Co-op Data Club

The live list of Members is on the home page: https://coopdata.club/ and I don't think any of your co-ops are there yet... but it would be great if they were! :)

Is there a list of members somewhere? I can't remember if I've signed up, and if so, on behalf of which coops.

https://brave.com/brave-rewards/

Dil Green

Mutual Credit Services ( https://mutualcredit.services )

digital anthropology blog ( http://www.digital-anthropology.me )

Open Credit Network ( http://opencredit.network )

@dilgreen on twitter and generally

Use this link to book a half hour slot with me!

https://calendly.com/dilgreen/30-min-video-call

Sent with Proton Mail ( https://proton.me/ ) secure email.

oh, I didn't know that! Which is probably an example of why no-body uses that feature - lol... where do I find the option to get paid for watching ads?

Brave Browser already does this (pay you for watching ads - and more, gives you the power to 'tip' people on twitter etc whose content you like with the tokens you get for watching),

No-one seems to care. People use Brave more because of the anti-tracking stuff afaict

Dil Green

Mutual Credit Services ( https://mutualcredit.services )

digital anthropology blog ( http://www.digital-anthropology.me )

Open Credit Network ( http://opencredit.network )

@dilgreen on twitter and generally

Use this link to book a half hour slot with me!

https://calendly.com/dilgreen/30-min-video-call

Sent with Proton Mail ( https://proton.me/ ) secure email.

and... if you need any more convincing that there is a huge market out there for the platform which turns the standard advertising model upside down, like CDC aims to do... check this out: https://www.weare8.com/ - seems like we have some catching up to do!

But it's good to know they're validating the concept for us! :)

Hello lovely people,

Co-op Data Club is up to 30 Members now, but we've still got a long way to go to hit our target of 200 co-ops by the end of the year!

Here's a brief explanation of what the Club is all about that you can share with your networks ;)

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Co-op Data Club exists to grow the co-operative economy by helping co-ops support other co-ops. Co-ops often lack the required investment capital to spend on customer acquisition in order to reach scale and financial sustainability. This problem is known as the ‘capital conundrum‘. Co-op Data Club is one idea to help solve this issue by providing cheaper – and free – ways for co-ops to acquire new members and customers by leveraging Principle 6 - cooperation between co-ops.

CDC's initial strategy focuses on networking Co-ops together, to enable them to connect and arrange inter-co-op promotions. Co-op Members that join CDC are added to a Loomio group where they can discuss ideas with other co-op marketeers and exchange promotions for other co-ops to share in their email newsletters, on social media and other channels. 

There are no obligations and no fees at this stage. Phase 2 will involve direct promotions to the shared email list, for which co-ops will be charged a small fee, which will be shared with subscribers - who will get paid for opening and reading emails! CDC has several more plans including implementing referral codes for both subscribers and co-ops, so that Members will be able to benefit directly by promoting the club.

Sign up your co-op now and spread the word.

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In co-operation!

Oli

Good progress - congratulations are due. And a good list of cooperatives. I'm talking to Platform6 colleagues about joining. Will come back to you. And keen to work with you where I/we can to develop this project.

3 more members so far this week - so now we're on 25. Here's a tweet you could share (or copy and paste into your preferred social media channel) to help spread the word ;)

https://twitter.com/DefactoDesign/status/1524424455925157891

If you work for a co-op, want to support #cooperation, or know any co-ops that want to support Principle 6 please join and encourage others to join: https://coopdata.club we're aiming for 200 co-op members y the end of the year #CooperativeAction

We now have 22 co-ops signed up to Co-op Data Club - and all those that have signed up have been added to the Co-op Data Club sub group here (which anyone else here is welcome to join if you want to share co-op news etc).

Leo and I set ourselves the target of signing up 200 co-ops this year. Do you think we can do it? Surely it shouldn't be too hard because now we're more than a tenth of the way there, the co-ops will all encourage other co-ops to join and it will become a self-fulling prophesy...right!? Maybe... Or maybe we'll need everyone's help! ;) If you can spread the word to other co-ops, that's is free to join CDC which aims to grow cooperation between co-ops - how can we fail?

In co-operation!

Oli

Hi Graham, thank you for your suggestion. We will get a look.

Il giorno gio 10 feb 2022 alle ore 17:09 Graham (via Loomio) ha scritto:

I'm unclear about your application, but it's possible this might be of interest: https://creditcommons.net

I wrote "distributed ledger" as I have in mind the Holochain infrastructure or a sidechain of the Ethereum blockchain, because they should not be centralized, but I am open to solutions not DLT-based.

much clearer - thanks @Vincenzo Giorgino I get it now. I'm not sure I know of anything which can provide for all those needs out of the box... but I will keep this in mind and let you know if I find anything.

Dear Oli,

thank you for your interest. In summary, we expect to test two apps.

One is already alive and kicking, it's Commonshood.eu and deals with P2P transactions.

