I’ve been meaning to start a thread about “rebooting CoTech in 2024”. I’ve had a few conversations about it around Space4 and I think there’s still enthusiasm and interest to communicate more widely with the outside world so that people can see what’s going on.
From what I can tell there’s still plenty of co-ops within CoTech doing loads of really interesting things, it’s just the busier we all are the less time we have to do the “within CoTech” and external work to make that obvious. Over the last couple of years I’ve had several conversations with new co-ops that have formed and joined CoTech - perhaps they’ve been able to do that with the resources that are publically available so it’s not as obvious that it’s happening?
I’d love to talk to anyone at anytime about how to increase activity and make the existing activity more visible
I’ve split your post into a separate thread @chrislowis I hope that is OK!
Personally I’ve been putting the energy that was going into CoTech into workers.coop and I’m still of the view that we should look at some kind of merger whereby we become the tech sector industrial group within workers.coop.
Perhaps those of us in CoTech co-ops who are at the workers.coop weekend in May could come up with a concrete proposal to bring back to CoTech on this?
I think moving CoTech and workers.coop closer together would be a good thing to pursue.
I think what I enjoy most about CoTech is the in-person events and the sharing of knowledge/experience/shoulders-to-cry-on with like-minded tech companies. I think injecting a bit more life into that is somewhat independent of the structure/governance changes that would come from merging with workers.coop (I’m not sure making that change in itself would help with the community building, but it would hopefully simplify things a bit).
I’d be interested in organising some in-person events this year and I also want to proactively contact as many CoTech co-ops as possible and work out if they’re still active and how best to keep in regular touch with them.
I think this sounds great. Last year I tried organising some tech chats and insight sharing sessions at Space4, but I think doing something network wide would be great.
Let me know if there’s anything Good Praxis can help with.
CoTech members already agreed to push forward on the CoTech-workers.coop industrial circle proposal, in this thread over on Loomio. A process was suggested and potential knotty questions were identified, but really I think all it needs is a bit of work to put it into a draft Memo of Agreement which can be picked over and voted on by CoTech members, then by workers.coop. The discussion hasn’t advanced since last May or so, but nothing has really changed since then in terms of context and logic. I’m happy to assist with this.
In the past we’ve offered SPACE4 as a CoTech meet-up location. Should we try to plan something here in the spring/summer?
If the event is out of London I might struggle to come because of childcare etc. So my personal preference would be to host it here, and I can justify putting time into helping organising it.
The only two events I can think of to avoid clashing with in the spring / summer are the Workers Co-op Weekend 17th-19 May 2024 and the Stir to Action Festival 10th-11th July 2024, perhaps June would be a good month for this?
Regarding a video call to progress the idea of a MoU between workers.coop and CoTech, here is a poll for some suggested dates and times I could do, would any of these work for others?
