Hi everyone I am working with Vica on the Co-op Hackathon - new dates 19 and 20 October, in London. A reminder that the deadline for proposals is this week Wednesday at midnight. General registration continues until 18 October.

We have some great submissions and registrations already, and would welcome more from people here. Some travel bursaries are available for shortlisted projects.

https://www.uk.coop/hackathon

Hi all, we have a new date for the Hackathon and have changed the aim of the event a bit - I have updated the event invitation above with the new info. The idea is to create a space to support tech & digital initiative for or from within the co-op movement. There are many ways to take part, but please note that if you would like to submit an idea, rather than just attend as a participant, the deadline for that is 20 September. Hope to see some of you there!

Oh, here's the manifest, plenty of holes, questions and things that probably don't work.

I can't come to the hack day, due to be somewhere else, but have some (at least 'two', ha) ideas, that are probably coop 'friendly'. I'll try and get to the Thursday session. Meanwhile, one is spin off from this: https://www.horizon.ac.uk/working-with-the-mema-3-0-project/ and the other, more of a thought experiment at the moment, but a couple of local people are interested is this: https://nifis.uk/

I'll probably partially bootstrap Nifis with a Raspberry Pi Jam in the autumn, probably in Stratford using space in one of the numerous non-profits. So it'll start out as tech, but my ambition is much more like this https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maison_des_jeunes_et_de_la_culture

@Vica TY for the reply. :D

Points 1, 2, & 3, answer my questions. :D TY :D

Point 4 is great. :D

One issue that i am facing is finding the right people to work with to create infrastructure co-operatives.

This looks to be a good start. :D

@Vica

We see this as an opportunity to bring together people that are interested in using tech to strengthen the co-op movement

Can I suggest putting in place T&Cs that copyright in all code written at the hackathon remains property of the person who wrote it, but that it must be released under a Free Code license approved by either the Free Software Foundation or the Open Source Initiative?

@Vica

we don't currently have additional funding to support these initiatives

Fair enough. This might be out of scope for this discussion, but for the record...

Software requires hours of specialist labour to develop and maintain. If co-ops want Free Code software designed for the specific needs of co-ops, at a range of scales, we're going to need to come up with systems for funding both initial development and ongoing maintenance of co-op software. Fortunately for us, much of the initial development work can be done by customizing off-the-shelf Free Code, which speeds up development and reduces costs. But all of this needs maintenance, both the customizations and the upstream software it depends on. If we want to stop outsourcing the maintenance of the software we depend on to corporate datafarms (FarceBook, Goggle, hOracle, etc) - and allowing them to determine how that software works for their benefit rather than ours - we need to come up with ways of aggregating many small contributions from co-ops using the software into funding pools that can be used to pay developers (ideally working in tech co-ops and platform co-ops).

@Vica Thanks for taking the time to respond. Most helpful.

Thanks Oli for the prompt, as I wasn't getting notifications from the comments. If anyone else has questions please @ me so I'm sure I don't miss them.

Responses below.

@Billy Smith apologies for not replying to your email. I will by the end of tomorrow (sorry a lot of competing deadlines at the moment).

I'll respond to some of your queries here in case they are useful for others.

1. Do you know what the turn-around time will be for people applying to the event?

   There is no pre-selection process to attend, if that's what you are asking?

   We might be filtering some of the ideas people are proposing, just to make sure they are responding to the challenges we have proposed for the event. We are doing that on a case-to-case basis.

2. What's the overall schedule?

   For now this is the set schedule, but we will be providing more detail next week (registration time, breaks, etc). Generally, however, the idea of the Hackathon is that we hold a collaborative space where people self-organise around projects. So on the 12th there will not be a set agenda with speakers for example. We will have a few speakers TBC on the 11th.

   Thursday 11 May

   • 6-8pm: Pre-hackathon meet and greet. Teams who have submitted an idea will be asked to present it to the audience, followed by the chance to meet and chat with other teams

   Friday 12 May

   • 9am-5pm: Teams will spend the day developing their ideas. They’ll also work towards a presentation to give at the end of the day

   • 6-8pm: Teams will present their work and explain what their next steps will be.  

3. Do we have Terms and Conditions?

   No we don't. We see this as an opportunity to bring together people that are interested in using tech to strengthen the co-op movement. The idea is not to steal ideas from others, but rather to provide a space to showcase what is already being built or thought of within the movement. I hope this reassures you, but do email me if there a specific points you'd like me to address.

   Responding @Danyl Strype

4. Yes, absolutely, we are aware that the negative aspect of a Hackathon is that it is only a day (or usually a bit more). So we see this as the start of a process. Mainly to gather people around ideas and start working on them together. The next step will be the Awards at Congress, which is Co-operatives UK's main annual event. The aim of that is to showcase the best 3 ideas (judged by an expert panel) to the wider movement and galvanise interest around them. Based on the results of that, Co-operatives UK will be looking into how to best support these ideas. Unfortunately, we don't currently have additional funding to support these initiatives, but we hope that this can be a first step towards supporting them further. It is part of Co-operatives UK's strategy to enable tech & digital in the movement, and this is one of our first steps in trying to involve the co-op/tech community in this process.

Responding to @Graham

5.. Can a team submit an idea for the awards if they do not attend the Hackathon?

Yes, attending the hackathon is not a precondition to participating in the Awards. However, some of the panellists will be present at the Hackathon, so it is an opportunity for them to learn more about the project and meet some of the team, so attending the Hackathon is advisable. But the panel will be judging the proposals based on the slide deck, and not all panelists will be present at the Hackathon, so don't worry if you can't attend.

...a few questions for you below @Vica - if you have the answers?

Thanks