šŸ‘‹ Introduce yourself!

Iā€™m Matt Wallis from the Institute for Solidarity Economics in Oxford - weā€™ve been around for a couple of years and have recently become a co-op.

I am a software engineer. My recent work has been on data for the solidarity economy, focusing on the use of Linked Open Data (video) to represent initiatives within the solidarity economy. To test this out, I converted the Co-ops UK open data to Linked Data; and put it on a map. I presented this work at the Open 2017 conference.

Iā€™m here because Iā€™d like to see a web of data created for the solidarity economy that can help it become more visible; promote co-operation between co-ops, and fuel applications that compete with the commercial giants. CoTech seem like a good place to find people with whom this resonates!

Good to hear about Strikemag still going strong, Rowan, I think one
year they came to Sheffield Anarchist Bookfair, noticed theyā€™re not in
the line-up of stalls this year (
https://sheffieldbookfair.org.uk/the-programme/stalls/ ~ Iā€™ve just put
this online ) I hope some magazines will be on sale(?), feel free to
bring back issues or whatever, even if a stallā€™s not booked, we can
always find space on a tabletop :slight_smile:

Best regards,
Jonathan

@mattw I wish I could have made it to your session at Open 2017, the map you produced is great, would it be worth starting a ā€œmapping co-ops and their relationshipsā€, or something, thread here? Iā€™d like to see if it would be possible to move to using OpenStreetMap on coops.tech at some point in the future and modelling relationships betweens co-ops within CoTech has come up a few times and there is also the software for developing co-op diagrams (Windows only however, so I havenā€™t used it).

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Based on Mattā€™s linked open data work, developing a global database of coops - who, where, what they do etc - is one of the things weā€™re looking into as part of our work for .coop

I did as you suggested: started a new topic. And because Discourse is brilliant, it automatically added a link to the new topic because I pasted the URL of your message into the new topic. Gotta love Discourse :slight_smile:

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I am Greg McVerry. I founded ReVIEW Talent Feedback it is neither open source (yet) nor a co-op.

Yet we have three companied very intertwined so we are exploring forming a o-op with member companies.

Was invited here by @dajbelshaw as we were discussing what a decentralized LMS could look like.

Adam Procter, I work at Winchester School of Art as the Programme Leader for BA Games Design & Art. I am interested in small business start ups co-op style, I am into open source, decentralisation, creative commons and all that good stuff. I am building a LMS as part of a (part time) Web Science PhD. I know @jgmac1106 and @dajbelshaw in various on and offline capacities :smiley:

Shaun Fensom, involved in several tech coops including: CBN http://broadband.coop (CoTech member) Brighton Digital Exchange http://bdx.coop and recently Digital Life Collective https://diglife.com - many years ago I co-founded an early ISP which was a worker coop and launched the .coop TLD in 2001.

Hi All,

My name is Liam, Iā€™m the MD for MediaBlaze Hosts, an ethical web services provider.
We offer a range of services, from web hosting to business consultancy for startups looking to get their foot in the door of the online world.
I studied Computer Networking at Portsmouth Uni before setting up he co-operative with 2 other directors.
We moved to Manchester, however still function from Portsmouth and Kent.
Weā€™re currently in the process of expanding our security products offering to include some great applications, such as an antivirus software that runs in the cloud.
Itā€™s all a bit exciting for us.

If anyone is interested in the services we have to offer, do let us know.
We look forward to collaborating and discussing various topics with you all.

Hey, Iā€™m Nick and I am an Outlandish collaborator. I am a general purpose kind of developer, but also worked in more sysadmin-y web hosting context.

Iā€™m very interested in how to build supportive/collaborative developer cultures/environments in co-operative / non-profit / volunteer contexts. I think there is huge potential - very inspired looking at orgs like loomio.

I also work on/with a number of grassroots community projects around sharing and food waste.

I have a bicycle-orientated lifestyle :slight_smile:

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Hi everyone,

Just a bit about me.

Iā€™m a scientist studying social behaviour. I mainly work on theory, using mathematical and computer models and do a fair amount of scientific computer programming.

My research has generally studied animal systems in the past: altruism in slime mould and aphids, colony collapse due to pesticides in bees, etc. These days Iā€™m more into human social behaviour which Iā€™ve been studying on Twitter.

I build computational/mathematical models of simple microscopic individual behaviours which generate complex behaviour at the macroscopic scale. I found that Twitter is a great resource for testing these theories and Iā€™ve developed a lot of skills for sampling and analysing Twitter data. Most recently I downloaded 500K+ responses to the March Westminster attack which are making some interesting reading. I am hoping to generate some kind of cool techy art project from that.

I like the sound of modelling cooperatives and gathering/mapping data based on the outcome of the models. Also, studying politics on Twitter seems like a good plan at the moment. Science is very slow though, itā€™s not like in the movies!

