounds good although we know too well not to count any chickens. Diana asked if I was going to Rwanda and like you not sure how to finance that. CUK have already decided who their delegation’s going to be, but I want to know who’s going to represent the UK at the CICOPA GA - logically it would be me, logically they should have the facility to participate remotely in that session, but they won’t do that …