Feed ideas in to the Co-op Group National Members Council

I also suggested that they push for a strategy to make the Group carbon neutral within a decade and free of single use plastics within 12 months. And that their commitment to Fairtrade, although positive, feels increasingly like tinkering at the edges.

I agree. Although the Members' Council is effectively a toothless fairy since the advent of the "revised" Group constitution and the "management capture" generated thereby, it can't hurt to propose stuff for their toothless gums to munch on.
I shall mostly be proposing FairCoin.

As Facebook gets ready to launch its Libra coinage my bet is that we will see a dramatic global shift towards cryptocurrencies.

Currencies are, after all, all about confidence, and a big player like FB will generate that confidence. However, most of us (I assume) would prefer to have nothing at all to do with FB's or any other big players' currencies. I would much rather see the global co-operative economy (if lumped together and taken as a national economy it would be the 5th largest on the planet) adopt it's own currency to encourage ethics and inter-co-op trading. I would like to see the global co-op economy detach itself entirely from the wealth centralising, starvation generating, and war mongering "host" economy.

Hi @martinstrube - great to hear from you. Whilst I fear that talk of cryptocurrencies may well not resonate with many on the Members' Council I applaud your bold vision, and I agree that Facebook's move may well be a game-changer in respect of public perception of cryptocurrency and perhaps of alternative currencies more generally. Certainly the crypto community sees it as a very positive move if the current price of bitcoin is anything to by (just shy of10 grand). I've long been a supporter of the FairCoin project as an innovative move in the co-op economy, and while it certainly has its weaknesses it also offers potential and deserves greater attention than is currently the case. For those of based in the UK a more direct method of purchasing FairCoin with sterling, and also cashing out into sterling, would be really useful, but even so that doesn't stop us from at least experimenting with the use of FairCoin. I would also encourage people who haven't yet done so to engage with the mutual credit network co-operative that is being set up. They are at https://opencredit.network

I am interested in the open credit network, but I am in the US, it seems they are looking for those in the UK though it is not clear.

In the US you might be interested to connect with people like Matt Cropp in Vermont, who might what if anything is happening on mutual credit there. Or Thomas Greco, who wrote the book on it.

there are quite a few US mutual credit (and other community currency) options, mostly city-based - the ones i remember off-hand are
- https://www.mutualaidnetwork.org/
- https://commongood.earth/

Could the co-op group set a target of using certain % of their software development budget (or whatever its used) to contract tech cooperatives? Bit like Preston Model.

So if the co-op group spend 1 million pounds per year to software development, they could have a target of using at least 100 000 pounds a year to buy services from members of CoTech.

Don't know if that makes sense.

Certainly there is a strong case for a community wealth building model inside the cooperative economy. I've been involved in various projects over the years to develop this, with mixed success. the creation of the directory that Co-operatives UK manage was a solid step in the right direction in terms of creating some visibility of cooperatives beyond the big consumer societies, but it isn't sufficiently focused to provide real value to a co-operative procurer. And I imagine that all of the big co-op orgs in the UK will have some sort of policy about supporting and/or trading with other co-operatives. So much more could be achieved, building on these, with the right carrots and sticks.

I am very interested in this. I am now collecting examples around the world of big coops buying services from tech coops. You might have noticed, but I started a thread in CoTech forum about this, it now a reply from WebArchitects Coop and Cooperative Web.

https://community.coops.tech/t/examples-of-cooperatives-working-with-tech-cooperatives/1520/5

VME Coop will be established soon as a FairShares cooperative. It provides software for most of the retail coops in the UK and will be probably the most significant example of a big coop buying services from a tech coop, as well as the most significant example of a tech company transforming into a coop (if there are other examples I would love to know).

I will be doing marketing for VME and it will be focused on, more than anything else, around promoting big coops to support tech coops in Preston Model style. Hopefully we can cooperate at some point in advancing this goal that we share!

Hopefully Platform6 could play a part in this as well, perhaps by helping coops to connect with each other in this way.

Firstly, apologies for not commenting much more on Loomio. I'm hoping to try and 'time manage' myself better to make more time for this and other forums.

I've been harping on to anyone who will listen in both the Co-op Group and the large consumer co-ops about purchasing more from tech co-ops. I've suggested that statutes are changed so that management need to justify why they didn't chose a co-operative option (there will be times when there are valid reasons). Almost all board members agree with me, some execs agree and some middle managers clearly want me to stop being a pain in their side.

I've even said if they have an issue with me personally fine, don't choose what I'm proposing but please DO work to help grow the tech co-op movement with others. Its going to require a mindset change in middle management in some societies, and this is talking from over 24 years of experience in the consumer co-op movement.