Welcome! Please introduce yourself

Hello, hello. Is this thing on?

Thomas Beckett here in Durham, North Carolina.

Hi! I'm Matt Cropp of Burlington, Vermont, USA.

My day job is as associate director of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center (VEOC), which works with worker co-ops and ESOPs, and relevant other projects include being the founder of a co-op brewpub start-up, Chief Manager of the Vermont Solidarity Investing Club (which invests in co-ops), involved with the #BuyTwitter campaign, core organizer in the Platform Co-op Investment Club project (in formation), and on the board of the Laboratory B hackerspace in Burlington.

I'm stoked for this project because I think we are at a strategically opportune moment to harness the vision of community-controlled social media being spread by the #BuyTwitter campaign's to an open-source infrastructure that seems like it just might be up to the task of scaling the platform co-op alternative that we really desperately need.

Let's do this. :)

P.S. My current Mastodon account is mattcropp@mastodon.social, if you want to connect there.

Hello everyone, Michele here, hailing from sunny Como, northern Italy.
I'm the one who (quite unexpectedly) kickstarted the discussion around the whole mastodon coop server, so feel free to blame me for the barrage of posts and comments that ensued soon after :)

I do UX and analytics for a living but I'm an open source geek at heart. I'm into philosophy, economy, cooperatives, military history, videogames and plenty of other stuff I don't want to bore you with.

Let's get this party started!

Romina Killpack located in Salt Lake City, UT.

i co-founded a (now defunct) experimental workers cooperative a few years ago (i'll get around to putting the project sites back up eventually). i do UI/UX for a living, but i love hacking on all kinds of free software. i want to make the world a better place.

i've recently started working on https://www.bbnet.io, but i'm definitely interested in pursuing other cooperative options.

i am @xj9@social.heldscal.la and @roroyourboat@mastodon.social

Hi everyone! Just realised I hadn't introduced myself here. I'll do so by presenting a few projects I'm working on. Also check my website http://deborniol.com for more...

http://ora.network – Newest nonprofit project, aiming to be a global digital skill-sharing marketplace based on the principles of time banking, open-source, and the commons. Think of a currency where a new token (Ora) is created (out of thin air, like any form of money) every time someone contributes one hour to an opensource/nonprofit project – who can then use that Ora to pay someone else to work on their own project. I hope it will help techies and other digital workers have more temporal autonomy to contribute to the commons, and to collaborate on each others projects, with no money in the picture.

https://getacross.org – A community and nonprofit tools to get across language barriers. There’s an app for realtime interpretation with remote volunteers (on iOS - Android to be developed soon - open source). Also a text translation tool (in beta) that passes each sentence through multiple automatic engines (commercial and open-source), and then translators and bilingual volunteers can go through them turn by turn and pick the best version (and edit/improve it). Makes getting things translated faster and more collaborative, and creates a shared non-commercial translation memory (used to pre-translate any similar phrases in others’ texts, and can be used to train AI).

Khora – Helped set up a computer lab in this awesome community centre in Athens, where hundreds of refugees and volunteers help each other each day, with language lessons, cooking 300+ meals a day, among many other activities, the latest being digital education - from computer literacy to HTML development. Khora is a nonprofit co-op foundation with a great ethos and very bottom-up, open and collaborative approach to getting things done.

https://cloudvault.me – A pet project, providing people or organisations with private servers in the cloud, so they can take complete control of their data, privacy, and security. I'm using it to push open-source and decentralised alternatives to the commercial cloud apps everyone uses.

I'm Nathan Schneider, a reporter and professor at CU Boulder. I'm a documenter and supporter of the platform co-op movement, as well as an instigator of #BuyTwitter, and the primary developer of ioo.coop. I'm very eager to see this effort succeed. It's part of what I hope will be a broader movement for cooperative cloud services, which I've begun outlining at ioo.coop/clouds.

I would love to see this up and running as soon as possible so I can use it and help others get on board!

Hi everyone,

I'm a social scientist and action researcher exploring on-the-ground applications of IT tech to enhance social resilience.

Specifically I'm interested in how tech can support the diversity of relationships and modes of communication that compose whole human systems. Rather than flattening and homogenizing, can we design in ways that promote differences within fields of equality?
And then leverage these 'diversity fields' to improve the quality of decision-making so that we can do more to address huge societal problems?

The coop model is exciting! I'm happy to be part of this effort.

I'm john; I build relationships between and within networks, especially across social barriers (in my less humble moments I might call myself a community organizer or coalition-builder).

