Fellow travellers
A thread to post information about similar projects, ancillary to what we are doing and from which we might learn. Obviously, exactly what we are actually doing is still fluid, but hopefully will become clearer.
Mark Simmonds (Co-op Culture) Tue 10 Apr 2018 7:48AM
Solid Fund of course https://solidfund.coop/
Mark Simmonds (Co-op Culture) Tue 10 Apr 2018 8:21AM
I'm sure you'll have plenty to add here @jdaviescoates
Josef Davies-Coates Wed 11 Apr 2018 3:24PM
The scope of this project is so broad I'm not really sure what this thread is asking for?
But the first thing I'd share is Edventure Frome's Community Enterprise School - imho every community should have something very similar (but with more explicit focus on co-op and community-owned enterprise - they just define a "community enterprise" and any enterprise that is good for the community and they mostly aren't actually co-ops nor community-owned enterprises :-/ )
Nathan Brown (Co-op Culture) Tue 10 Apr 2018 11:44AM
Shared Interest is a donation platform to support development as well as investment platform https://www.shared-interest.com/gb
John Atherton Tue 10 Apr 2018 11:55AM
https://opencollective.com/ a way for groups to collect money and pay for things transparently.
Graham Tue 17 Apr 2018 7:21AM
Interestingly, https://social.coop - the social network run on a Mastodon instance (i think Josef and I are currently members), uses opencollective, and is discussing the potential to host their own instnace of the open collective code (which is open source). We are currenetly looking at CoBudget, which as yet has no mechanism whereby people can directly contribute funds. Would be interesting to compare and contrast. I certainly don't think that the opencollective business model is antithetical to our approach.
Graham Tue 17 Apr 2018 12:51PM
Also learned through https://social.coop, from Leo Sammallahti, who is an active member there and a keen supporter of cooperatives generally, WeCo which is Reddit-style platform, is in process of becoming a cooperative, and has been accepted on the Unfound programme. Leo is an early user of that platform and a financial supporter.
Graham Wed 18 Apr 2018 11:05AM
Graham Sat 21 Apr 2018 5:47PM
Whilst reading lots of stuff about RIPESS I came across this excellent project - FundAction -which looks in many ways like a Europe-wide version of what we are talking about for Platform 6. More interestingly, they are using a tech platform for their deliberations called Decidim which I've come across before, but thought it was primarily focussed on providing a tool for local authorities to do participatory budgeting. Looking at it more closely I'm thinking that it might actually a good fit for Platform 6, as it purportedly provides for: deliberation, decision-making, planning, and participatory budgeting. Investigating more closely. Looks to be quite widely used by local authorities in Catalunya, as well as Barcelona City Council and Helsinki City Council (the word 'decidim' means "let's decide" in Catalan).
Mark Simmonds (Co-op Culture) · Tue 10 Apr 2018 7:44AM
An interesting patronage model platform looking to fund the development of "common goods" through the donations of members - strong parallels. https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/ Have been going since 2014 and their wiki is an interesting presentation of similar issues and challenges to those we are considering.