The other is the real problem because... ... we don't have it: a protocol that allows participants to upload their health data to a vault and manage it together according to the principles of stewardship, and perhaps in a cooperative form.

What I was asking as a suggestion is this: is there a technological platform that has low management costs and that responds to the above?

The experimentation involves uploading the results of about 500 Covid-19 swabs from a sample aged 50 and over, residing in one neighborhood of Turin. It would be the first step towards a self-governing system of health data, not for profit or aimed at individual advantage, but with full individual decision-making power on sharing.

On the legal level, I already know that the trust is not for us, the data cooperative itself seems to me to involve a centralized server, and it was the thing that, at least at the beginning, we wanted to avoid.

I also add that we are a small action-research group and do not have funds to pay developers. We would appreciate if someone had something that solved the problem and, on her side, a kind of use case for testing purposes. I hope this is clearer, but not depressing...

Hi @Vincenzo Giorgino can you explain a little more about what you want the tech to do, specifically!? You may be interested in SourceCred (which we discuss here: https://open.coop/2020/05/15/open-2020-webinar-sourcecred/ ) and possibly Vocdoni (which we discuss here: https://open.coop/2020/05/29/vocdoni-as-an-engagement-tool-for-cooperatives/ ) but I'm not sure exactly what you want to do!?

Hi Chris,

thank you very much for your contribution. I would like to deepen and share with the collaborators of the project. Can you suggest me a reference? Thank you

Hi Vincenzo, my action research at UCL ISRS over the last decade (I've been working on it for over a decade before that) has been on just such simplified legal designs and in a nutshell I use four party mutual "association of association" permissioning agreements. We deconstruct the complex "trustee/beneficiary" relationship (invented by lawyers for lawyers 🙂) into passive IP "custodian" and active IP "steward" service provider managing partner. The legal innovation is that IP users/investors and IP originators have JOINT oversight. The enterprise model is that 1/ IF any payment is made for use of IP as a commons, a % age levy may be applied, pooled and reinvested in new IP 2/IP Platform Service Provider costs are shared. We term this mutual agreement "Nondominium" because no stakeholder has dominant rights over another (as investors do now) and long term funding is possible via IP credits, returnable in payment for IP use. Development finance requires surplus sharing capital partnerships we term smart swaps. My experience is that the consensual/collaborative nature of mutual risk, cost & surplus sharing agreements simplifies them by at least one order of magnitude. Chris

Hi Grace,

thank you for sharing your concern. We do not have any direct scheme of incentives: we expect that voluntary work as well as care work could be recognized by the community via the creation of tokens as evidenced by the features of Commonshood https://www.commonshood.eu/ Moreover, it is important to recognize the need to invent new categories for human commitment to spend intangible personal resources (technical skills, emotional skills, gifts such as generosity, compassion, etc ...) and get out of the usual patterns of dependent, independent and voluntary work. The digitalization and automation of the economy together with the crisis of the social protection of the state, push in that direction. Accelerated by the pandemic. The direction of an area where fiat currency-based income loses its link with personal commitment ("technological unemployment") and it is necessary to invent tools that are part of a complementary and / or alternative trading system. What the sociologist Urlich Beck called civil work...

Before doing this, make sure to study the research on paying volunteers. Many studies have shown that paying volunteers tends to reduce motivation, not increase it. If you are doing something related to test results that could impact people's access to treatment, you might want to be very careful about experiments that go against the common knowledge and research regarding incentivizing volunteers.

Dear All, I wonder if you can be of help to suggest which kind of technological solution is possible in case we would set up a data producers coop in the next months. I coordinate a research project on community social protection. We will test the webapp Commonshood to support volunteer and care work via tokenization. In addition to it, we wish to set up a distributed ledger for personal data managed by the participants. The first data we expect to add are related to the results of antigenic swabs for Covid-19 by over50 y/o of the neighborough and administered for free by volunteers under the responsibility of the Infectious Disease Dept. We can't fund developers for this last task, so we would like to know if you can be of help about this issue.

Thank you.

Vincenzo Giorgino

PS: I will attend the 23d Feb. webinar on data trusts but I already know that that legal solution is too complicated for us. We need something lighter in terms of legal and technical solutioons.

FYI - for anyone interested in Data Trusts - this event from the Data Trusts Initiative might be interesting:

The technologies behind data trusts

Wednesday 23rd February, 15:30-17:00 (GMT)

What role can technology play in delivering trustworthy data trusts? In this seminar, our expert panel will discuss how different technical approaches can support real-world data trusts, exploring technology’s contribution to data stewardship and the design of technical architectures for data trusts.

Sylve Delacroix, Data Trusts Initiative and the University of Birmingham, will chair a panel discussion and audience Q&A with:

Irene Ng, Chief Executive Officer, Dataswift

David Alexander, Chief Executive and Platform Architect, Mydex CIC

John Ainsworth, Professor of Health Informatics, University of Manchester

Register here to join us for the discussion.