I'm from Wisconsin, originally, where I got my sea legs for social justice/ change work on the ground floor the occupation, the Wisconsin Uprising, of 2011. I also developed a keen longing to be part of a worker-owned co-op during my year there. I work in Indianapolis, now, with a community empowerment center and a art collective that runs a Tool Lending Library. I also am part of Enspiral, where I put my mechanical engineering degree, with its focus on systems, comms, and workflow, to work.

I love exploring, be it ideas, places, music (I play, dance, and listen), and I especially enjoy collaborative exploration, sense-making, and production.

Dropping in to say hello to all and to apologize for my absence the past few weeks. This month has been very busy working towards a grant deadline this Friday and an event we are hosting on Saturday. Hope to return more regularly in June.

Congratulations to the organizers on an excellent effort with #BuyTwitter. A tactical loss perhaps, but still a strategic advance.

Welcome friends!

Friends, we have a song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qawlthPv1dE

Well, hello tooters. Congratulations to all on the >3% shareholder vote to #buytwitter.

I am Jason, a Colorado-based cooperative developer and attorney, where I run a boutique law/consulting practice and cooperative development effort to build authentic sharing economy ventures. I focus on distributed ownership design, entity formation, financing and securities (non-extractive, non wealth-based), and general transactional services.

My practice is a certified B-Corp/public benefit corporation.

I have experience designing and forming multi-stakeholder cooperatives in the tech, online, worker, local food, farmland, healthcare, transportation and other sectors.

More information about my practice is available at www.jrwiener.com and our public benefit reports provide a high degree of transparency into our work and our social/environmental performance.

Happy to be connected and happy to help however I can.

-Jason

Welcome, Jason!

Hello! I live in the St Louis area (Missouri). I work at a credit union in the area and am a member of a second credit union. For a short while I was involved with the IWW, which has a long-term goal of essentially converting traditional businesses into worker co-ops through union actions and federating them. I don't think I'm well-suited for that kind of confrontational approach though, so I'm looking to get into the more creative side of the co-op movement. I'm a regular patron of several worker co-ops, but social.coop is the first one (other than my credit union) that I have been a member of. I heard about coop.social through the #BuyTwitter campaign. I'm excited to get involved, but still considering which working group to apply to. On social.coop, my handle is @Canvasian 😅

P.S., I'm reluctant to name the credit union I work for just because if I do, their social media policy goes into effect, and I just find it too confusing / convoluted to risk :p but I bank at West Community Credit Union, and work at a more poverty-alleviation-focused credit union.

Wow, I forgot to post here! I'm Rory, originally from Ireland, now in Germany. I work with OpenStreetMap, and other open source stuff. I don't know much about co-ops, yous all are more knowledgeable. (Though I did co-found a hackerspace in Ireland) Though mastodon I discovered the idea of a co-op owned social network, which is something that should exist! You're opening my eyes to the existance of co-ops as an alternative to traditional shareholder owned companies!

I don't know how much I have to offer, so I'll mostly be deferring to others. But i'll help pay and cheer people on maybe. :)

Welcome to our small corner of the fediverse Rory :)

Whoops, I'm @ebel@social.coop

Hello, I'm very excited to see social.coop get off the ground too! I work as an attorney, and my interests include coops, immigrant communities, and languages/language learning. I'm eager to help out with any cooperative governance issues and get my feet wet in this area.

Welcome! :)

Hi, I'm Steve, from Madison, WI. I'm the founder and president of the Interpreters' Co-op of Madison, and a big fan of worker co-ops in general. I'm particularly fascinated with the recovered businesses of Argentina, and, of course, with Mondragon. Not coincidentally, I'm translating books on both. My other big interest is creating a remote conference interpreting platform.

Hi Steve, welcome to social.coop :) Looking forward to reading those books!

I never introduced myself on Loomio! You can call me Lehigh or cloudwater if lehighcommunalist is too long.

Over the course of this year, I've been on a mission to put theory into practice. As such, I've gotten into a bit of activism with the pipelines here in Pennsylvania. Currently trying (in my limited spare time) to get an activist media collective started at waterislifepa.org. I joined social.coop on a whim because I thought it was an interesting experiment. I figured it would be a great place to learn new things and put my communalist ideals into practice. And so far, I was right on the money. :)

Hi, I'm Alan Zimmerman, from Cape Town, South Africa

My interests are the decentralised internet, mesh networks and the like. This is my first look into the co-op space.

Hi, I'm Gyula, and I'm from Hungary, but moving to Luxembourg in the next month. I work as a DevOps Engineel for a long time, in different companies. I'm interested in p2p, co-ops, decentralization and things like that. There is no single reason, but one is that I think that trusting in more people is more beneficial (less risky) than trusting a single entity fully because it makes that entity a highly valuable target to anyone who want to abuse it.

