@wouter, @garyalex, @mikemh, I find your feedback very inspiring. We should discuss these points further. At first I wanted to write a lot about it in this forum, but it is certainly better if we exchange ideas in direct discourse so that there are no misunderstandings (even if my English is a bit rusty …).
Hi there,
I’m hellekin from petites singularités. We probably saw each other during the Xmas meeting.
@natacha opened an OpenCollective account for our non-profit to support meet.coop, but I have no sympathy for a project that turns anyone and anything into a public corporation with ‘transparent’ accounting. I find it intrusive and potentially dangerous. I also find it difficult to understand why people do the job of the spooks and expose their data online this way. I much prefer an alternative approach like Snowdrift that introduces incentives for recipients of donations to increase quality as they grow.
I rarely use video, mostly audio and pads. I’m glad that meet.coop provides this service to the public to save people from using proprietary systems though.
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Hi everyone! My name is Trinh (she/her) and I am a holistic security trainer and chief security officer at Team CommUNITY – which is a project of ARTICLE 19. TC brings together digital rights defenders from diverse grassroots movements and marginalized communities who are facing acute forms of online surveillance, censorship, and attacks due to the nature of their work. We are best known as the organizers of the Internet Freedom Festival.
Our mission is to create vibrant, resilient, and inclusive networks of digital rights defenders around the world by strengthening resilience and improving capacity, equity, and collaboration between and among these people.
Our values overlap with Meet Coop, particularly on those centering around community. Being a trainer myself, I am also very interested in ways to improve education, training, and documentation on effective online facilitation and collaboration, particularly for groups working on anti-surveillance and anti-censorship tools that may need to rely on Meet Coop’s platform.
Looking forward to getting involved!
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Hi @trinh ! Happy to see you here. Digital rights is an important element of what drives many of us here. Shared worries about surveillance tech, raising awareness of the problematics of the platform capitalist model behind that and pooling resources together to build cooperativist tech alternatives.
If you want to have a better idea of the community programme, here’s the main Community space with a series of threads. Possibly @mikemh will add to that.
@how and @natacha Yes I was very to see you at the Xmas meeting last December and thanks for your support. About our use of OC, I’m trying to understand your criticism. OpenCollective is designed to make contributions transparent, but it also allows people to contribute “incognito”. Some members use that option, and we respect that, of course.
Snowdrift.coop is building a different service, interestingly with a unique matching proposition. It seems to be in a very early stage thought. Will keep an eye on them…
Greetings All!
I recently joined, and am very excited about this community. I believe that a coöperative structure is a great way to solve challenging problems. Having run my own personal BBB instance (with the default configuration) since early in the pandemic, there are definitely a lot of moving parts to videoconferencing. It is great that by running an instance as a community, we are able to bring videoconferencing to everyone without a requirement that everyone invest the energy, time, and expertise to make it happen.
I am also involved in the Internet Hosting Coöperative and my wife is on the board of the Durham Co-op Market.
The type of meetings I most frequently host are board meetings for my amateur radio club (de KM4MBG).
Best,
Jack
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Welcome to the cooperative!
Yes this is exactly it, and in the process we practice making decisions together, to operate larger and larger scale infrastructure in a cooperative manner. It also seems you are connected to many like-minded folks 
A while back @osb and I did a presentation looking at dominant SaaS like Slack and Zoom, and what our cooperative could be. Of course we can’t compare numbers, but I think we are hitting important milestones as such a young organization.
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Hi all, my name is Oussama,
I actually do not work for a coop, but am looking to start one soon. I am currently in the process of looking at ways to incentivize founding members to join. I want to find a way where these members are motivated and innovative to give the coop their all. Moreover, as you may know, many people tend to exploit a coop’s structure to their own benefit - coop benefits and perks without putting in the actual work (passive investment). I am also looking at ideas to be able to monitor and stop this.
if anyone has any ideas, or what their coop does, please feel free to reply to this message. All ideas are welcome!
Thank you!
Hi all,
I’m Benjamin (he/him), @shibco co-conspirator at the NDC, invited here by @mikemh to help shape the upcoming meet.coop streaming series.
Aside from that, I’m a UX/UI/information designer based in London, and sometimes researcher on topics that relates to political autonomy, agency and imaginaries, especially within the social relations dictated by production and its current social form, as well as the ones we are in the process of inventing.
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Great to see you here Benjamin, welcome 
I’ve sent you an invite to the private thread where Cade and I are working on commons.hour design. See you there too.
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Hi @Obeid72 Apologies for being slow recognising you’ve joined, welcome We don’t have a magic answer to problems of freeloading, such as you refer to. But questions of contributions in a commons will be at the centre of the discussions we will open next Month, September , in ‘commons.hour’. Commons.hour Do visit the threads in that topic, and we look forward to seeing you in those gatherings when they begin.
Caitlin here. I am on Social.Coop. I am on the board of VREC, rhymes with Shrek: the Vermont Real Estate Coop, which is a PREC… in our second year.
I use BBB via Meet.Coop, for a cooperative writing group of speculative fiction about DisCOs: distributed cooperative organizations.
- Caitlin
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Welcome, @cwaddick, thanks for joining here. Feel free to post a link to your cooperative, and also to share your experience about using meet.coop. For that we have initiated a separate thread “member reports”, where you all may want to share how you use the platform and how meetcoop helps you.
I’m Bob Haugen, part of http://mikorizal.org/ where I work in one way or another on software for supporting solidarity economic systems. (Or as somebody recently said, cooperative-commons economic systems.)
Our work is centered around the https://valueflo.ws/ vocabulary enabling many apps and communities to collaborate with each other economically.
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Hi, I’m Lynn Foster, the other part of http://mikorizal.org, with @bhaugen right above. My primary work these days is on Valueflows, mostly with groups who are implementing it, or are interested in doing so.
It’s nice to see friends here, and people I look forward to knowing. And thanks to @mikemh for inviting us directly.
One thing I like a lot about meet.coop is that it wants to be multi-stakeholder. Such a challenge, but really important I think.
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I think I never did this? I’m Matt Noyes, here via Social.Coop, which is a Meet.Coop member, where I have been on the community working group ops team. My main work these days is as a live-in family caregiver. I am also active in GEO.Coop, OpenFoodNetwork, local food system stuff, Colorado Solidarity Fund, etc. I am eager to learn from/with you all about how to build viable multi-stakeholder community.
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Great to see you here @lynnfoster and @bhaugen Personally I really value your Valueflows perspective and mission, and I also know how much experience of cooperation and digital stuff you can bring to our explorations here. Thanks for making a little space for meet.coop
Hi @mnoyes OK you’re official now 
I feel that the relationship between meet.coop and social.coop is a significant and helpful one. I also really appreciate your long organiser perspective and skills, so I hope you’ll help keep us on the straight and narrow with our governance and ‘movement education’ intentions. Thanks for hanging in here.