Turning r/cooperatives subreddit into a platform coop?
There was a discussion in platform cooperative email list about democratic online communities. I threw out an idea on transforming r/cooperatives, a subreddit with around 7300 subscribers into a coop. I believe it is the largest online community for coops.
Josh Davis who is a moderator there and who I've talked to before (he also runs GEO) said he is open to a proposal that could be presented to the other moderators about converting it into a coop.
Perhaps conversion into a legally binding cooperative is too complicated, but I really think we should use our imagination in implementing some sort of coop structure in operating the community.
Perhaps it could be as simple as having mods elected by users who have made over 50 posts into the subreddit or who pay $1/month membership fee?
Wwe could do outreach by donating 10$ every month to a r/cooperatives fund that would be given to a coop that has a coop crowdfunding campaign going on (and doing so would also get more visibility to the crowdfunding monitor and alerts twitter account). The subreddit users could vote on how the funds are distributed between crowdfunding campaigns added to the monitor that month (we could do this using the comment up/downvote system.) I could match the 10$ with 10$ of my own money.
I try to think of ideas that we could present. I also came across "one click cooperatives" concept which I think is cool and could perhaps be used in this case.
Nevertheless, I think we should utilize r/cooperatives as an outreach channel for P6. I am a moderator in a "cooperative empowerment" discord chat group that has grown to around 72 members. I would love to see r/cooperatives and the discord chat group fostering an ecosystem of online coop community spaces with low treshold to join (chat, facebook, online forum groups, etc.)
I will try to come up with more ideas to present to the moderators, but would love to hear your thoughts about this.
Mark Simmonds (Co-op Culture) Wed 28 Aug 2019 5:36PM
Good idea. I've just joined the reddit
Graham Wed 28 Aug 2019 5:43PM
I like this. Especially the idea that the subreddit users are encouraged to make a modest contribution to a common pot that is then invested/donated to a coop-crowdfunder. So we could host an open collective for the financials. Not sure how voting could work - I guess reddit has a simple vote counter in effect in the upvote/downvote thingy.
Leo Sammallahti Wed 28 Aug 2019 6:09PM
Yes, we could just make each coop that is seeking crowdfunding as a separate comment from say Platform6 user account and then see how much upvotes each comment has and distribute the common pot accordingly.
Leo Sammallahti Thu 29 Aug 2019 4:31PM
Didn't we have a problem with hosting OC for folks using currencies other than the pound? Or did I misunderstand this? @graham2
Graham Fri 30 Aug 2019 9:28AM
There's no problem with it as such. Simply that currency conversion costs and cross border payments add to the amount that gets sliced. The important thing is to be aware of that.
Ian Snaith Thu 29 Aug 2019 6:46AM
Great ideas. I've just reactivated my neglected reddit acccount and joined this group.
Leo Sammallahti Thu 24 Oct 2019 2:48PM
Just had a call with r/cooperatives moderator Josh Davis. Here's my plan:
Outreach campaign for Platform6 Coop Crowdfunding Monitor in r/cooperatives
- Have a Reddit thread with all the crowdfunding campaigns posted last month.
- Each campaign is a separate comment in the thread.
- Have Platform6 set up “r/cooperatives fund” in Open Collective that is distributed to coop crowdfunding campaigns according to the points the comments receive. - Everyone can contribute to the fund.
- Platform6 will donate the first months 15£ and I will donate 15£.
I've inserted an image in this comment so you can understand what it could look like.
I would advocate us to run the 3 of such polls, and see after that whether they will lead into new P6 members and if the Open Collective fund will receive donors.
Outreach campaign for r/cooperatives in r/TodayILearned
- There's a Reddit community called r/TodayILearned, with 21.6 million subscribers. The idea is that people share short simple facts there. I have run a "Coop fact of the day" campaign in Twitter & Facebook for Coop Exchange since February and will start adding those facts in related Wikipedia pages, and then share them in r/TodayILearned.
- Once a fact is posted on r/TodayILearned, there will be someone making a comment on the post advocating for people to also join r/cooperatives.
- Here's an example of someone recently sharing a fact about Migros cooperative in Switzerland in r/TodayILearned. It gained 3200 upvotes and the Wikipedia article received 5000 pageviews as a result. If someone from very early on had commented advocating people to join r/cooperatives, I bet there would have been dozen of people who would've joined.
Leo Sammallahti Fri 1 Nov 2019 5:19PM
Okay, the first fact has been posted!
Leo Sammallahti · Wed 28 Aug 2019 5:16PM
We could also propose for r/cooperatives to add link to our coop resources document and P6 itself in the sidebar (that looks like this right now, the full list is too big for a screenshot)