Coop values evolved into DisCO values?

DisCO goes back some way. In 2020 there is this https://geo.coop/articles/tales-disco

And in 2021 this: https://stacco.works/2021/10/05/disco-in-7-principles-and-11-values/

Sadly, their documentation is a bit of a mze (in 'The DisCO Mothership' wiki for example), and there are stubs. Is @Stacco Troncoso out there? Can you guide us into where DisCO is at right now?

their main site is this one I think: https://basics.disco.coop/ But good to hear from Ann Marie or Stacco!

Hey, thanks for the heads-up @mike_hales, happy to speak through here, of course. I'll bullet point some ideas in reaction to Mike's message, peppered with links.

• Any org, like Social.coop can benefit from DisCO Principles (which are distinct from values). The key takeaway is that each org has to dialogue and fork them to their specificities. We do have availability to help, but the thing is that it needs to be a community decision. You can simulate the process of becoming a DisCO through this questionnaire. Online this usually leads to more questions so, in our experience, this works much better as a facilitated process, ideally in-person but it can also be done online (or asynchronously through Loomio, we've had plenty of experience with that).

• The 7 DisCO Principles complement, not substitute, the OG 7 Principles, you can read more about that progression in this article from the DisCO Elements, the sequel to the DisCO Manifesto. The article is Principles and Values: DisCO 7-11 

  • If you want a more visual representation of this, check out this illustrated booklet 

  • Important to note: DisCO works with both online and offline/in person collectives. There are important differences in the implementation of course, but the spirit remains the same

• Yes, the documentation is a maze right now. We are very aware of it and working on it, with the usual inevitable delays. Right now the DisCO Ball, which is our main repository of in-depth info lives in a Mediawiki installation. It's clunky, so we've developed a new wiki interface called qwiki with our close allies at Sutty (hello @Eduardo Mercovich!). We're still transferring resources from one platform to the other and once that's done (hopefully within the next few weeks) the info will be a lot more logically organized.

  • qwiki basically brings the speed, look and functionality of the DisCO Basics to wiki format. In lieu of the qwiki being finished and as @wouter@freeknowledge.eu rightly points out, the DisCO Basics is one of the most up to date resources on DisCO. That will be enough for any group to decide whether they want to DisCO or not. The FAQ in the main site also tackles a lot of those questions

• Stuff that's new and available: Here are two resources that reflect a regular perceptionDisCO: "Is this art or science?" dynamic. The answer is both, of course, so check this contrast out:

  • Our first Zine: 9 colorful pages full of cats and mushrooms

  • Our latest academic paper, co-authored by our colleague  Pame Gil-Salas, DisCO co-founder Ann Marie Utratel and my self - with important contributions by our colleague Dmytri Kleiner. Here's the abstract:

    • "Platform cooperativism has been popularized as a democratic alternative to the sharing economy. However, even as it experiments with new forms of ownership, it often reproduces the same logics of platformization and datafication, thereby reinforcing capitalist extractivist logics. Addressing these limits requires rethinking governance beyond ownership to include the relational dynamics that sustain collective work. Grounded in Latin American traditions of resistance and social justice, this paper explores autonomía(s), or collective agencies, as a means of resisting platform dominance and extractive data regimes. Anchoring the term in Spanish signals a shift in worldview that centers comunalidad, communal ways of being, over individualistic notions of autonomy and private ownership. Drawing from carework and the principles developed within Distributed Cooperative Organizations (DisCOs), the paper conceptualizes the design for autonomía(s) as an approach to governance grounded in care, where governance is understood as a relational practice that sustains collective agencies. Care is treated both as a political site of struggle and as a design principle for feminist and decolonial approaches to collective organization."

    • This is a pre-pub version, so please share only one to one with friends and colleagues with the disclaimer that it shouldn't be published on the open web until the journal we've submitted to is in print. Last week it won a prize at the Platform Coop conference in Istanbul, so there's that.

Let's see where the conversation goes. If Social.coop wants to DisCO we're ready to help, but it always needs to be a group decision and for DisCO to help structure the group's values. It's not a copy/paste protocol but a copy/fork/document protocol.

We've gone pretty quiet online in the last few years because we decided that Silicon Valley-selfie self promo is a waste of time and counterproductive to our deeper work and revolutionary ends, but we're quite active and happy to work with interested communities and have always had a special relationship with Social.coop and many of the folks here. In the meantime, happy to continue talking through here. Thanks Mike for bringing this up.

It seems conceptually interesting but what concrete benefits would adopting the DisCO frame or framework and values bring to either the social.coop members or the broader federated social network ecosystem?

DisCO is much more than a list of value statements and a conceptual exercise. It's an economic-ethical regime of coop practice, which includes contribution in the commons alongside the bread and butter of livelihood work. 'Contribution economy' is a practice with a lot of feminist economic rationale in it, care work inside the coop is up front. They thought a lot, also, about the DisCO toolstack - how d'you tool up a distributed collaboration under close partnership? DisCO is the self reflection of an actual working coop, not a piece of philosophy.

social. coop isn't on that same livelihood kick. It's basically volunteer, the old FLOSS aesthetic, and maybe rooted in privilege in that same way? Whatever, critical reflection on paid/unpaid contribution is within social.coop's field. And many social. coop members in livelihood coops are definitely candidates for a DisCO rethink? Just how DisCO bears on this coop here and on its members isn't clear, but it's worth exploring?

I can't seem to 'like' a post in this UI! So thanks @Stacco Troncoso for coming in with that thorough review 🙏 Very clippable