Hey Graham, I’ve just got back from holiday and picking up emails/messages. Thought I’d paste your email here and respond to it for posterity/transparency.
I spotted your blog post on Preston the other day.
Very interested to learn more about the work that is going on there, for two reasons really:
I’m working on a solidarity economy project for my own local authority - Kirklees - and we’re keen to make links with what’s happening in Preston and elsewhere. I’ve known Gareth Nash and Dave Hollings from CMS for years, and I know that they are very closely involved in a lot of the cooperative stuff going on there, but it’s probably fair to say that neither of them are particularly digitally minded. We’re trying to get a new digital exchange concept up and running here, with a cooperative element to it, so anything we can learn from what’s happening in Preston on the digital front would be very interesting.
As my co-op is part of CoTech, and I’m relatively close to Preston, if there’s anything I can do to help move things forward there I’m very happy to help.
I did post a version of this on the CoTech discourse thing, but I’m guessing that you aren’t a frequent visitor there. Anyway, it would be great to hear from you, and to help if I can.
We got involved with Preston last year. They consider worker co-ops a valuable part of community wealth (yay) so our early conversations were understanding where/how Outlandish and CoTech could be involved.
They don’t need any tech from us at the moment, but there is a project to make the graduate technical arm of the UCLAN i.e people who are already delivering commercial projects into a worker co-op who will then join CoTech. They’re interested in using some of the internal systems that we’ve made and use, as well as understanding how co-ops work. The ball is very much in their court with this, as the people who run that department might decide that they don’t want to become a co-op.
That’s all there is to mention at the moment, but let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks