Platform Cooperative Development Working Group?

Thanks, Matt. Do you have a sense for a general audit of skills needed and ways group members could contribute?

Good question ;-) I was thinking of it as a place to have discussions related to starting or helping to start new platform cooperatives that are relevant to our needs (like a hosting coop, a git coop, a Mastodon coop...). All of our collective skills would be relevant.

I don't understand what a git co-op would do. Host?

I guess so, provide hosting and other git repository management services? Not something I know well...

It sounds like people are moving to GitLab or self-hosting. I don't see a git co-op getting a lot of traction... unless it were for something other than code. Various people have asked about -- and even tried to build -- a "GitHub for prose." Penflip is nice example, but hasn't been updated in four years. Leanpub is also similar to what I picture.

I'm putting the JMA book into git to make it available online. What not others? A platform publishing house co-op could be fun.

A prose eBook publishing coop does sound interesting. I would be glad to have a coop base for making stuff Creative Commons or P2P available. However, physical books are wonderful things, with affordances that eBooks just don't have; and the pairing is very powerful. That's why I publish in eBook and paperback, at lulu.com. So digital publishing is valuable but not quite so valuable as eBook and print-on-demand. I don't suggest that a print-on-demand coop should be created.

Although . . if 3D printers are so fashionable in the code world, it would be logical to do print-on-demand too? Maybe not geeky enough? ;-)

Just to chime to say that a GitLab instance at https://git.coop already exists :) (run by a multistakeholder co-op in the UK, Webarchitects)

Print-on-demand requires high-end equipment, which then takes an awfully long time to pay off. That's why only a few places do it.

What I picture is a network of writers who would be financed as they write. Then their work would be available under CC-BY(-SA?), which would mean that small co-op print shops around the world could print short runs and sell them at just above cost, well below what a big publishing house would charge.

Would it work? Definitely maybe.

Hmmnn paying people to write is a whole other thing. Making a livehood from writing is a whole other thing too. This is where a really clear distinction would be needed between coop (a way of holding common resources in a market-trading organisation) and commons (curating, stewarding and enabling beneficial access to resources of value). And a clear-headed decision and organisational design, to do one or other, or both.

Commissioning in 'the arts' is a fraught thing. And I for one would find it very hard to write under the expectations of a very large committee, that was paying the piper and expecting to call some kind of tune. This is deep water. Might it be seen as a shared-patronage organisation? But operating a repository for digital texts (with services attached? or just raw?) is the simple thing.

I accept what you say about the cost of kit in print-on-demand. Even so, it could be considered as a coop manufacturing venture, with exacting requirements for funding? Physical books are significant things in a digital age, old technology but by no means broken. I agree that small decentralised coop print shops might be able to turn a surplus on small runs of licensed texts. I doubt there’s much of a surplus in this for anybody, except in the exceptional case of a best-seller. That’s how it goes in cultural production for the market? How many bands make a living from distributing tracks on the internet?

Josef -- Right - so in cases where other coops exist we should think about how to inter-cooperate, as we have been doing in relation to web architects.

We're building an open online (but not exclusively so) cooperative development platform at https://platform6.coop. It's early days, but we are now legally registered, and very open to collaborating on the development of the Platform 6 project. Although our initial focus is UK-centric this need not be the case, and I see no reason why we couldn't be working on a twin-track transatlantic approach. Stuff like provision of digital infrastructure is clearly part of the mix, but we're also seeing that a lot of people with good ideas for cooperative businesses are not necessarily that digitally literate, and would not know a git repo if you poked them in the eye with one. We think that a great way to support platform cooperatives is to be a platform cooperative so that's our approach. Let's cooperate, collaborate, federate!

You're right, the tech side is the easy part. That's what so many start-ups miss. They think they've found a technological solution to a non-technological problem, but it ain't necessarily so.

I haven't solved the financing side. If I had, I would have implemented it long ago. I don't feel too bad about it, though, because obviously, no one else has, either. At least not in a way that allows you to be both self-managed and sustainable over the long term.

I could see having a co-op with the express purpose of owning and running an on-demand printer. Maybe it could partner with an existing print shop (or two), or maybe it could take the shape of crowdfunding to finance such a printer for a co-op print shop.

