Not breaking any molds there @toml !
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Hi Tom, Hi James 
Nice to meet you.
And thanks Chris for resolution of issue #102 - appreciated.
Ippy
Jana here from Small Axe. Nice to meet you all!
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Hey Jana, nice to have you here. @everyone - Jana is going to be the CoTech rep in The Small Axe now that Danās left. Small Axe are a super cool communications/people mobilisation agency who worked with us on Find out how Government cuts will affect your childās school #SchoolCuts :: School Cuts
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Welcome. Hope to meet you soon.
Felix
Hey folks. Iām a Dave.
Iām in the earliest stages of setting up a tech for good social enterprise, aiming to federate community currencies for intertradeability. This will be built on co-operative principles, both on the organisational level and on the operational level.
More broadly, Iām interested in projects and approaches which boost democracy and community resilience, especially anything with the potential to give the ābig corporatesā a bloody nose. The more big picture and unconventional, the more more Iām likely to get interested.
My big need at the moment is funding. I need to get the money in to get the project off the ground, probably via some combination of impact investment and venture philanthropy from non-institutional sources. Any thoughts and tips very gratefully received.
Hi all - Iām James Moulding, only just discovered this forum!
Bit of a background from me - I work as a project manager with Digital Liberties, a coop focused on developing games for social change and participatory design. I founded Games for the Many last year, Labourās unofficial games unit, through which we made Corbyn Run for last years general election.
I do a lot of work around bringing tech and political groups together. Iām currently running Campaign Lab to try and get the Labour Party to take retrospective election analysis seriously, helping to bring together Radical Engineers, and setting up a new coop, Common Knowledge, focused on improving the amount of autonomous activity going on in left political movements and overhauling how their members interact and are onboarded into those groups.
Iām also a Fellow of Newspeak House and the Royal Society of the Arts - come and say hi!
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Hi Dave, welcome to the CoTech community.
I think one thing to be clear about is that co-operative principles are not compatible with many (most?) forms of social enterprise and impact investment.
One of the key principles of co-operatives is democracy in the sense of one person one vote, rather than one dollar one vote. In my experiences impact investors donāt agree with that
There are forms of co-operative where some members are āinvestorā members by virtue of the fact theyāve invested capital, but their control over the organisation canāt be in proportion to their investment.
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Hey James, good to have you here at last - especially as weāve been in orbit for so long! Would be great to get CoTech (and this community generally) more involved with Campaign Lab and similar initiatives.
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Hi Everyone,
Thanks to Graham Mitchell for the introduction to CoTech!
Iād 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 - hereās 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 arenāt interested in taking a voting position. They have invested in Sharetribe and OpenCollective (which arenāt co-ops, but names you might be aware of). I donāt 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, Iām Elliot. I recently started (within the last month) working at Aptivate (http://aptivate.org/). To quote our website, we do āaccessible web and mobile software for NGOs and development agenciesā. Being a member of a co-op is a new thing for me, and itās 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. Iām 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. Iāll 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! Iām 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). Iām just moving back to the UK due to the brexit. I have to sort everything out before the cutoff date as Iām an italian and chilean national.
Iām working with Faircoop at the moment - Iām involved with the faircoin and odoo based marketplace Fairmarket and a few with other commissions and projects related to this coop. But Iām 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 Iām looking for web development mostly but also anything vaguely cooperative! Together with other web workers involved in faircoop, weāve 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 Iād love to meet up for a drink and chat!
Alejandro
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Hola po Ale 
nice to see someone from Faircoop here, Harry and I met Guy in June and reaaaally like the sound of what youāre doing and what youāre about.
(Iām 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. Theyāre amazing and based in Glasgow
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