If the people own the data and businesses basically pay them (or rather, the coop they own) for advertising to them, and the users decide how their data is used I don’t see a problem. People who want a lot of privacy could restrict how their data is used, those who don’t mind having ads targeted towards them could choose to allow that.
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I am interested, but I don’t really have any time right now!
Please update the thread if it’s moving forward, so we can join later!
Thanks, Pau.
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Appreciate the perspective, but humbly disagree. Totally normal people in many industries will consider a candidate at a networking event dead-in-the-water if they aren’t present on LinkedIn. If someone is feeling that value (nevermind my or your thoughts on the structural issues with LinkedIn), then imho it’s offering more than you’re giving it credit for. <3
(It’s also a huge support for all the people who do network building as their work/contribution, whether partnerships or community onboarding or recruiting or hiring or whatever)
I’d be interested in using a Co-operative version of Linkedin.
While i ended up with an account on LinkedIn, i didn’t originally set one up.
They ran a scrape on the Companies House website, getting hold of the details of every Company director in the UK, and used that as part of their starter database of [strike]customers[/strike] product…
This was how they got my contact details and created the account from there.
Then they started spamming me, and they’re still sending me emails.
I refuse to do business with spammers.
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Yeah totally agree, spammers are a total pain. In the U.S, companies have to allow a way for people to opt-out of those emails. Scape and scam is a terrible and aggressive practice…even in silicon valley standards! The more reason why the cooperative model needs to be popularized.
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Are you a member of CoTech? At the conference in Newcastle (13-14 December) we’re going to be setting up a Startin’ Blox instance to (kind of) this end if you’d like to get involved 
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I read very quickly, but I confirm that we are working with @calummackervoy and 20 others on a set of open source and decentralized tools and can be summarized as The social network for freelancers.
I’d like to compare notes. Contribution and constructive critics are always welcome.
Hi @alexbourlier that sounds really interesting, could we talk so that I can get my own understanding at least – anyone else would be welcome of course, but I envisage some real two-way conversation.
Thanks
Simon
We are at least 3 members of Startin’blox participating to the CoTech conference in December. Let’s meet there? I have heard a workshop is on the topic. We’ll be happily contributing.
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A similar concept also occurred to me a while ago when I was trying to think how I could find people who may be interested in joining 3XE. My idea being a sort of network for organisations/individuals interested in exchanging labour/resources on a mutual aid basis.
I have been sitting on the domain hack kropotk.in for some time with the hope of one day building such a platform but glad to see it is already being done by others!
Hi @cregis and all. Just on a point of inspiration: I saw this app the other day https://shapr.co/ - which is a bit like LinkedIn meets Tindr. The idea is that you can find people locally or in your area of work to act as mentors, advisors, collaborators etc.
It’s aimed at people starting and growing businesses.
Haven’t tried it myself, and it might be naff, but I like the idea of the interface facilitates quickly finding and being recommended possible mentors and friends. If it did it in the coop world that would be great.
R
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Thanks Pete. It seems like our idea are in a similar space. I would love to ask you a few questions via a chat or email if that is ok with you.
Thank you, Richard, for your suggestion. I agree a coop version of this would be great. The app enables members to quickly find like-minded people near them locally, which may help build authentic relationships.
I am not sure how much I will be able to help because I was never able to give any time to the development but happy to have chat. Phone is probably best if that is OK? I will DM you my number.
Hi to all,
At Hostsharing eG (german web hosting coop), we just have started to experiment with Solid:
Solid has some very interesting concepts to give back users the ownership of their data and create a decentralised network of hosting hubs instead of “the winner takes it all platforms”.
So far as I know (I´m not a techie…), the installation of a solid pod was not “plug and play”…
But we got it to run in our shared hosting environment. (Currently only a test and not a full integration…)
One of the core features of solid is the creation of social networks, were the users can control with which person, groups, services (e.g. advertising companies) which parts of his data is shared or not.
I as user can decide, if don´t want to see any personalised advertising, or if I want to see personalized advertising, from selected services which pay ME to look their advertising…
If our further test are succesfull and if we get a members vote to invest ressources, we may can offer in future every coop member a solid account, managed by our coop.
If other coop hosters would also offer managed solid accounts, we could create a decentralised coop hosted infrastructure for social networking.
Based on such a decentralised coop infrastructure, the creation of a coop version of LinkedIn, would be a quite easy task.
Unfortunately, we as a coop are currently very busy to renew our own technology stack (next year were operate since 20 years…) and implementing some big projects for our members. Solid has currently not the highest priority. But we are testing and collecting experiences.
Regards
Jan-Peter
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Except “world domination” is the expressed mission of the SOLID/Inrupt team so it is still built on the idea of “winner take all” economics
“The intent is world domination,” Berners-Lee says with a wry smile. The
British-born scientist is known for his dry sense of humor. But in this
case, he is not joking.
jgmac,
There are huge difference between open standards, which may dominating some areas of our digital life, or privately owned intransparent platform doing so.
html is open standard, which is dominating the world of text, graphics and links in web sites. This is an open standard managed by the W3C and any one can use it, without paying licence fees, or paying with personal data.
Tim Berners Lee is by the way one of the co-inventors of HTML.
Solid is based on W3C standards and is available as open source software. It can be implemented without any dependence on Inrupt (so far as I know…)
So far as I understand Tim Berners-Lee, he wants to make Solid successful as HTML.
Jan-Peter
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Any updates of this?
Hi Patricio, thank you for this nudge! I don’t know of anything happening here, but personally I am still very interested. The main question to me is not what to do – don’t start by jumping in and designing or building it – but how to do it in human terms. Once we – but not only we, anyone else who shares this aim – have a convincing approach to doing it, I think it will start to happen.
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@JanPeter posted last year about a Solid social network. For me this is the more co-operative route because it means we can federate with other similar efforts instead of competing with them. I’m also a believer in Solid successfully becoming the next iteration of the web… eventually
People are talking on the Solid forum about this, for example here
We’re aiming to onboard CoTech members to Hubl over the next couple of weeks, which is an app loosely fitting this description using open-source and semantic-web based tools (but primarily built for sharing skills/resources between co-ops)… we could look to extend the social networking features within Hubl, for example. Or if developing or using a new service, look to plug it into Hubl… this is the beauty of the semantic web
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