šŸ‘‹ Introduce yourself!

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!

Hi Iā€™m John. I like to call myself a philosopher because I graduated with a philosophy degree last year and I think itā€™s funny to make it a vocational course.
Iā€™m the project lead on Wobbly, a chat application for precarious workplace organising. Alongside that, Iā€™m building an understanding of a development methodology for running a radical app. Iā€™m part of ProgCode, a group that matches devs to political tech projects. They have about 300 monthly active members and need more non-coders to facilitate the community. If you know anyone looking to make an impact in politics, they could do worse than join ProgCodeā€™s staff.

In the co-op world, Iā€™m part of a group setting up a software developers co-op in Tyneside, where I live. Weā€™re in the early stages of working out our legal and organisational structures and business model and are looking to do a pre-launch event in October. Iā€™ll probably be asking a lot of questions on this forum soon about legal structures and finding clients etc.

If any of this is interesting to you and youā€™d like to talk more about it, we can set up a phone or zoom call. Just send me a message!

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Hello!

Iā€™m James, and I started working for Open Data Services Co-op back in March. http://www.opendataservices.coop/

Iā€™m on the more technical side; programmer and Linux sys admin type stuff, tho Iā€™m interested in many different areas. We use Python at work, but previously Iā€™ve mostly used PHP and a little native Android in Java.

Iā€™ve been involved in many other community groups before, and so I was very keen to work in a co-op when this job came up.

Iā€™ve also been involved in Open Data before. However a lot of my work has more been around what I call Community Data - a bunch of people working together on creating a dataset of shared interest. For instance, I started and still run (6 years now) https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/ , listing tech events.

Anyway, Iā€™m based in Edinburgh but in London every few months so maybe see folks around - talk soon!

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RE: Open Tech Calendar you might be interested in the work of our sisters over at https://diglife.com/

RE: Edinburgh have you met the awesome people at Graphics Coop - @chrisb is lurking here on their behalf I believe

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I have not seen Diglife - I will have a look!

I think I did meet Graphics Coop years ago when working on a different project - Happy to meet for drink and co-op chat tho @chrisb!

@SzczepanOfAnimorph my mate Fred Deakin (musician ex Lemon Jelly and Prof of Digital Design at St Martins no less) is doing a music/aug reality event at the Rosemary Branch, Islington, for 13 days starting 13th Nov that you may be interested in -

"Iā€™m writing to tell you about an insanely ambitious new show which Iā€™d love you to come to. Along with my soundtracks, weā€™ve now introduced projection-mapped visuals and VR sensors to Project2ā€™s improvised science-fiction narratives so that Katy and Chris can control their environment through movement. Hereā€™s a couple of stills from our R&D sessions (to be clear, Katy and Chris wonā€™t be wearing VR headsets during the performances!)

So every night weā€™ll create an all new epic sci-fi movie combining narrative, music and visuals that will never be seen again.

The show is called 13 Cycles (13 nights starting on the 13th of November) and is at the Rosemary Branch Theatre near Essex Road, N1. This three week run is a big stretch for us and if you were able to come down and support us it would be really appreciated. Personally I think the show is mind-blowing and has every chance of crossing over to a wider audience, so come and say you were there at the start!

Tickets are available here:
http://www.rosemarybranchtheatre.co.uk/event/thirteen-cycles

Thanks a lot and all the best,

Fred"

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Hello, Iā€™m Jack, I work at Open Data Services Co-op with @ODSCJames. And Iā€™m also based in Edinburgh. Iā€™m an analyst at ODSC and work mainly on beneficial ownership. I see a few familiar names on this thread, from visits to Space4. I wonā€™t be at the event at the end of November as Iā€™m on leave but hopefully some of my colleagues will.

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Hey Jack, have you said Hello to the other CoTech members based in Edinburgh. Iā€™m not sure theyā€™re all on here but @chrisb of Graphics Coop is lurking I believe. There are a few other ones up there - Atomised who are not members yet for reasons unknown and Media Coop over in Glasgow