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 âthe winner takes it all platformsâ.
So far as I know (I´m not a techieâŚ), the installation of a solid pod was not âplug and playââŚ
But we got it to run in our shared hosting environment. (Currently only a test and not a full integrationâŚ)
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 advertisingâŚ
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 yearsâŚ) 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 âworld dominationâ is the expressed mission of the SOLID/Inrupt team so it is still built on the idea of âwinner take allâ economics
âThe intent is world domination,â 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 knowâŚ)
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 donât know of anything happening here, but personally I am still very interested. The main question to me is not what to do â donât start by jumping in and designing or building it â but how to do it in human terms. Once we â but not only we, anyone else who shares this aim â 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. Iâm 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
Weâre 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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Hi everyone! We are testing Hubl in FACTTIC too. We think that could be a very powerful tool if tech coops networks from different parts of the world could join there. Somehow we could be building the confederation without realizing it. Happydev is interested in building the tool among the cooperatives that participate in Hubl. So! we are on that road too!
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Wow, awesome!! Iâm checking the features seems quite useful and actually social-network-like. Do you think it would be possible to use it as a cooperative LinkedIn substitute?
Btw, the idea of a tech workerâs coop international confederation sounds awesome. I do think it might be worth considering for the sake of internationalism, communication and workerâs solidarity having a linking mechanism as well with worker-employee unions organisations in tech, example: Amazon Workerâs International, Democratic Socialists of America Sillicon Valley Chapter, The United Tech And Allied Workers, etc. I think worker-cooperators and worker-employees in the same sector should find common grounds to promote social change more effectively.
In Argentina thereâre a few tech unions but I suspect theyâre not quite class conscious.
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I imagine none of us want to blindly follow LinkedIn. What would interest me greatly is a careful analysis, which can start with LinkedIn as a case study, of what the requirements could be for a service of the kind that LinkedIn attempts to provide. Probably some of LinkedIn functionality is inessential (and would not be in a minimum viable product); some LinkedIn functionality is good in intention but for one reason or another badly executed, so could be improved; and other functionality could be really useful but not there at all at present on LinkedIn.
So I see it as not a quick process of systems analysis and design, bearing in mind that we wonât have definitive requirements because it is an open system. We need input from people like us, and indeed dialogue with people like us to focus on the set of features that would give the most value for the amount of effort put in to implement them. To me, this kind of careful focused effort would be highly worthwhile and could well be fruitful, particularly if done in conjunction with a thorough search for other systems (including Hubl) that are in the same space.
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The only thing I really use LinkedIn for is collecting âRecommendationsâ aka testimonials.
I imagine an nice open and co-operative version might be able to incorporate Open Badges to do that too and I know @dajbelshaw and others at We Are Open Co-op have experience with Open Badges, so wonder if they know of any LinkedIn type sties that already take advantage of them?
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True. In my personal experience I do actually use LinkedIn quite a lot, to discover people and content. Use case example: If I want to develop a coop service in retail I contact a manager from a âseniorâ coop in retail to learn from their experience. But I agree we shouldnât just copy-paste LinkedIn experience and itâs irrelevant features.
I think that there is a lot going on lately around cooperative innovation worldwide and sometimes I feel we are quite disconnected and overlapping our work. If a coop is innovating in say, automation, instead of copying it without knowing we might want to look for opportunities to build something complementary that adds higher value to the movement as a whole. A networking platform might help with that and actually work as an international confederation of worker coops.
Ps.: Btw, what are open badges?
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Please leave out the social feed!!!
One of the most annoying, nauseating and cringe-worthy aspects of LinkedIn is the virtue signalling on the social feed. And worse, a lot of it is corporate sponsored virtue signalling. Makes the platform virtually unusable for me, itâs so painful! (And a total distraction from actually being productive!)
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I recently came across this which is relevant here:
https://flockingbird.social/
https://git.webschuur.com/flockingbird/
Hi everyone,
So I have been building something like this since August and Iâm near launch. It was a personal project but I plan to community exit or maybe even community kick off. Can those who are interested in this project email me ben@dcdc.io so I can share what I have completed and we can see if itâs suitable?
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