Iā€™m also into music and arts. I have been somewhat nomadic the last couple of years.

Thatā€™s an interesting background! I was able to sit in on some presentations by researcher Kate Starbird at the University of Washington. Sheā€™s studied the networked behaviors of people during a crisis and the emergent systems that form for, say, finding operating gas stations.

I love the idea of understanding co-operative ā€œbehaviorā€. Itā€™s research that would contribute a lot to understanding the journey that people take to participate in and patronize co-operatives. Knowing that journey and those dynamics would help identify barriers and problems to solve for the future!

Anyhow, nice to meet you. Looking forward to hearing more about your work.

As someone new to the co-operative world, ditto.

Hey folks, nice idea for an introduction topic and nice to see so many people here. Iā€™m Luke and Iā€™m living in Ireland at the moment. I first bumped into coops.tech through a rather strange project listing and was lurking the coops.tech mailing list and loomio/slack. The tech cooperative idea is really attractive and I want to get involved. Iā€™ll be lurking here and most likely will try to find work in coop soonish (keeping an eye on the jobs board :)). Iā€™m working for the FSFE at the moment - github.com/lwm | gitlab.com/lukewm.

Hi all, Iā€™m Mix. I live in New Zealand and hold an eccentric orbit around Enspiral. Iā€™ve helped build Loomio, Cobudget, and DevAcademy.
Iā€™ve done a lot of alternative education (where alternative = listening to what people are interested in and supporting them like individual humans), and a fair amount of social enterprise / startup / open source. Iā€™m a facilitating coder, or maybe a ninja-shaman?

My current passion is a project called Scuttlebutt, which is a crypto social network which is like mastodon, but a little less designed, and a lot more decentalised. It supports git (code management), music and social layers.

For paid work, Iā€™ve recently formed a cooperative called Protozoa with a couple of long time collaborators. Iā€™m here to meet like minded (and valued) people, and work on building international bridges across communities - hopefully through paid work together.

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Hi all, my nameā€™s Dan, I am a member of a co-op called Small Axe, a creative agency that runs campaigns and builds movements to make the world a better place.

So in practice that means working with non-profits, charities, social enterprises, campaigning organisations - and cooperatives - to help them grow their audiences, promote their work, produce great creative messaging and design, push it out to get to the right people online and offline, and so on.

Weā€™ve been a co-op since our founding 5 and half years ago, but weā€™re still working out all the nuts and bolts of how we make the most of the model. Weā€™re very keen to make more links with other CoTech members and coops more generally, so do get in touch if thereā€™s anything youā€™d like to discuss.

My big personal interest is in psychology and language, and im keen we think about how we can make the most of CoTech as an example of how the economy can work better for everyone in the future, without being held back by the associations and cultural baggage that the coop movement has sometimes been burdened with in the past

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Hey everyone, Iā€™m Kayleigh and I work with Outlandish. I do lots of stuff here - PM, finance, community development, speaking at events, HR. Part of my community development stuff is centred around CoTech and I try to get out to events and speak about it to encourage more people to join/organisations to become co-ops.
Iā€™m running for the Worker Co-op council this year because I want to lobby Co-ops UK to support other co-ops to establish networks like ours. I think itā€™s brilliant and Iā€™m really proud of what weā€™ve achieved so far.

Future of Education Workshop 10

Hi I am Fabian aka Leutha. The first co-op I was in was while at school (back in the sixties) to raise money for political activity: it didnā€™t work but it was fun. I worked in a number of co-ops since radical bookshops, radical printshops, a film co-ops through the seventies, eighties and nineties.
I have an administrative background, and have been involved in drawing policies, contracts etc. I also have lots of experience using (but not installing) Mediawiki (I have been an active Wikimedian since 2003), CiviCRM.
I have experience in community organising amongst social housing residents, mental health service users and Wikipedia volunteers.
I am not really a techie, but more someone interested in the relationship between technological developments and the workers who use them, creating a learning environment so that worker-learners can feedback to developers to help create more user-friendly software. I see this as an application of cybernetics and I am assistant secretary of the Cybernetics Society. I am interested in the liberatory use of cybernetics as for example with Stafford Beerā€™s Project Cybersyn.
I am also interested in Open badges.
I am interested in freelance work or long-term comitment to a co-op which grabs me.

Hi Fabian @Leutha would be good to talk sometime from a perspective of similar ages but different backgrounds. Much in common I think. I can be easily found by searching for ā€œasimongā€ in several places.

Hi Simon,
Yes, it would be good to talk. I am based in London, Isle of Dogs actually, Where are you?

my phone no. is 07908 592 835 or skype: fabian.tompsett1

all the best

Fabian