Loomio
Mon 8 Oct 2018 4:39PM

Cooperative Advice, Support and Help

LS Leo Sammallahti Public Seen by 255

If you are a member of social coop and know a project that is itself a or is directly linked to supporting cooperatives that could benefit from help, advice, funding, employees, etc. post in this thread.

Hopefully this will help build social coop as a global, 24/7 helpline/bulletin board where new coops can be connected with people interested in cooperation and co-ownership.

LS

Leo Sammallahti Mon 8 Oct 2018 4:39PM

680£ grant from UnFound to WeCo

WeCo is a platform coop for discussion and link sharing similar to Reddit, with unique tools such as polling and more sophisticated categorization. On Reddit r/geology and r/science are separate subreddits, whereas on WeCo, b/geology is a childbranch of b/science.

We'll transform into a legally binding cooperative structure soon, allowing equal co-ownership of the platform to all users, while keeping registering as an user free.

We received a 680£ grant (from UnFound) to to recruit users. Instead of buying ads from big tech, we want to fund individuals and groups that share our goals and can help grow WeCo in return. We are open to all ideas and can split the grant money among many ideas. If you are interested or know someone/some organization interested in receiving funding from us in exchange of growing WeCo, don't hesitate to message me.

About WeCo:
* Introduction video and a video describing the features.
* How the democratic decision making works in WeCo and future feature proposals for more sophisticated polling tools and comment rating mechanisms.
* How WeCo currently enables global cooperative movement to share, rate, categorize and discuss content, and how it could develop in the future.
* Discord and/or Slack Group. Everyones welcome to join.

MN

Matt Noyes Mon 8 Oct 2018 8:10PM

Cool idea for promotion -- give grants in exchange for adoption. So, how could social.coop, for example, integrate WeCo?

LS

Leo Sammallahti Wed 10 Oct 2018 8:07PM

WeCo has a branch for Social Coop, which has two subcategories: one for the Social Coop Reading Group, and another for coop ideas, where I have collected links to toots where someone has posted about an idea for a new cooperative. I also linked a 50+ toots long thread about the Platform Cooperative Consortium Toolkit from June there, and hope to make it into an archive for members to be able to find old, coop related toots from our instance.

Mini-tasks
WeCo could donate 1$ to Social Coop each time a membership fee paying social coop member does one of the following:
* Follow a hypothetical WeCo Mastodon account that would toot all links shared and tagged as related to cooperatives in WeCo.
* Adds a link to Resonate and WeCo in their Mastodon user profile (here's an example, this in specific.
* Makes their first comment in the WeCo branch for the Social Coop reading group.

Any member could choose to raise 3$ for social coop through these fairly quick and easy tasks.

Mini-grants
WeCo will donate 20$ to Social Coop each time:
* Social Coop reading group invites a writer to do a Q&A in WeCo (basically a Reddit AMA) or does a video interview where the questions are chosen from a WeCo comment section.
* Social Coop holds a poll on WeCo about the most brilliant idea for a new cooperative tooted. The grant would be split among the members who had tooted these ideas according to their share of vote, and require at least 20 WeCo users to vote in the poll. If a coop idea toot is from a non-social coop member, they can use their share of the grant by having WeCo use it to pay for their membership fee if they choose to join Social Coop.

Other ways
* CoopNews mastodon account could retoot WeCo account when CoopNews articles are linked to WeCo and the account toots them.
* Internet Of Ownership mastodon account (@internetowners) could toot every time a new project is added to the directory of platform coops (I can write the toots and include a link to their Platform6, CoopExchange, etc. profiles if they have one). WeCo has a monthly poll about the most brilliant project added to the IoO directory, which @nadiab1 posted today on Social Coop. InternetOfOwners account in Social Coop could toot or retoot link to those WeCo polls.
* Link to WeCo branch for cooperatives, platform cooperatives or social coop could be included in the about page of social coop.
* Social Coop wiki could add a link to crowdsourced software recommendation sites for people to upvote platform cooperative alternatives (recommending Resonate in the list of alternatives to Spotify, WeCo as an alternative to Reddit, etc.).

These are rather concrete but also potentially narrow methods. I would also be happy to give 50 $/month donation to social coop if there's a dozen of social coop people sharing links and comments about cooperatives in WeCo about once a week. The 9 dotted ideas are ones that I could imagine are suitable for a membership or a working group vote.

Let me know your thoughts, especially if something I explain is unclear.

MN

Matt Noyes Wed 10 Oct 2018 8:14PM

WOW -- this is great. We on social.coop need to get more organized to make these things happen -- I love the way you offer specific, concrete actions that can be mutually beneficial. This is what intercooperation can look like.

MN

Matt Noyes Mon 8 Oct 2018 8:07PM

Thanks for starting this thread!

NS

Nathan Schneider Tue 9 Oct 2018 7:54PM

I'm a member of Social.coop and it seems like we might benefit from some outside help on governance:)

G

Graham Wed 10 Oct 2018 9:14AM

I think I'm a member of social.coop. I'm also a member of the Digital Life Collective (https://diglife.com) which is an international organisation (registered as a co-op in the UK). We're working on a governance methodology that is designed for asynchronous distributed/decentralised groups, utilising a sociocratic approach. We're within a couple of months of having this system running internally so that we can then thoroughly test it and iron out some of the wrinkles, and then we'll be looking to see how we can share the toolkit. Anyone interested in getting involved in the work is welcome to join the co-op and contribute.

MN

Matt Noyes Wed 10 Oct 2018 2:33PM

Look forward to seeing the governance methodology you adopt. Diglife and Social.Coop should be members of each other's groups.

LS

Leo Sammallahti Tue 23 Oct 2018 10:41AM

I will make the proposals in my earlier comment into membership polls soon.

Would need a simple WordPress site for a platform cooperative I'm part of, that will be launching in Finland, similar to Savvy. If it can be done today or tomorrow, we can pay 80€. No other requirements, you don't have to speak Finnish or live here.