šŸ‘‹ Introduce yourself!

Hi Everyone,

Thanks to Graham Mitchell for the introduction to CoTech!

Iā€™d like to introduce the project to create a community benefit society for south London. We are calling it Technology and Provident Society (working title) and the object is to build community wealth in South London.

One of the activities will be incubating and investing in technology business, hence the interest in being connected with the coop tech community.

Please get in touch to tell us what you think or get involved, and if you can, please express your views in our consultation. If you live in Richmond, Kingston, Merton, Sutton or Croydon, take the survey

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Hello DaveHC, This sounds like a good idea. https://www.edgefund.org.uk Edge Fund seems to be the (?)only funder of campaigning groups in UK, perhaps worth a look. Depending on the proposed focus, it might consider a funding request?

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Hi again @DaveHC - hereā€™s a link to some work done by Matthew Slater on what looks to be - on the face of it - similar to the thing your are proposing: http://www.creditcommons.net

I sat in on an interesting talk with Matthew and Arthur Brock from Holochain/Metacurrency at the excellent Open 2018 conference in London on Friday where Matthew mentioned the credit commons project.

In terms of funding you might be interested in Purpose Ventures (Purpose Ventures - Purpose) who arenā€™t interested in taking a voting position. They have invested in Sharetribe and OpenCollective (which arenā€™t co-ops, but names you might be aware of). I donā€™t know the detail of their offer, but it might be compatible with a cooperative structure, or the FairShares approach that Harry is referring to.

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Hello all, Iā€™m Elliot. I recently started (within the last month) working at Aptivate (http://aptivate.org/). To quote our website, we do ā€œaccessible web and mobile software for NGOs and development agenciesā€. Being a member of a co-op is a new thing for me, and itā€™s been great so far.

My background is as a software engineer, mostly back-end web. I am mostly coding in Python now, but have also worked with Ruby, JavaScript, PHP, Java etc., been a technical writer, and worked as an open source evangelist. Iā€™m more generally interested in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, open source and open data.

I live in south Birmingham, UK.

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Thanks for the tips, guys. Iā€™ll be looking into these over the next few days.

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Whilst that is broadly correct, it is also perfectly possible to register as a (multi-stakeholder) co-operative (or community benefit) society and to raise risk capital by issuing withdrawable shares, and in some cases these investments can attract various forms of tax relief too, see links I just shared here:

Hi @townxelliot , glad to hear you are in south brum. Can you make this South Brum co-op meetup?

https://brum.demosphere.eu/event/74

Would be good to meet!

Hi everyone! Iā€™m new here and am just reading through some of the introductions on this thread. My name is Ale, short for Alejandro and pronounced Alley maybe (other attempts accepted). Iā€™m just moving back to the UK due to the brexit. I have to sort everything out before the cutoff date as Iā€™m an italian and chilean national.

Iā€™m working with Faircoop at the moment - Iā€™m involved with the faircoin and odoo based marketplace Fairmarket and a few with other commissions and projects related to this coop. But Iā€™m looking for other projects, especially if based in or near Glasgow into regenerating, relocalising, decentralised-ish collaborative work, cooperativism and self management, not least those working in alternative economies like local currency projects.

Work-wise Iā€™m looking for web development mostly but also anything vaguely cooperative! Together with other web workers involved in faircoop, weā€™ve just created a freedom coop based project to allow us to work as an autonomous coop of tech workers of which here is the first brand new draft of a holding page: webcollective.tech

Chat soon and if anyone is around glasgow from the 24th onwards Iā€™d love to meet up for a drink and chat!

Alejandro

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Hola po Ale :smiley: nice to see someone from Faircoop here, Harry and I met Guy in June and reaaaally like the sound of what youā€™re doing and what youā€™re about.

