Wouldn't cotech.coop be better than coops.tech?

I'm abstaining as I wouldn't be willing to pay for a .coop in addition to the .tech, but would be happy to setup a .coop if someone else is prepared to pay for it indefinitely and would suggest that people voting for a .coop should consider if they are willing to pay for it.

There are 109 people in this Loomio group (and the website says 34 co-ops and 264+ staff ) - frankly if we can't Cobudget the cost of .coop domain what are we playing at? :P

Even assuming the more expensive uk.domains.coop price of £96/ year (£80 + VAT) and only the 109 people on here (I wonder how many are so far in Cobudget...) that would be less than £1/ year each. Or less than £3 a year per co-op.

Personally I quite strongly feel that ALL co-ops within the CoTech network should systematically contribute something towards/ pool resources within the CoTech network (because if we don't we'll never achieve our potential) and we'd be VERY happy to pay say an absolute minimum of £5/ year to be a member (which would more than cover the cost of a .coop domain! :P )

More medium term I think realistically we should be looking at pooling %s of revenues and profits into a collective pot (e.g. members of the Valley Alliance of Worker Co-ops in the states pay dues of 0.00125% of their revenue to cover the association’s operating expenses and pool 5% of their profits into a co-operative development fund - I'd LOVE to see CoTech co-ops do something similar. Note: within the Enspiral network which inspired the creation of CoTech ventures pool much MUCH more than this, more like 5% of revenues on average, last I read)

I agree in theory but in practice things are not working like that.

From a pure brand perspective - assuming of course CoTech is, first & foremost, about growing coops in the tech space and developing an awareness of cooperative technologists as a viable alternative in the world beyond beyond coops - then a .coop address is a no brainer. (And, for an identifier that shouts 'we're a cooperative' from the get go, ridiculously cheap.... Probably the cheapest marketing one can buy in fact!)

But, if CoTech is first and foremost about 'tech' then maybe not so...

And ditto:
'There are 109 people in this Loomio group (and the website says 34 co-ops and 264+ staff ) - frankly if we can't Cobudget the cost of .coop domain what are we playing at?'

As someone with a long affiliation to the .coop TLD, and aware of the enormous achievement to actually bring it into being as one of the earliest TLDs of this type I am heavily in favour of the idea that all cooperative organisations, and I include CoTech in that (as do the registry rules about .coop eligibility) should use a .coop domain. It was conceived as a trusted and trustworthy space on the internet and although I have always disagreed with the registry's pricing strategy it remians a valuable asset to our movement that we should be proud to support and adopt.

I was chatting briefly with @chriscroome on this yesterday, and the use of the .tech TLD was pursued simply becuase it was quick, cheap and available at the time. Yes, I get all the stuff about brand and migration and all that, and this is all do-able stuff. My co-op would be willing to controbute equitably towards costs, and I would be personally happy to get stuck into organising the nitty gritty of setting up an annual membership subscription to create the common pool, as a positive step towards deeper cooperation among CoTech organisations.

Just to mention to all incl. @jamestimbrell (you probably saw) that http://tech.coop/ most recent news is from April 2011 "Due to a lack of Directors, The Tech Co-op is no longer in operation. Please contact Chris Palecek at 604-729-8536 if you require technical support." so maybe it would be possible to persuade them to part with the domain name...

Also looks like it expires in March next year, which isn't an awful
amount of time to wait for a coop network decision, assuming we can
snipe it :-)

Aptivate could stump up the first year of domain costs if that
helps!

If that's a possibility then it's probably worth pursuing regardless of whether we change to using it as the primary domain to allow for options in the future.

Yeah, I personally think a co-op network called CoTech would still be better off having cotech.coop rather than tech.coop as its primary domain, but tech.coop would still be a nice domain for such a network to control :P

Perhaps in Feb/ March next year I'll do another poll with coops.tech cotech.coop and tech.coop (if we can get it) as the options! :P

@dougbelshaw said:

I'm forced to choose an option to comment, which seems problematic.

@dougbelshaw you could've commented on this thread without voting - but I agree the ux/ navigation between threads and discussions could do with some work - clearly not clear enough!

@kayleighwalsh said:

I don't think we should be focusing our efforts on minor points like this.

