by Pat Conaty – Research Associate, Co-operatives UK Read the full report, Working Together: Trade Union and Co-operative Innovations for Precarious Work The labour market in the UK has changed dramatically since 2006. Employment and social protection today for most new jobs is either thin or absent and as a result a new in-work poverty […]
Originally published in the Cooperative Business Journal‘s winter 2018 issue. For a sizable portion of the people running the established cooperatives in the United States, I’ve found, the internet is still regarded as a kind of alien invasion, an ever-bewildering source of trouble. Along with the hassle of building and maintaining a website, the internet […]
State Farm Customer Service One State Farm Plaza Bloomington, Illinois 61710 January 11, 2018 To Whom It May Concern, As a policyholder of State Farm Mutual I am writing to request proxy form for the upcoming annual meeting. Please send one for me at the address below at your earliest convenience. I would also like […]
The fight for a free and open Internet scored a win in 2006, thanks to a bad analogy. Alaska Senator Ted Stevens argued that Internet service providers should have the right to manage traffic from sources that “flood the Internet,” which he likened to “a series of tubes.” Companies like Comcast could filter competitor ads […]
by Alanna Irving, originally posted at the Open Collective blog Social.coop is a cooperatively run instance of Mastodon, a decentralized social network based on open protocols and free, open-source software. Alanna from Open Collective interviewed three of its co-founders to find out more. Nathan Schneider is a media scholar, journalist, and co-founder of the platform […]
by Jen Horonjeff If you’ve ever had to come up with a name for a group, a company, a project, it can be one of the most daunting tasks. It’s important to get it right! And when it comes to a company, not only does it have to be right…but also not already taken. Lucky […]
In support of our platform co-op friends AnyShare, and to allow them to support us, I’ve set up an AnyShare instance for The Internet of Ownership. AnyShare, if you haven’t seen it, is a FairShares multistakeholder cooperative that produces a platform for sharing resources. It’s based around a framework of wants and needs. This might […]
Cross-posted with the P2P Foundation blog David Bollier and I (see David’s post from yesterday) had the pleasure of meeting Janosch Sbeih and Jérôme Birolini (“The Reciprokans”) at the Open 2017: Platform Cooperativism conference in London. We were very impressed with their overall concept and presentation, it aggregates and puts a fresh spin on some of […]
If you’re involved with the “cooperative community” on social media, you’ve probably heard a lot about platform cooperatives in recent years. The vision is simple: what if Uber or AirBnb were owned by its users, who could share decision-making responsibility and profits among themselves? Instead of being exploited by platforms, users could and should be […]
Many internet users currently rely on highly centralized, corporate-controlled cloud tools for daily needs such as email, calendars, contact management, file-sharing, collaborative editing, social media, and more. These tools, provided (in many cases for “free”) through companies like Google, Dropbox, Facebook, Yahoo, and others, rest atop business models based on mining and surveillance of users’ […]