I looked at the client list of CoTech and noticed that the only two big coops that were in the list were Midcounties Co-operative and the Phone Co-op. Dublin Food Co-op was the only other coop I could find in the list. I might have missed something and apparently the list is not totally up to date.
What sort of work did CoTech members do for Midcounties Co-operative, Dublin Food Co-op and the Phone Co-op?
Are there other examples of other co-ops buying services from tech coops (in the UK or the world in general)?
Also, feel free to generally discuss how big coops could use Principle 6 to support tech coops.
We provide a Nextcloud server for INCA (not listed on CoTech site).
We provide email hosting, WordPress hosting and a Nextcloud server for the Leeds Bread Co-op.
We have a ongoing VPS exchange in place with Mayfirst.
We provide two managed virtual servers for mc3 for hosting multiple WordPress and Drupal sites (including sites for other co-operatives, this is not listed on the CoTech site).
We host email and the WordPress site for Organic Lea.
We did host a static website for the Sheffield Co-operative Development Group but they recently switched to the commercial Wix platform (not listed on the CoTech site).
We provide email hosting for Somerset Co-opeative Services and we are members of their co-op and they are members of our co-op (they also wrote our rules, we haven’t yet listed them on the CoTech website).
I don’t think this is a complete list, I’m sure we have clients we haven’t listed on the CoTech site, also we have worked with several CoTech co-ops on projects, the main ones being mc3, Outlandish and Agile.
We would love and could do with more work from others co-ops, they are generally some of the best clients to work with.
So we work with Midcounties supporting some of their internal systems. Co-op Web was actually born out of Midcounties 13 years ago, we used to be an internal team that MCC allowed to spin off into our own Co-op and we’ve kept a good relationship ever since. Our Articles actually state that we can call on a non-voting board member to join from MCC if we feel we need support or direction.
We did also go through the procurement process of Co-op Group as a link for the Co-Tech, however nothing has really come from that yet.
We are also talking to Central England, as they are keen to learn more about Co-Tech and work with other Co-ops in general, but this is very much an in-progress discussion.
Apart from that we’ve had the odd project with out Co-ops, but nothing major so far. We did a POC for ICA some years ago, but this didn’t really go anywhere.
Great info on webarchitects clients. Thoughts on defining a simple spec and making this available via each coops domain? Like a http://example.coop/techcoop.json file?
Could have details on clients and services offered, and metadata about what sorts of clients, etc. less need to keep a central website up-to-date; maybe more delegated. Could just aggregate, and each coop could render their own website from this. (Says the person about to redesign a website, for which this would be minimal burden )
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