Exciting news: dev.coops.tech is ready for your input!
Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative)
Public
Seen by 478
The amazing work that Outlandish and Glowbox Designs have been doing developing a promotional web site for Co-operative Technologists, complete with a fantastic video from Blake House, is now at a stage where it is ready to have co-ops edit / upload their details, add clients and technologies and generally give it a spin :-)
It is currently set not to be indexed by search engines -- when we are happy that it has enough good quality content to be made live it'll be moved to from dev.coops.tech to www.coops.tech.
Editor accounts have been created using the contact list addresses, if you need access to the site see the process for getting an account and there is the start of some user help documentation, but the site is powered by WordPress and it easy to use so help documentation might not even be needed.
Please Note: It is going to take each co-op some time to get all their data into the site, it is a bigger job than putting your co-op details and categories on the wiki and there are a lot of gaps there...
I'm very excited by the site have have been busy helping sorting out the hosting and deployment process for it over the last few days, in Slack, so haven't had hardly any time to post to the recent discussion threads on Loomio but I have read all the posts via email and might post some thoughts when I have some spare time (just to make the point again that getting stuff done is often more interesting than chatting about getting stuff done... ;-) ).
At the moment the site is hosted on a very low spec development machine, if it is too slow let me know and more RAM can be added to it, the current plan is to host it on one of the Webarchitects WordPress shared hosting servers but if it proves too big or popular for this it can be moved to it's own virtual server (that would be nice!).
Alex is hopefully going to make the code available as a GitLab project soon so at that point we will have a bug tracker / ticketing system to go with it and it'll also be possible to open up to allow wider contributions to the code, in the mean time there is a small wishlist on the wiki.
There has been some discussion of the draft manifesto in the #onlineplatform Slack group and we have created a manifesto wiki page where edits can be made and alternatives can be suggested. People might also want to do the same for the about us page.
Aaron Hirtenstein
Mon 13 Feb 2017 9:14AM
I made a couple of edits to the manifesto.. just grammar stuff but otherwise I am happy with this as a starting point!
Deleted account
Mon 13 Feb 2017 10:27AM
Love it!
Simon Grant
Mon 13 Feb 2017 12:19PM
Yes, a good start. Looking forward to talking more at the launch party!
Graham
Tue 14 Feb 2017 9:42AM
I made an edit to the manifesto - removing the last line, which I found confusing. Happy to be convinced otherwise though.
Harry "Outlandish" Robbins
Tue 14 Feb 2017 1:53PM
may you live in exciting times....
James Mead (Go Free Range)
Tue 14 Feb 2017 2:02PM
I think the Manifesto, About & Join pages are all great. Thanks to everyone who's contributed. I'm happy to agree to them all on the assumption that they will continue to be open to change after the "launch" of the site.
Shaun Fensom
Wed 15 Feb 2017 9:50AM
I still think we should admit consortium coops and consumer coops without policing their personnel practices. But don't want to block.
Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative) Mon 13 Feb 2017 12:39PM
@roybrooks said:
If the manifesto is only a call to cooperators, all good. Tho if one of the aims of CoTec is to compete in the non-coop market as a commercial resource/entity then I'd have thought this would be a good place to make that clear too
I think we might still need to address this point if possible?
Currently the front pages has:
Strengthening the cooperative movement by working together through local, national, regional and international structures.
And if the site is primarily aimed at people who might join or setup tech co-ops then this is fine but if the site is also to be aimed at potential clients then perhaps some additional text needs to be added?
@shaunfensom you said you would have a go at editing the Join CoTech page, did you get anywhere with that?
Shaun Fensom Mon 13 Feb 2017 3:33PM
I've tried, but everything I come up with loosens the definition. For example:
"Membership of the Co-operative Technologists network is open to all co-ops that sell technical/digital products or services and that promote and adhere to co-operative values and principles. This includes co-ops that are run and owned by their workers and multi-stakeholder co-ops where workers have a substantial or controlling stake."
But then what about consumer co-ops and consortium coops:
* The Phone Coop would be adamant that it meets the first part of the definition. Fine by me but not by @harryrobbins and others I believe.
* Brighton DX would also qualify but, for the avoidance of doubt, we have no control over the extent to which our members make a return for investors.
So, I can redraft, but I end up breaking the intention. I'd just leave it at:
Membership of the Co-operative Technologists network is open to all co-ops that sell technical/digital products or services and that promote and adhere to co-operative values and principles.
But that definitely allows in The Phone Coop and BDX.
So, stuck.
At the very least the existing wording should be changed to:
Membership of the Co-operative Technologists network is open to all co-ops that sell technical/digital products or services that are run and owned by their workers. Consortium co-ops and multi-stakeholder co-ops are also welcome so long as they (and their members) do not generate money for investors by exploiting their workers.
However, I don't personally agree with that.
Shaun
Roy Brooks · Wed 1 Feb 2017 4:14PM
Thanks Chris.
If the manifesto is only a call to cooperators, all good. Tho if one of the aims of CoTec is to compete in the non-coop market as a commercial resource/entity then I'd have thought this would be a good place to make that clear too