Hi! I'm Lauren, currently living in Los Angeles (originally from Pennsylvania). I'm a Philosophy grad student and union steward at UCLA. Happened upon the platform co-op conference when I was living in NYC and have been thinking about transitioning to tech ever since. I'm really excited to learn about collective governance where everyone is remote.

Welcome, Lauren! It's great to have you here!

Hi Lauren, welcome on board :)

Hey all! My name is Jochen, I'm a freelance PHP&Python developer based in Brussels, Belgium. In my free time I do some volunteer translation for FSF. My interests are mainly in open source software, aimed particularly at decentralization. That's also the main reason I'm very excited to be here!

Hi, my name is Gabriela. I am based in Limerick, Ireland. I have lived in Germany and Luxembourg before moving to Ireland in 2005. I am originally from Romania. I went to OpenCoop 2017 in London and I grew more and more interested in the topic. I was quite sceptical in the beginning, having grown up in a communist country where a strange form of cooperativism was forced upon us. But the more I read about platform cooperativism, the more I want to make such things happen. I am lecturing in Interaction Design and I am passionate about supporting communities with digital technologies.

A warm welcome to our new members :)

Hello, my name is Paul and I am a web developer in Cape Town, South Africa. I've been lurking for a few days and have just donated via OpenCollective to Social.coop. While I was lurking I saw that you were all getting things done. Decisions were being made, there was progress. That's an important part of an effective project. Too many decentralisation projects are stuck with a great idea and no collective progress.

My main interest though is in linking up digital with local. I work for ChangeX.org which is all about global ideas applied locally. I want people in my local community to be using these digital tools to both better their local and the global community. Too often local means rejecting global and that's not what I want to see happen. Federation is a good way to go for having local communities that stay in touch with global trends.

@paulmwatson hello from Somerset West :)

🙂 I'm living in Land en Zeezicht near Lourensford.

Hello!

I'm Greg (@greg on social.coop) and am really excited about joining this coop. I was an early user of identi.ca (it was made public on my birthday, July 2nd, when I was an intern at Creative Commons, so I met Evan that day as he was frantically talking to people and making sure his server was still up) and a long time user/contributor to FLOSS. I work at the Wikimedia Foundation as the manager of the Release Engineering team.

I'm also a father of 2 awesome/active boys; currently 5.5 years and 17 months old. I am a bit worried about the only 6 day minimum for decisions via loomio for that reason (I don't have a ton of spare time to truly engage quickly on many topics), but I hope it'll be OK. :)

Good point on 6 day minimum for decisions, Greg. I noticed yesterday, Monday, morning that I'd missed a few polls over the weekend. I'm with my kids and family on the weekend, don't open email.

Hi everybody,

I'm very happy that this group exists and does what it does, so I joined immediately once I found out about it! We can band together and provide technology for ourselves, and don't need to depend on the Google's and the Facebook's of the world. (At least that's what I think social.coop's instigators had in mind. If so, IMHO this is the model for the future of providing consumer technology -- much better than letting the data miners exploit us. This is very exciting!)

I'm a software-geeky entrepreneur (Indie Computing) who is currently building an operating system for self-hosting websites on personal servers (UBOS), runs a little side project site that lists products that don't screw us (indietech.rocks), likes the idea of an Indie IoT, hangs out with the Indie Web guys, used to hang out with the decentralized internet identity folks (IIW and OpenID), is a foster/adoptive parent of 3, and so forth. I blog at upon2020.com and I'm @j12t@social.coop.

I also think that those of us who think decentalized, user-controlled technology is better than the "state of the art" need to band together and bring complementary products to market, together. Otherwise we'd never have a chance because the overlords are just too big. If you are inclined to agree, please reach out!

Welcome to all our new members :) It's a joy to see so many enthusiasts joining!

Hello! I'm Jon, a serial immigrant originally from Leeds, England, and most recently a Canadian living in Toronto. I'm a contract programmer and general software person, with a particular interest in functional programming - been doing a lot of Clojure lately, and am on the lookout for OCaml or Haskell work - I'm pretty good at learning new stuff quickly.

My most recent employer is a data science "incubator" which partners with corps to do infrastructure projects, which suits me quite well. Last project was a P2P marketplace for home solar PV customers in Australia - coming up with a model for trading which encourages desirable behaviour without imposing too much cognitive overhead on customers.

I'm fundamentally a socialist at heart, tho I have been a reasonably successful participant in the tech industry - at a distance. I work remotely, and focus on providing a supportive environment for my family. I have three kids, all mid to late teen now, all (differently) queer and proud SJWs. I am in turn deeply proud of them, and consider them my greatest accomplishment. Yes, it's all my work :P

I am enjoying the atmosphere of social.coop so far - it reminds me of the early idealism of the internet (I'm pushing 50, seen a few internet generations) as well as apparently being genuinely functional. This is very rare..

