Whether to invite consumer and consortium co-ops

It will definitely be the first of many! This is going to be an engaged and united community, and these getaways will provide a space for us to have productive conversations and allow us to reach outcomes from initial ideas.

GreaT :) As you likely know, Enspiral do a retreat every 6 months and Radical Routes have quarterly gatherings (I wonder if it'd make sense to have one of these future Digital Co-op meetups at/ alongside a Radical Routes gathering too...)

Indeed, we're having a chat with Enspiral on Monday about it (a few of us spoke to them about it for the first time about two months ago and it was really helpful, they said that biannual retreats were vital to maintaining their ethos alive and healthy) and I've got in touch with Cath Muller, so perhaps in the future we will end up teaming up with them.

@harryrobbins '... idea of having 3,000 people profitably employed in tech co-ops by 2020 and 100,000 by 2030. That could generate huge revenues, better work, better outcomes, etc' a reality' seems to me to offer a sound basis for a very constructive four days and a concrete goal which the process of working towards realising will bring into focus many of the other issues raised so far (nature of membership eg)

@roybrooks the other advantage of taking over such a large part of the market is that it drives up the cost of tech workers to capitalist businesses which reducing the costs to co-ops (who provide better employment). The difference could be high enough to make it almost impossible for private companies to compete against us and then capitalism will be brought to its knees.

Still got to organise this piss-up in a stately home first though... sigh. Small steps.

... move it to a brewery?

really hope Dan or someone from Founders and Coders can make it along (see they are already on the list but not confirmed yet) because you'll likely need all their alumni to get involved to hit those targets and take down capitalism :)

how do people feel about inviting someone from John Lewis's digital team?

They are a workers co-op (according to co-ops uk) but are not really a tech/digital co-op (though I guess they might become increasingly tech driven).

Any strong feelings either way?

Do it. JLP aren't a worker co-op in our sense but anything we can do to engage them/blow their minds is positive.

I agree, invite John Lewis team, ditto the great new team at Coop Digital (at Co-op Group) who were pretty much all previously at Government Digital Service (GDS)