Fair point, at present this clearly isn't a big issue for most. But doing a quick poll doesn't really require any effort (although admittedly implementing an actual change would take some effort)

@kayleighwalsh said:

Anyone can have a .coop domain so it's not fundamental to me.

I guess in practice they aren't that hard to get hold of, but they are supposed to be restricted only to co-ops, so "Anyone can have a .coop domain" isn't really correct imho.

@kayleighwalsh said:

There's also a cost issue, so unless anyone is willing to own this and pay for it...

If we wanted to change the url and then found that over 30 co-ops couldn't together cobudget the cost one .coop domain we'd be a laughing stock, surely.

@kayleighwalsh said:

if it ain't broke :)

Yeah, I'd say that sums up the overall feeling on this issue, at least for now.

Was just doing a quick temperature check really :)

I don't often comment here (being a designer and not a true 'tech' worker – but I agree with all the points Josef makes in the reply above. If we could get the tech.coop domain we should – it's a small cost to protect the name even if it's not rolled out straight away. But I may be missing something here, surely it would become co-tech.coop? Sometimes we need to make faster decisions – if they are of a small financial cost and I do think this is small. Going forward, I think a small yearly membership fee for each co-op is a good way to keep the basics ticking over. I am not so sure a percentage of revenue would work for a lot of smaller coops though. I think some kind of fixed minimum contribution to running costs would be fair.

I am not so sure a percentage of revenue would work for a lot of smaller coops though. I think some kind of fixed minimum contribution to running costs would be fair.

Interesting perspective, thanks. From where I'm sitting a % of revenue and/ or profits (my preference would be and) would be much fairer than a fixed amount (if indeed that is what you meant?) - a fixed amount could be pocket change for bigger co-ops but a relatively significant cost for smaller co-ops (although I guess if it were something really small like £5/ year no one could really complain so I guess that is probably mean?).

I'm still rather fond of the Valley Alliance of Worker Co-ops model: Members pay dues of 1/8 of 1% (i.e. 0.00125%) of their revenue to cover the alliance’s operating expenses and pool 5% of their profits into a co-operative development fund.

That'd mean a small co-op who only turn over £25k (have we got any that small? I guess we might when it comes to some of the start-ups) would only pay £31.25/ year membership, plus 5% of whatever their profits were (if any). Sounds reasonable to me. About 3 times cheaper than cheapest Co-ops UK membership (which from memory start at about £95)

Sorry, I think what I meant was a small fixed fee/contribution to become a member – to cover administrative costs. I can see your point about larger coops not contributing enough, but 1% of revenue for a small coop like ourselves (even if we have been going 30 years) would be difficult to cover. I think it's a different issue if there is an alliance of coops that genuinely market themselves collectively and all benefit/share from some equal return on work or services but we can't guarantee that for every member of CoTech – can we? Perhaps this is a future aspiration? 1% of revenue could run into the thousands for each coop and that would mean CoTech would be sitting on a lot of cash! The example of 25K is pretty unrealistic a revenue figure. If you change that to 300K, the membership fee would be £3,000! That's a large membership fee in my opinion! Unless of course you mean there would be a minimum and a maximum membership fee based on revenue? In which case you may as well set membership fee bands based on min and max – up to 100K, 100K-300K, 300K-500K, 500K-1M and so on… and just set a fee for those bands? Or is that what you meant?

Yes, 1% of revenue would be too high (even though in the Enspiral network that inspired CoTech last I read the average venture contribution is closer to 5% revenue!).

But I never even mentioned nor suggested 1% of revenue! :)

I said perhaps we should adopt the model used by the Valley Alliance of worker co-ops, i.e. 0.00125% (1/8 of 1% - i.e. 8 times less than 1%).

So, for a co-op with a turn over of £300k it'd be £375 - less than the cost of one ticket to a corporate conference. For many in the tech sector, less than the cost of one days work.

The co-op (of two) I'm a member of which is part of CoTech (United Diversity) turned over about £50k in last tax year, so for us it'd be £62.5 (still less than Co-op UK membership, Locality membership etc etc).

We'd be very happy to pay that, especially if the larger co-ops committed to putting 0.00125% of their revenue in the pot too.

Ah, that makes sense!

There is now a thread on this on the Discourse forum.