An infrastructure that potentially can be shaped directly by non-corporate user organisations because it is coop governed.
An infrastructure that hopefully will expand to embrace a full-featured easy-to-use toolkit of digital means of organising.
A fairly priced service that works OK in everyday life and doesn’t cause me headaches (as user or administrator), without over-elaborate features designed for corporate administration.
A venture that builds the coop economy and is a user-facing utility for non-corporates like my organisation, not a machine for network dominance and private intelligence gathering.
Mental (how it contributes to my sense of contribution)
I can contribute to a solidarity-economy venture, not a private company, a venture-capital startup or a for-profit.
I can be a contributor to a radical shift, not a consumer who carelessly props up the system and sustains capitalist-oligarchic wealth and power.
I can contribute to an ethical livelihood for a small number of people operating an essential alternative infrastructure.
Spiritual/Idealistic (participation in traditions of change)
Meet.coop identifies with the radical coop tradition of free association, fair livelihood and ordinary people’s provision for their own wellbeing.
Meet.coop advances the practice of peer-to-peer production and free-libre software.
Meet.coop manifests a commitment to radical practice in the coop sector, including multistakeholder governance, openvalue accounting, contribution accounting, transparency of operations and financial fairness, rather than ownership of financial stakes, commercial secrecy and financial accumulation.
But let’s not call this ‘ethical’, let’s call it political, anti-capitalist and anti-propertarian. I would expect meet.coop to fly a banner saying it is building a commons.
Social (sending a message about who ‘we’ are)
Using meet.coop sends a message to my collaborators about my own affiliation with the commons-cooperative economy.
I hope that in time it will also send a message about
. . mutuality between global North and South,
. . attention to the needs of civil-society organisers in the South and in the global majority, and
. . collaboration across language regions . . . a message about the geography of digital power and digital infrastructure.