I see on other threads that there may be some need for technical work or support for the Co-op's infrastructure, based in a North American timezone. I'd like to have a conversation about that, and figure out if I might help. I've done a bunch of rails work in the past, and I am well versed in infra matters (I did a full terraform makeover for my most recent employer's AWS and docker deployment), so I may be of some use to you all.

Happy to be here :)

Hi all! I'm Neil. I'm really happy to be a part of social.coop. I'm finding it very fertile ground for discussion on politics, anti-capitalism and technology, all things very much of interest to me, so it's great to be on board. I've lately been getting into decentralised tech, so the fact that it's a mastodon instance is even better!

Most of my working life has been as a software (mainly web) developer, but I have most recently moved into the position of tech and data lead, so am currently getting my feet wet with some of the more strategic, less technical stuff. It's an interesting transition, though I love coding, so am still trying to keep my hand in when I can.

My main side project at the moment is my own website, which I'm trying to run in an indieweb way. In fact, I usually post to my website first, and then syndicate it out to social.coop.

I work for a UK-based charity called The Restart Project. We help people learn to repair electronics, promote repair and resilience, and advocate for better device design, all to try to ameliorate the repercussions of over consumption of electronics. (Plus fixing stuff is fun :) )

We've had great support from a tech coops on a couple of our projects, which has really turned me on to the idea of cooperativism, particularly in tech. I hope to learn more about that here.

Great to meet you all :)

Welcome to Loomio! Glad to have you on board :)

Hi all, I joined because I was looking for a stable Mastodon host where I could have a presence to talk about research, issues, and advocacy related to bipolar disorder and metal health in general. social.coop seemed like a good match - my username is muninn on there. I haven't had too much exposure to coops beyond using credit unions for most of my finances for many years, and shopping at a couple coops now and then.

I'm also a recovering software engineer, and I have a lot of experience in online communities. :)

Welcome :)

Hello, I'm Andrew from Birmingham UK. Looking forward to getting involved and learning more about how Social.coop is run by it's members. Also glad to see there is a reading group just starting up :)

[Cross-posting my Mastodon #introduction: https://social.coop/@caseyg/99576838795997517]

Hi, I'm Casey! 👋

I'm an artist, teacher, designer and web developer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Interested in learning more about the history & future of cooperative structures, especially around higher education, distributed collaboration, durational organizing + activism.

You can find me online at my personal site (http://cag.wiki), my work site (http://hire.caseyagollan.com), and on twitter (http://twitter.com/caseyg).

—excited to be here + to jump into some discussions soon.

Hi all 😊 Thank you for letting me become part of this community. I have just joined Social Coop and I'm still finding my feet.

A few quick bits of data about me. I'm from Bulgaria (we're currently running the EU 😁). I'd describe myself as a social media marketing junkie. I'm a very open-minded person that digs deep in philosophy, psychology, religion, technology to name a few. I like to keep my mind occupied.

Looking forward to getting to know all members here. You can find me at https://social.coop/@petar

[Also cross posting https://social.coop/@lindner/99584109598880659 - if only there were standards and protocols to make this easier!]

I'm here because I want to help promote Platform Coops. This is the future I always envisioned back when I was on the Gopher team in the early nineties.

Currently supporting Resonate music coop effort, Riot/Matrix, Known, Mastodon, and OpenCollective.

Interests include Digital Preservation (developer on Perkeep) and decentralized protocols.

Day job is at Google, but I'm not your typical Googler.

More at http://1500wordmtu.com

Also a post about supporting Resonate via supporter shares here:
http://www.1500wordmtu.com/2018/investing-in-a-better-internet-resonate-a-music-coop

Fun facts:
- Living in Oakland, California for many years now.
- Went to a summer camp sponsored by my Rural Electric Coop when I was a teen. Can confirm - coal powered electric plants are dirty.

Hey, my name is Melody. I'm a worker-owner and software engineer for a worker-owned cooperative in the US.

My main interests are online community management, anti-harassment/anti-abuse, and governance. Looking forward to participating!

Welcome!

Hello!

I've just joined social.coop as @twsh@social.coop. I'm interested in the idea of cooperatively owned social media, and coops in general. I'm based in Dublin, Ireland.

Hi, I'm Jake, quite recently had my submission accepted and set up @jakebeamish@social.coop. I'd been looking for an appropriate social media alternative for quite a while until happily stumbling across this instance, and I'm really looking forward to contributing here and on Mastodon. 😀