Hi All,
@LeoSammallahti and I have been developing a new project called Co-op Data Club, which aims to flip the standard data model and connect people with co-operatives, to help grow the co-op economy.
We’re hoping that Meet.coop will join.
Maybe all @operational_members could have a look at the website and the one pager attached and perhaps we could take a vote on joining at the next All Hands?
Introducing CDC - A.pdf (58.6 KB)
In cooperation! 
Oli
Thanks 
Equally, would be good if Coop Data Club were to join meet.coop? There ought in principle to be some kind of alliance possible?
A query: governance @ CDC is a little in the background? I note
Co-op Data Club is a collaboration between Oliver Sylvester-Bradley of The Open Co-op and Leo Sammallahti of VME Coop, who collectively administer the Club. If you are interested in collaborating with us to help grow the Club, or finding out more about how we can help your co-op, please get in touch.
Looks like a standard consumer coop with relatively passive membership, lowest admin overhead, and a pitch in mainly consumerist terms (with a dash of ‘trade in the coop economy’ on the side). D’you have plans to develop active member contribution, multistakeholder governance, CDC as a commons? D’you have thoughts about mix of individual and organisational members? D’you mean to have a forum?
Would be great to have @osb and @LeoSammallahti in the commons.hour conversation on contribution accounting - like, next Monday’s workshop Sign-up - commons.hour special : mapping the contributions in the meet.coop community (part 1)
Oh, another query: who hosts your infrastructure? No mention of this anywhere I can see. I guess I’m a little concerned that commoning and openvalue transparency aren’t too much up front at this stage. Would be great to be having a cross-coop conversation about such things. Best wishes
“Looks like a standard consumer coop with relatively passive membership, lowest admin overhead, and a pitch in mainly consumerist terms (with a dash of ‘trade in the coop economy’ on the side).”
I think that is a mistaken interpretation. Trade in coop economy would not be a small dash on the side, since the Coop Data Club would not do anything else but promote more trade in the coop economy.
Of course, one can argue that it would be consumerist to advocate for people to spend more of their money in cooperatives rather than capitalist firms. To me it seems no more consumerist than advocating for people to buy a subscription for The Meeting Cooperative instead of Zoom. Would argue that growing cooperatives can be a way to counter consumerism.
D’you have plans to develop active member contribution, multistakeholder governance, CDC as a commons? D’you have thoughts about mix of individual and organisational members? D’you mean to have a forum?
We have envisioned it to have worker, consumer and cooperative members but have not set in stone the specifics yet. One idea would be for cooperative members to earn some sort of points by promoting other coops and recruiting new consumer members to the shared email list.
Regarding being passive, think that could be right in the sense that it would have a large group of people and cooperatives but none would be very “deeply involved” in the sense it would not require much to participate. For consumer members, it would mean receiving emails and for cooperatives, it would be having yourself promoted in emails. It will never become a big part of their life - but think that is fine. Instead of a project where everyone is very deeply involved, it is a project that enables a large number of people and organisations to easily participate without much effort required.
Also would like to think that this fits with commons thinking in a great way - we are effectively building a shared email list for all coops in the world, which itself is a coop co-owned by coops. This would create a resource in common ownership, at least if common ownership is understood to include coops.
I think forum is a good idea, but we have not thought about it yet to be honest.
“Oh, another query: who hosts your infrastructure? No mention of this anywhere I can see. I guess I’m a little concerned that commoning and openvalue transparency aren’t too much up front at this stage. Would be great to be having a cross-coop conversation about such things. Best wishes”
I am a total non-tech person so cannot answer about the infrastructure, but regarding matters concerning transparency, privacy, etc. - those are one of the major reasons why we have been drawn into email marketing especially. For cooperatives to do marketing that does not require them using capitalist intermediaries that exploit our privacy, email is a great tool to do so. Email newsletter marketing is not based on similar creepy data gathering to target ads - rather, than tracking peoples browsing habits and analysing it to manipulate them, we collect very little data, and only data that the member explicitly and actively gives us. The Coop Data Club does not sell data (it does not even have data that it could really sell for any meaningful price) - it just sells space in email newsletters. Think its more similar to ads in newspapers or TV rather than what Facebook & Google do.
Great to have your full response @LeoSammallahti . I feel it would be good if some of this logic was more out-there, in CDC promo material?
It helps to get a deeper sense of diversity within coop-commons economy/ecology. Even though both ‘infrastructure’ and ‘coop’, CDC and meet.coop are not making the same contributions. I feel it could be good if we join each other.
Thanks for your feedback, we have drafted another one-pager. Would be great to hear your thoughts about whether you think it also has similar problems?
Totally agree that we should work together. For example, an email newsletter of a purchasing cooperative with numerous small business owners could be an ideal audience to promote The Meeting Cooperative. There are many practical steps we could take that would provide tangible mutual benefit with little costs or risks.
Here is the other version of the one-pager:
Introducing CDC - B.pdf (38.9 KB)