Welcome to Digital Co-ops

Hi Harry,

Thanks for this. Made a couple of tiny corrections. Otherwise all good. Exciting!!

AC

Hi, I'm from Webarchitects Co-operative, we have four workers and we mostly do shared hosting and sysadmin these days, we are Sheffield based and should be able to confirm next week how many of us are able to make it to Wortley Hall.

Hey everyone, I'm Kayleigh and work with Outlandish. We celebrated our first day as an official co-op last week so everyone is really looking forward to the first Megazord gathering in November.
Nice to be in comms with you all.

Hi. I'm Graham, been involved in co-ops if various flavours since the mid 80s. Very much into P2P, multi-stakeholding, FairShares, cryptocurrency, and the bit where these things join together. Aiming to get along to the Wortley gig if at all possible. Doing things at mc3.coop and networks.coop. Also working with ooooby.org.

Hi. I am Shaun. I co-founded Poptel in the 1980's. Poptel was a worker co-op and one of the first ISPs. We promoted the use of on-line communications in NGOs and the labour movement - we got organisations like ANC to use email, set up the first websites for trade unions and launched the .coop TLD with NCBA and the ICA. Now I work with a freelance co-op CBN (http://broadband.coop). We helped create the Brighton Digital Exchange (http://bdx.coop). I collaborate with @graham2 on Co-operative Networks.

Hi, I'm Josef, this is me. I'm co-founder of United Diversity and The Open Co-op. I'm helping to organise the Open 2017: Platform Cooperatives conference in London next February and have just joined Co-operatives Europe Working Group taking forward the work started by the "Cooperative Platforms in a European Landscape: An Exploratory Study" report launch earlier this month.

Hi. Chris Roos & I run Go Free Range. We're a London-based software development consultancy specialising in Ruby, Ruby on Rails & web development. Go Free Range was founded in 2009 as a loose collection of freelancers engaged on client projects as sub-contractors. However, in 2010 we decided to become a tighter group and work directly as employees. We operate as a limited company and each of us is a director and equal shareholder. Everyone takes shared responsibility for running the company and decisions are made by consensus. We're a bit smaller now than we were a a couple of years ago, but we're hoping to grow again. We regularly take conscious breaks between paid client projects to work on ideas we're interested in, e.g. in 2014 we investigated setting up our own online credit union. We're looking forward to meeting people at the retreat in November.

hey @jamesmead good to see you here. Excellent that you tried to set-up a credit union - did you ever make anymore progress? BTW, in case you've not seen it check out http://www.cuprium.net/ who started of with very similar ideas. Their rails code is on github here: https://github.com/Cuprium/cuprium

Also, do you know Josh Russel https://twitter.com/joshr ? I know he's been thinking about similar stuff too.

Finally, check out http://moneycircles.com/ who also want to do this sort of stuff.

Perhaps we should organise a meetup of all the people involved in these efforts to see what we can kickstart together? Personally I really look forward to the day when there is a "one click credit union" platform that solves this problem for whoever thinks of it next... (could be complemented by "one click revolving loan fund" etc etc too). :)

@jamesmead this news also seems to be potentially significant in the future:

http://positivemoney.org/2016/06/bank-of-england-uk-banks-to-lose-their-status-as-gatekeepers-to-the-payment-system/

And this is of relevance too because it demonstrates how needed such stuff is:

http://www.thenews.coop/103623/news/banking-and-insurance/credit-unions-the-mystery-of-the-disappearing-members/

Finally, I wonder if Monzo would be up for help new credit union stuff too?

https://monzo.com/

Thanks for all the links.

We learnt a lot, but ultimately decided against actually starting the application process for a credit union. Essentially as a very small business, we couldn't justify the amount of time and effort we expected the opaque application process to take. You can read more about where we got to in this article.

We chatted to Josh in the summer of 2015 and attended a discovery workshop on "ethical banking from the future", but we haven't kept up-to-date with what he's been up to.

We chatted to Jamie Burke about MoneyCircles back in the summer of 2014, but we haven't really kept up-to-date with where they've got to. Reading their website, it sounds as if their proof-of-concept is using https://uphold.com/.