I’m involved with WeCo, a platform cooperative Reddit replacement with extra features. It allows people to share and upvote links and posts, comment and create polls, along with sorting posts by their type and category (or branch as we call it). WeCo has a branch for cooperatives with currently 130 posts. WeCo, unlike Reddit, allows creating branches inside branches, and in the coop branch this means branches for different types of cooperatives. Here’s what the co-op branch currently looks like:
Here’s the wall.
Here’s the current branches.
Click on the consumer cooperatives, and only posts that deal with consumer cooperatives appear:
But if you want to be more specific you can go further to check only posts about utility or retailer cooperatives:
And just when you thought you have reached the limits, the utility cooperatives has sub-branches for electric and water cooperatives:
And we could continue this to a level of individual cooperatives, or even branches of a cooperative.
Few cool branches:
- Social Coop is a childbranch of b/platformcoops, and it has a branch on Coop Ideas, that seeks to include all ideas for new cooperatives that social coop people have posted.
- Internet Of Ownership is a childbranch of b/platformcoops, that includes a monthly poll on what is the most brilliant new project added to their directory in the preceding month.
Been also thinking of having an annual poll on the most brilliant platform cooperative added to the Internet Of Ownership directory that year. I could even match every vote with some small donation to the coop that receives the vote. Hopefully that or some similar polls could help people from CoTech, Platform6, Coop Exchange, etc. to see new projects to participate in.
I’m planning to message social coop and Internet Of Ownership about this later this week. It’s not very active as we have not done almost any outreach for WeCo yet (we are starting out soon).
Few ideas on developing better features:
- Allow clicking the childbranches in the sidebar and not require users to leave the wall to go through branches. It could look something like this:
- Allowing description under the posts, that would look something like this.
If branches could choose how long descriptions they would allow, we could have for example a branch for ”Cooperative Research” that would include studies about cooperatives. The wall could show the name of the study, along with a description long enough to include the whole abstract. So with few clicks, you could see the most upvoted study on cooperatives this week/month/year, read the abstract, and give it an upvote or a comment if you like without exiting the wall.
List of proposals for new features (such as more sophisticated polling tools, similar to those in Loomio) can be found here, and I have another comment on CoTech forum describing the decision making pipeline.
Since WeCo is not only dedicated to coops, but allows creation of branches of any subject, it also allows cooperative enthusiasts to talk about other shared interests too.
Two people interested in cooperatives and geology can have discussions on both subjects by posting on the cooperative branch and the geology branch. People who join WeCo due to other interests might also get interested about cooperatives.
Few questions:
- What features should the b/co-ops branch have to make it better?
- Are there email lists or other sort of communities I should message about this?
- If there’s people interested in posting to the branch once a month or so, that could be awesome
WeCo founder @jhweir is also here.