To to follow your work. FWIW yesterday I had lunch with Guillem Cordoba, developer at Holochain. Most of you will know him. We are exploring holochain apps he's involved in developing for possible use inside and around meetcoop and other collectives. One of his favourites is mutual credit. He's thinking of a generic code base with customisable parameters. I like his view of building collective apps that groups can decide for themselves what apps/features they want add to it. In any case, that's still PoC work. But he's a smart cookie. And holochain is offering a unique network architecture that wasn't there before.

Keep us posted on your work at MCS, Dil!

Hi Dil. Just to say that I'm keen to set something up working with MCS and the Innovation Cooperative project that is fast developing across Greater Manchester and beyond. There's strong interest in internal trade mechanisms that can help to accelerate the development of the ecosystem that we're growing. Probably worth setting up a call in the next few weeks.

At Mutual Credit Services we are developing, with a contact in India, just such a digital voucher system, whereby each member business, after evaluation by peers as to spare capacity and gross profit margin, is empowered to sell a certain number of vouchers per period, which are issued with a set discount (less than the lowest gross profit margin in the group - so that no-one can lose out).These can be sold for cash to other businesses or to customers - providing cash up-front for verified spare capacity. At point-of-sale, when a customer buys with vouchers, businesses can add a 'cashback' to increase the discount - again managed so as to be within their gross margin for a win-win outcome.)This is easy to build on credit commons ledgers.

We are working right now in Sweden with Coompanion, building new software for Svensk Barter, a local mutual credit co-op group.

We are also working with a business network in Lancashire, UK, to build a 'clearing union' - allowing all invoices internal to the group to be processed for maximum 'multi-lateral setoff' - clearing debts which form a loop without money.

All of these techniques can be combined, using the same underlying data structures, to provide an internal economy for a group of businesses that achieves a certain scale can achieve a really significant proportion of its internal trade without using bank money at all. Groups do not need to be enormous - 100 businesses, sharing 3 or 4 invoices in the group per period can produce significant benefits).We would love to introduce these ideas to the co-op movement, but so far co-op types haven't quite asked us in. And we're not actively selling - rather patiently building and learning with enthusiastic partners in a handful of contexts globally.

It would be great to work towards an initiative which gathered up all these strands in a cooperative context.

If we can get this right, we can turn Principle 6 of the Co-op movement from a source of guilt into the basis of financial empowerment.

For clarity, all the orgs and networks we build are designed with built-in mutual ownership and governance from the get-go.

Thanks for the invite, and the hat-tip. This project - in aligned collaboration with some other stuff that I'm involved in - has great potential. Pooling of data can deliver scale.

Looks great Oli, thanks for sharing, will dive in when I can and offer any thoughts. Congrats on the initative though!! Hope all's well in London :)

Hi All,

@Leo Sammallahti and I have kicked off a new project to help co-ops support each other through cross-promotions - see https://coopdata.club/

In true co-op style @Graham pointed out we were both working on similar ideas so we decided to collaborate. Leo was designing plans for co-op coupons site to provide individuals with discounts and special offers exclusively from co-ops. I had been working on plans for a data co-op, to which people could licence their data in return for a share of the profits when it’s used. Leo explains several of these ideas in his post about Alex Pentland and data ownership.

Cut to 2022, and we’ve had several discussions, and explored various ways to configure a club which helps grow the co-op economy. Like most start-up projects the full ‘data co-op’ idea is not really viable without large numbers of subscribers and, while we would love to be signing people up by the thousands, encouraging everyone to shop exclusively with co-ops and to be paying out data-dividends to Members, we’ve had to scale back our ambition a little - in the short term.

Our initial plan is to try to ‘get out of the way’ and to create a space where it is easy for co-op marketeers to find and connect with each other in order to arrange cross-promotions via each others email newsletters and other channels - without us needing to act as gate keepers. So, we signed up the first few co-ops and created a sub group here in the Open Co-op Loomio where Co-op Members of CDC can get in touch with each other.

As the shared email list grows, and we onboard more Members we will kick off other parts of the idea to help promote the co-op economy. One of the next steps we want to take is to implement referral codes for both individuals and co-ops, so that Members will be able to benefit directly by promoting the club. There are so many things a club like this could provide including discounts for bundled services, bulk purchases, and additional data brokering and management. Imagine if this was all linked up with Self Sovereign Identity (via https://coopcreds.com/ or similar) - we’ve  been discussing how that could work with @Nick Meyne  from Resonate and the folks at Fairbnb and there is definitely a lot of synergy.  

But for now, we’re starting simple since, as ever, this idea will only work if people get involved and help make things happen, so please sign up an an individuals or a co-op and help spread the word. And if you have any feedback we’d love to hear. 

Oli