“We believe in a fairer world in which wealth and resources are distributed to the people who need them rather than those best able to take them.
As Co-operative Technologists we aim to ensure that technology plays its part in creating a fairer world.“
I wholeheartedly agree with a) the stated value and b) the consequent aim. The next question, which I think @Graham was raising, is how. What can CoTech as a collaborative group actually do to achieve this aim? If wee can agree on how, then that plays into answers to the questions of how we organize ourselves and function as CoTech.
I have three inter-related proposals that I believe go a long way to addressing the aim, and that I would welcome as an integrated agenda topic:
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The development of a Co-operative Exchange Token, designed solely to support a co-operative economy and NOT tradable as a commodity nor offered as an ICO (and hence not so close to Boyd Cohen’s proposed Collabor8 token and ICO).
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The development of an inter co-op exchange platform, which is close to Boyd Cohen’s proposed Collabor8 platform
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The development of software to support a Distributed Autonomous Co-operative Organisation - DACO - amplifying the idea of a 1 Click Co-op. Again Boyd has similar thoughts along these, or parallel, lines.
All three could be built over a single integrated blockchain infrastructure - maybe Collabor8’s?
Collaboratively developing these as a shared open source project is, I recognise, a large undertaking, but many others are working along similar lines. So first we need to agree amongst ourselves what elements of these proposals we share and how they mesh with our individual priorities and available time, then we need to hook up with and collaborate with others beyond CoTech working along similar lines so that we can share code and not duplicate efforts.
Although the focus of this is wider than @BoydCohen’s, taking in co-operatives generally and the co-operative economy as a whole, rather than more specifically platform co-ops, there is clearly a great deal of overlap, so the two could be merged into a single agenda item (albeit a big one!)
Suggested title: Web 3.0 Infrastructure for a Co-operative Economy and a Fairer World
I’m in the process of writing a set of further notes on these (current word count c.1000), but I don’t seem able to persuade Google Docs (sorry!) to do more than put in single email addresses (is there one for this forum) and have not found how to add a doc here or find an appropriate place on the wiki. Advice welcome!