Welcome! Please introduce yourself

Hello, hello. Is this thing on?

Thomas Beckett here in Durham, North Carolina.

Hi! I'm Matt Cropp of Burlington, Vermont, USA.

My day job is as associate director of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center (VEOC), which works with worker co-ops and ESOPs, and relevant other projects include being the founder of a co-op brewpub start-up, Chief Manager of the Vermont Solidarity Investing Club (which invests in co-ops), involved with the #BuyTwitter campaign, core organizer in the Platform Co-op Investment Club project (in formation), and on the board of the Laboratory B hackerspace in Burlington.

I'm stoked for this project because I think we are at a strategically opportune moment to harness the vision of community-controlled social media being spread by the #BuyTwitter campaign's to an open-source infrastructure that seems like it just might be up to the task of scaling the platform co-op alternative that we really desperately need.

Let's do this. :)

P.S. My current Mastodon account is [email protected], if you want to connect there.

Hello everyone, Michele here, hailing from sunny Como, northern Italy.
I'm the one who (quite unexpectedly) kickstarted the discussion around the whole mastodon coop server, so feel free to blame me for the barrage of posts and comments that ensued soon after :)

I do UX and analytics for a living but I'm an open source geek at heart. I'm into philosophy, economy, cooperatives, military history, videogames and plenty of other stuff I don't want to bore you with.

Let's get this party started!

Romina Killpack located in Salt Lake City, UT.

i co-founded a (now defunct) experimental workers cooperative a few years ago (i'll get around to putting the project sites back up eventually). i do UI/UX for a living, but i love hacking on all kinds of free software. i want to make the world a better place.

i've recently started working on https://www.bbnet.io, but i'm definitely interested in pursuing other cooperative options.

i am @[email protected] and @[email protected]

Hi everyone! Just realised I hadn't introduced myself here. I'll do so by presenting a few projects I'm working on. Also check my website http://deborniol.com for more...

http://ora.network – Newest nonprofit project, aiming to be a global digital skill-sharing marketplace based on the principles of time banking, open-source, and the commons. Think of a currency where a new token (Ora) is created (out of thin air, like any form of money) every time someone contributes one hour to an opensource/nonprofit project – who can then use that Ora to pay someone else to work on their own project. I hope it will help techies and other digital workers have more temporal autonomy to contribute to the commons, and to collaborate on each others projects, with no money in the picture.

https://getacross.org – A community and nonprofit tools to get across language barriers. There’s an app for realtime interpretation with remote volunteers (on iOS - Android to be developed soon - open source). Also a text translation tool (in beta) that passes each sentence through multiple automatic engines (commercial and open-source), and then translators and bilingual volunteers can go through them turn by turn and pick the best version (and edit/improve it). Makes getting things translated faster and more collaborative, and creates a shared non-commercial translation memory (used to pre-translate any similar phrases in others’ texts, and can be used to train AI).

Khora – Helped set up a computer lab in this awesome community centre in Athens, where hundreds of refugees and volunteers help each other each day, with language lessons, cooking 300+ meals a day, among many other activities, the latest being digital education - from computer literacy to HTML development. Khora is a nonprofit co-op foundation with a great ethos and very bottom-up, open and collaborative approach to getting things done.

https://cloudvault.me – A pet project, providing people or organisations with private servers in the cloud, so they can take complete control of their data, privacy, and security. I'm using it to push open-source and decentralised alternatives to the commercial cloud apps everyone uses.

I'm Nathan Schneider, a reporter and professor at CU Boulder. I'm a documenter and supporter of the platform co-op movement, as well as an instigator of #BuyTwitter, and the primary developer of ioo.coop. I'm very eager to see this effort succeed. It's part of what I hope will be a broader movement for cooperative cloud services, which I've begun outlining at ioo.coop/clouds.

I would love to see this up and running as soon as possible so I can use it and help others get on board!

Hi everyone,

I'm a social scientist and action researcher exploring on-the-ground applications of IT tech to enhance social resilience.

Specifically I'm interested in how tech can support the diversity of relationships and modes of communication that compose whole human systems. Rather than flattening and homogenizing, can we design in ways that promote differences within fields of equality?
And then leverage these 'diversity fields' to improve the quality of decision-making so that we can do more to address huge societal problems?

The coop model is exciting! I'm happy to be part of this effort.

I'm john; I build relationships between and within networks, especially across social barriers (in my less humble moments I might call myself a community organizer or coalition-builder).

I'm from Wisconsin, originally, where I got my sea legs for social justice/ change work on the ground floor the occupation, the Wisconsin Uprising, of 2011. I also developed a keen longing to be part of a worker-owned co-op during my year there. I work in Indianapolis, now, with a community empowerment center and a art collective that runs a Tool Lending Library. I also am part of Enspiral, where I put my mechanical engineering degree, with its focus on systems, comms, and workflow, to work.

I love exploring, be it ideas, places, music (I play, dance, and listen), and I especially enjoy collaborative exploration, sense-making, and production.

Dropping in to say hello to all and to apologize for my absence the past few weeks. This month has been very busy working towards a grant deadline this Friday and an event we are hosting on Saturday. Hope to return more regularly in June.

Congratulations to the organizers on an excellent effort with #BuyTwitter. A tactical loss perhaps, but still a strategic advance.

Welcome friends!