(Iā€™m a Chilean national too btw hence the poā€¦hope the paperwork is going ok, my husband and I are going through it too)

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ps have you get in touch with anyone from Media Coop? we know @Louise and some others. Theyā€™re amazing and based in Glasgow

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Hi IĀ“m Jan-Peter from Hostsharing eG. A german based Web- and Cloud Hosting cooperative owned both by workers and customers. We are an registered Coop since 2000 and run our own server hardware in two different data centers.
IĀ“m part of the non technical coop members and IĀ“m here because the platform.coop mailinglist recommended coops.tech as nice place to meet other tech coops. Im in the coop area since round about 30 years as member in several different coops. E.g. a coop linking eco-farmers and customers in cities, my ethical bank GLS-Bank e.g. my webhoster hostsharing and my marketplace fairmondo.
I had a voluntary leading position for several years ion a coop and learned a lot about conflicts between voluntary and workers in coops. At hostsharing IĀ“m active on voluntary basis and mainly interested on platform coops and sustainability.

Beside my voluntary coop activities I work as graphic arts IT specialist (colormanagement) and live with my family in Berlin.

Concerning CoTech I have following questions:

  • What I have to do for hostsharing eG to be listed as an CoTech member ?
  • any formal membership and membership fees ?

IĀ“m also interested to meet people from other coops, which are running their own server hardware to exchange experiences ans strategies on coop owned hardware and coop owned data centers.
(Owning hardware servers seems to be for several people - even in the coop tech scene - quite old fashionedā€¦)

Regards
Jan-Peter

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Hi Jan-Peter, good to hear from you, we, Webarchitects, also run our own hardware, but the local data centre we colocate in, Avensys, isnā€™t a co-op. We are also a multi-stakeholder co-op which includes workers and clients.

@shaun is involved with a colo co-op in Brighton.

Iā€™m afraid that CoTech is only open to UK co-ops (we have no membership fees) but you are very welcome to use this forum.

Perhaps we should start a new thread on co-op owned hardware?

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Hi Chris, Thanks for your response,
Looking the first time to membership roll of Cotech, I saw fairmondo an thought that the german fairmondo coop is also a member. Now a I realised, that only fairmondo UK is a Cotech member.

A thread with co-op owned hardware would be a good idea.

What IĀ“m also interested in is a discussion, if there are use case, where coops offering hosting and cloud service cooperate on international level. IĀ“m not a techie, but I could imagine, that e.g. a network of co-op servers for e.g. video chats or other traffic intensive applications could make sense. May be we should also add a thread ā€œinternational tech coop networksā€ ?

I just started a similar topic in the platform.coop mailinglist and one answer was, that I should have a look at the discouse forum from cotechā€¦

Regards
Jan-Peter

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Hello Jan-Peter

Could I ask whatā€™s the link on a similar topic in the platform.coop mailinglist? Thanks very much. Iā€™m also interested in this (& also non-techie).

For ā€œvideo chats or other traffic intensive applicationsā€ would it be better to consider peer-to-peer solutions? For example, I believe one in development called Matrix works like this, similar to how Bittorrent works.

Best wishes,
Jonathan
Webarchitects

Hi Jonathan,
The discussion on the platform.coop mailinglist is here:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/arc/platformcoop-discuss/2018-08/msg00019.html
You can have a look at the public archive or create an account to post.

regards
Jan-Peter

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Or PeerTube as posted on here a while back by @chris:

Hi @JanPeter great to have you here :slight_smile: https://www.hostsharing.net sounds great - and if the website/ services were also available in English Iā€™d very likely direct customers in your direction too :slight_smile: (I already sometimes promote non-co-op Hetzner as a good cheap option for renewable energy powered servers in EU)

Hi all,

Iā€™m Rich, a web developer from the Midlands working mainly with Python and Django. Iā€™m not in a tech co-op but am fascinated by the movement and seeing where it goes.

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I believe Dev.ngo had python jobs in the Midlands from time to time. @johndunf might know whatā€™s coming upā€¦

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Thanks @harry!

Hey @richbrennan, lovely to be in touch with you! Iā€™d love to have a chat with you about this, if you want you can grab a slot in my calendar here and we can talk :slight_smile: Calendly - John Dunford

Cheer!