Hi there, did you know we’re organising our first online meet.coop Xmas party?!
Would be great if you could stop by and say hi! Next Friday at 17h CET. Please follow the link and confirm you’re Going.
I’m Gary, from Norfolk, England, but grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I see various old friends here. I was one of the co-founders of the Open Coop (with OliSB and Josef Davies Coates), met Wouter various times.
I was on the Board of the Transition Network for 4 years. I worked for the UK’s Open University for 37 years, creating courses in elecronics, environment among other things. I was one of the people that put the OU online, so helped invent online learning.
My EarthConnected website has more about me, various papers and talks, and a free ebook version of my book, eGaia, Growing a peaceful, sustainable Earth through communications]. My current project is Planetmakers, (still a work in progress, but great graphics!) and we are hoping to use BBB and Discourse as proof-of-concept software.
I’m looking forward to meeting more of you and working with you. Meet.coop looks like a great community!> I’m Gary, from Norfolk, England, but grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I see various old friends here. I was one of the co-founders of the Open Coop (with OliSB and Josef Davies Coates), met Wouter various times.
I was on the Board of the Transition Network for 4 years. I worked for the UK’s Open University for 37 years, creating courses in elecronics, environment among other things. I was one of the people that put the OU online, so helped invent online learning.
My EarthConnected website has more about me, various papers and talks, and a free ebook version of my book, eGaia, Growing a peaceful, sustainable Earth through communications]. My current project is Planetmakers, (still a work in progress, but great graphics!) and we are hoping to use BBB and Discourse as proof-of-concept software.
I’m looking forward to meeting more of you and working with you. Meet.coop looks like a great community!
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Hi! 
I’m Ana Ulin, a software engineer contributing to Zinc.coop and Ampled, among other things.
At Zinc we are working on a product called Convene, which we envision as digital collaboration spaces containing video conferencing. We’ve been hosting our own video infrastructure but we’d love to share the costs of operating the video infrastructure with like-minded folks. Seems like Meet.coop is the perfect place for us to join forces with other cooperators that want to pool video infrastructure resources, so here I am. 
I’m here to explore how might we at Zinc join forces with y’all at Meet.coop. I’ve posted more in detail about that in a new topic, here: Zinc.coop looking to join forces on video infrastructure
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Welcome @anaulin! I see that in another thread you’re already engaging to explore ways for collaboration, that’s wonderful!
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hi,
here you see three happy people in front of you now: Ulrike, Knut and me (Steff) - the team ©movingsport.
Last year we held many online meetings (with big headaches) with great experts from Ecuador. Unfortunately, we were using zoom. This year we have finally made the step into self-determined virtual meeting spaces. We really want to thank you for letting us join your community!
I’m a gender equality expert and linguist with expertise in project conceptions about gender aspects and equality under an intersectional perspective, especially in the context of European structural policies in connection with gender equality in the areas of labour market policies, education, language, new media. I’ve been working in the area of information management (web-based information systems) and last year I shifted my focus more into the field of gender equality in transnational sports concepts.
As the team ©movingsport Ulrike, Knut and I bring scientifically based and innovative movement concepts into practice in order to initiate sustainable development on the social, economic and ecological level.
Our guiding principles are gender equality, anti-racism, inclusion and ecological sustainability. Our goal is to promote health and learning through measures of physical activities.
Our current project together with Ecuadorian partners is called #ecuador_en_movimiento_2021 Proyecto Transnacional de Multiplicador@s en actividades físicas. If you like to have a look: this is a short intro (video on youtube): #ecuador en movimiento 2020 proyecto transnacional de multiplicador@s en actividades fisicas - YouTube
Soon we’ll provide a longer video about the main focus, topics, content e. g.
In our transnational and transdisciplinary contexts, we’re guided by the objectives of the following framework documents and legal requirements:
UN-CEDAW – Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women
UN-CRPD – Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, especially art. 6 (girls, women).
UN-Agenda 2030 and 17 SDG – Sustainable Development Goals
—> gender equality from an anti-racist, intersectional perspective: all genders in their diversity of local and social origin, age, impairments.
Gender/sex, social and ethnic origin, class, impairments are structural perspectives of social power relations and not purely identity categories or individual characteristics. This perspective shows the structures of power within the patriarchal social system that we want to change.
The project is not only about the individual level of participation, it’s about changing the discriminatory social structures, which created and reinforced inequalities and injustices.
It would be great to bring some of our experience into the meet.coop-community!
(Our “method”: In our current project we built up a learning network, kind of a community of practice.)
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wonderful to see you here, @steff! What you say about deconstructing power structures is a real challenge that I’d like to learn from you - it’ll be great any contribution you can make on that front!
Thanks for a clear and full introduction @steff, and it was very nice to meet you in the community discussion a few days ago. I would like to see ways in which the insights and ways forward you are coming up with can be shared widely among the Meet.coop partners, as I am sure many would appreciate them, even if it isn’t the focus of their work. That kind of sharing is one of the main things I would like to see come out of the proposed Community Circle.
It’s so helpful to have this perspective within this community @steff Old-timers like me in various traditions might talk about altering relations of production or even structures of feeling. But it’s all the same intention of social and economic transformation, I think, expressed in various ways by different generations or communities.
Being more explicit about such structural stuff is part of the framing that the Community programme will find itself engaging with, I think. Because, a global digital infrastructure like meet.coop - The Online Meeting Cooperative is nothing if not structural 
So what’s the critical difference between coop-commons governed structures of digital provision, and corporate-consumer ones? Answers on one side of A4 paper please 
@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…
A post was split to a new topic: OpenCollective and other contribution channels
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.