Changes to the fiscal hosting arrangements for social.coop

Providing this information by way of background/context, and to raise awareness, and stimulate discussion, with a view to one or two proposals:

For the last couple of years or so social.coop has worked with Platform 6 Development Cooperative. Platform 6 is a UK-based cooperative development organisation, which acts as a fiscal host on the Open Collective platform in support of innovative cooperative initiatives which don't have their own legal entity or bank account. From the Platform 6 perspective this partnership has in the main worked well. Platform cooperative initiatives like social.coop are exactly the type of thing Platform 6 was set up to encourage and support.

Shortly after we started providing this service, we (myself and my fellow Platform 6 directors at that time) decided that it was more trouble than it was worth to charge a fee for the service, in part because of the way that Open Collective handles that aspect, and the resulting book-keeping complexities that it created for us.

We're now a couple of years down the road, having learned a lot. Partly as a result of changes happening with Platform 6, we wanted to raise this thread and engage more widely with the social.coop community of users.

There are two issues that I want to raise, and to a degree they are linked:

1. The issue of compensation. As above we chose early on to provide the service (initially at least) to social.coop without making any charge. We were learning about how it all worked, and this was a sensible choice at the time. Two years or so down the road, we think that the work we've been doing is useful to social.coop, and that it is now fair and reasonable that social.coop makes a modest contribution towards costs. In our experience the work involved in handing the book-keeping and dealing with expense payouts, etc amounts to 2 or 3 hours of work per month. Note that most of the fiscal hosts on the Open Collective platform do make a charge - up to about 10% of the value of contributions. I've informally discussed this with @Matt Noyes a while back.

2. Things are in the process of change at Platform 6. For various reasons the founding group have largely chosen to step back, and whilst we continue to have a supportive membership we don't – in our current form – have the capacity to continue operations in a useful way. This was identified some while ago, and so steps were taken to look at how we could move forward constructively. We were keen as part of this to enable a seamless transition for the collectives we host if at all possible. We are working now to complete a process whereby Platform 6 will continue, as a subsidiary of innovation.coop. So the relationships will remain as is for hosted collectives. I've included a bit more below about innovation.coop and why this is all seen a positive step forward.

As it happens as well being part of Platform 6 I'm also a member of the founding group behind innovation.coop. This is not a coincidence: both organisation are born out thinking and work that I did in about 2008 with a colleague, and which was subsequently flavoured with all the stuff that's happened in the interim with platform cooperatives and the growing power of the GAFAM tech giants in the online world over the last fifteen years. innovation.coop is a fairly new cooperative organisation that is working to become what I call an "entrepreneurial ecosystem-enabling cooperative'. We've talked about it as a protective 'biome' under whose cooperative canopy lots of cooperative innovation can take place in an environment where cooperation is the default setting.

There's more about it on the website (although that's not currently as clear or simple as we want it be). As a business development and support organisation in its own right, innovation.coop has the notion of fiscal hosting as part of its emerging service portfolio. It is also focussing on digitally oriented business models, so when I raised the possibility of taking on some of the work that Platform 6 has been engaged in the idea was enthusiastically supported. Platform 6 provides fiscal hosting to over 30 collective groups, most if not all of a cooperative nature, and the two most prominent among them being social.coop and meet.coop. Both of these important initiatives are close to innovation.coop's heart in being digitally oriented as well as cooperative, and are highly aligned to innovation.coop's plans for similar services. innovation.coop is soon to go live with an email service and has been working for some time on a hosting service utilising cooperatively owned hardware hosted in a cooperative data centre in the UK. We believe that there is lots of potential for collaboration, cooperation and innovation in this space, and we're excited to be exploring and creating new relationships.

innovation.coop would be keen to develop a closer relationship with social.coop than Platform 6 had the capacity to do, and is also now about to launch into a programme of work with meet.coop with the aim of stabilising and developing that business, building on the great work of the founding group, and working in cooperation with (at least) two other cooperatives to make that happen.