That makes sense I think :) With print-on-demand though, there's probably also a logistics element to the business - shipping. Which is a long way from coding and running a repository, as an area of interest and skill? And tech. Time to find a logistics/supply-chain coop to partner with?!

I don't know of any logistics co-ops. That might have to get folded into the printing part.

If we want to be really ambitious, we could collaborate with makerspaces and the open design community, and build an on-demand printer ourselves, and encourage others to do the same.

The tech side is only easy for those proto-coops that have internal tech skills.

So, does it make sense to propose a new social.coop working group on co-op development and inter-cooperation? Any reasons not to?

What would be the brief for this working group? I'm unclear.

It would be to a) to share, discuss and propose platform co-op development opportunities, for example the idea that social.coop might take over Maastodon, or propose a co-op for Mastodon; b) the same for inter-cooperation opportunities, like joining webarchitects or partnering with other co-ops; c) provide advice and other support to people creating platform co-ops, e.g. co-op Mastodon instances; d) coordinate ongoing development and inter-cooperation projects.
As of now all of that happens (to various degrees) in different threads. (Even the Reading Group has discussed cooperation with Cooperation Jackson.)

I think a git co-op could be useful to spread out the work and have more specialization. Using them instead of a self-hosted git would help support another co-op, and reduce the effect of "self-hosted shit goes offline and no one mirrored it" problem

Steve @steve7 If you haven't seen it, I think you might be interested in what's being hatched here at culturebanks. Liam Murphy is hoping to find a commons/licensing/intellectual property-management way to bankroll cultural producers. It seems that you feel that a commons of writing might be funded by a coop too?

Good discussions and I support the creation of a Coop Development focused Working Group. I would suggest that the focus initially be on coopertizing Mastodon development, spreading the cooperative model amongst independent Mastodon instances, and support/development of cooperative enterprises with a product or service Social Coop may interface with.

Maybe transferring this to a proposal under the Governance/Org Working Group would be the best place to start.

Wondering also if this could live under a general Initiatives Working group. The goal being to move some of these long varied topic threads that pop up to Initiatives so as to reduce the email notification overload happening under the general Social.Coop banner which I believe could increase the membership participation in governance activities as a whole.

Yes, some forking & redistribution of thread content please. Reducing notification overload is good. Focusing-down is good also.
Not sure what 'general initiatives' covers @robertbenjamin . Would you care to distinguish this from existing working group tasks? Is it a time @mattnoyes to review/rationalise working group structure?

I suppose "Initiatives" are anything not related to the operations, finance, and governance of the Social.Coop platform and organization. Historically these broader Coop Development discussions along with some cultural enriching activities like the Reading Group take up the bulk of activity on the notification timeline

Not a Loomio expert but would like to move towards a default lean notification structure for new memberships where each member can purposely choose to increase their activity notifications as they subscribe to more groups.

Right now it seems its on the reverse where members are subscribed to all the broad notifications upon joining the Loomio group. This leads to more checking out or just notification overload.

Totally agree. I find myself in every working group at one point or another, which is fine in principle, but gets overwhelming. Not opposed to an Initiatives thread -- Loomio recommends creating a "wall" thread for a similar purpose. I still think the Coop Devel. focus is narrow enough to be useful for organizing existing and future discussions.

In case people missed it, this is my attempt to map our ecosystem and identify some issues: http://prezi.com/doasu5ptep9k/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

Thanks for the pointer @mattnoyes, I had missed it.

A sidebar: graphics-wise . . . I find this kind of spider diagram mind-mapping doesn't help me much - but then, unlike many, I've never taken to spider diagrams. My go-to visual form is the Venn diagram, and I think the content of this one too could be Venned. I do appreciate that different folks have different perceptual orientations. But a Venn diagram will necessarily have fewer graphic elements, which makes for a cleaner visual experience (Tufte, Envisioning information: 1 plus 1 equals 3 or more).

As suggested, I have moved this to the Governance and Legal Working Group and made a proposal: https://www.loomio.org/d/c6tDyjrR/proposal-creation-of-a-cooperative-development-initiatives-working-group