Hi everyone, I’m looking into tools that support co-ops with both governance and day-to-day operations.
I know about platforms like Loomio for decision-making, and Nextcloud for file sharing, but I’m wondering if there’s anything out there that combines voting/decision processes with project management and secure document storage in one system, designed specifically for co-ops or platform co-ops.
Has anyone here come across something like that? Even partial examples would be helpful.
Welcome @coopevolution great thoughts there
The problem is an “all in one” solution is not necessarily a good way of developing software.
The needs you mentioned are all quite difficult things to do in one platform. Google and Microsoft have ploughed decades and untold millions in creating their attempts at business software and people still find them frustrating.
Co-ops like us (Autonomic) and Web Architects and other co-ops provide a collection of different open source platforms integrated together with Single Sign On and theming etc to give that coherent feel and which we can do support.
Here’s a little write up of a project we did for an international art collective lumbung.space – Autonomic Co-operative
For your needs listed above, I would probably recommend something like-
All using a single login (you could even go passwordless with Passkeys) and could probably with any existing infrastructure you might have e.g. Wordpress website. Then the bit where a co-op like Autonomic makes ongoing income is supporting and maintaining all of that.
It’s usually a more expensive initial setup cost than big tech but obviously over the long run, you have so much more freedom, privacy and future proofing than big tech. Not to mention, diverting some money away from corporations that provide infrastructure for an ongoing genocide (Google, Microsoft and Amazon).
We’re hoping to make a blog post soon about the internal infra we use for Autonomic. I think that would be useful for folks.
Thanks, that’s really helpful. I can see how integration makes sense in many cases, especially with the flexibility of open source. At the same time, I’m also curious whether there’s scope for something that feels more unified from the start, so that co-ops aren’t always relying on multiple tools stitched together. It’s useful to know what the current best practice looks like though.
I’ll take a closer look at those tools you mentioned.
No worries! Happy to help. Welcome to CoTech!
Couple of things I forgot:
A lot of devs follow this (even without knowing it):
Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.
A lot of the all in one solutions are not very well made, become bloated and are not easily maintainable.
Our co-op helped founded some projects to investigate if there was a way to create a template “recipe” for small orgs/co-ops. Co-op Cloud is a very active project that builds tools to help deploy open source apps and Server.coop was a project to see if it was possible to apply similar principles to the server hardware/VPS provision.
However there are some “all-in-one” apps we at Autonomic are interested in. The main one right now that we’d like to play with is Odoo, especially for it’s invoicing, bookkeeping tools: https://www.odoo.com/
Obviously it doesn’t have the co-operative/democratic focus I think you are looking for.
The functionality is, I agree, best separated, but the ontology needs to be compatible enough for some sufficient kind of interoperability. I’ve written a bit about the term I coined: “ontological commoning”.
Simon
Thanks, that’s really useful context. I can see the tension between the modular approach and the practical desire for something more unified when the admin burden gets heavy. I’ll check out Co-op Cloud and Odoo to get a sense of how people are approaching it. Appreciate the pointers.