Co-op Data Club

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