What's next?

Here are the latest numbers of signatures:

Now that we've delivered the manifesto to Ariel Guarco, he will review it and hopefully decide to take it to the operational side, Jeroen Douglas, ICA Director General. We'll work with Mr Guarco to ensure that this happens.

So we have at least two paths for further work. 1) to develop the language we want to use in further communications with ICA and 2) to draft a second version that picks up on some the sticking points in the first version. Please point out any other paths that you believe would be useful in furthering the reach and message of the Cooperative Digital Infrastructure Manifesto.

Develop language to use with ICA

As a reminder, here are the items we suggested. We'll need to flesh them out:

1. Encourage standardization and interoperability, focusing on cooperative and citizen needs, (collective) consent, and democratic open (API) structures, within the cooperative economy and its various sectors.

2. Call for and support tech development based on open standards, to ensure standardization doesn’t pave the way only for commercial platforms. 

3. Promote solutions that are FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).

4. Create knowledge and support hub(s) that educate cooperators and developers on these issues, and that cooperatives can turn to for finding open-source solutions and asking questions concerning the use of them. 

5. Call upon (local) governments for support: invest a percentage of innovation budgets in the cooperative digital commons, support cooperative start-ups, and make policies that favor platform cooperatives.

In thinking about this, I have some points that I believe might be useful, in no particular order of priority or presentation and not necessarily corresponding to the suggestions in the manifesto. Please comment on these and add your own to the discussion:

• Cooperatives all over the world are buying technology from capitalist companies not from the cooperative ecosystem. So we're buying into a supporting companies which do not share our values, and don't necessarily provide the features that we need as cooperatives.

• An entire tech cooperative ecosystem is seeking work and available to support the entire cooperative ecosystem. And many of us provide our deepest discounts to cooperatives and solidarity entities. In the spirit of Principle 6, Cooperation among Cooperatives, we should be giving business to this sector.

• The tech cooperative ecosystem skews younger than the cooperative ecosystem as a whole, so by encouraging these cooperatives, ICA would be working on its goal of attracting more young people to the movement.

• As an ecosystem, we should own and operate the technologies we use, in the spirit of Principle 5, Autonomy and Independence.

Version 2 of the Manifesto

We invite you to comment on and tighten up the manifesto. The first version of the manifesto was created by a small group of people. In the second version, we want to ensure a input from a much broader group of drafters.

We delivered the Manifesto to Ariel Guarco

Manuel Leiva, Redjar Cooperative and President of FACTTIC (a tech coop federation located in Argentina) and Steve Ediger, ChiCommons LWCA, Data Commons Cooperative, USFWC Tech Peer Network, and Patio (an international network of tech coops) delivered the Cooperative Digital Infrastructure Manifesto to Ariel Guarco on November 27th, 2024 in New Delhi, India at the International Cooperative Alliance’s (ICA) Global Cooperative Conference 2024. Mr Guarco had been well-prepared for the meeting and delivery by one of his colleagues from FACTTIC and was open to talking about the issues. Of course, we were just delivering it to him for the first time, so he did not have any immediate response. However, he indicated that he would review it, and, if he did not have any problems with it, he would facilitate our presentation of the manifesto to Jeroen Douglas, Director General of ICA.

There has been discussion of created a Manifesto version 2.0. We also might choose to wait and see what we can develop out of the first manifesto as it works its way through ICA channels. Also, we might do both. Let’s discuss it here.

Please continue to sign the Manifesto. We’ll update ICA on new signatures.

Greetings. We have not been very active on this channel, because we've been out gathering signatures. Here's the tally as of this moment, and more individuals, cooperatives and federations are signing on daily.

We are pleased to announce that we are arranging to deliver the manifesto in person to Mr Guarco at the International Cooperative Alliance General Conference (25-30 November 2024).

This signifies only the beginning of our work. This call will be followed up with actions and opportunities to get involved in building technology for the ecosystem. Also, we'll be starting on follow-up actions and a new version of the manifesto, with more teeth, and to a larger set of stakeholders.

The UN has declared 2025 as the International Year of the Cooperative. We believe that technology cooperatives can provide the tools to make 2025 truly the International Year of the Cooperative.

@Martha Giraldo Hi, Sorry, I did not see this post earlier. I'm not sure how we got connected, but thank you for joining! We are intending to deliver this manifesto/open letter this month at the International Cooperative Alliance meeting in New Delhi.

Dear Noemi, I already signed the manifesto but I see the last posts are form February this year, I don´t know where is the actual discussion. By the way, I would like to know where did you got my name and interest?

Thank you very much!,

Martha Giraldo

MINGAnet ( http://www.minganet.org/ ) coordinator

De: Noemi Giszpenc (via Loomio)
Enviado el: domingo, 29 de septiembre de 2024 3:09 p. m.
Para: [email protected]
Asunto: [cooperative-digital-infrastructure] Manifesto for sharing and commons

Hi @Yasuaki Kudo - thanks for the info and your email, I tried to reply but messages to your @yasuaki.com address seem to be bouncing back for me... :(

Hello @Oli SB and everyone, my neighbors in our small town in Japan are considering proposing for https://dataempowerment.fund/#open-call , based on the idea of town mapping, promoting democratic and vibrant town building through community control of data. (@Oli SB, I will contact you separately on this!)

I have known about this initiative through @Steve Ediger (ChiCommons), but I feel that instead of singling out and asking the ICA to take action, it's more effective to establish a democratic institution and invite any interested party, including potentially the ICA?

Maybe I am lacking some background knowledge but just wanted to share with you my impession!

Hi All,

I'm very happy to have discovered this thread and the work on the Manifesto [thanks @Noemi Giszpenc ;) ]

the open letter to the ICA reads like it was specifically designed to get the ICA to support Murmurations (and other projects!) so it is music to our ears - I have signed up.

Murmurations is an open protocol (which we have been developing for 3 years) which enables easy sharing of data across platforms - making it interoperable with data from other networks...

We have developed a range of tools which are all open source and free to use, to help you map your networks, build directories, share offers and wants and any other kind of open data...

We're running a demo on the 16th Jan - please join if you would like to learn more.

We will be demonstrating the new Wordpress Plugins we have developed, which show how co-ops can connect and share more with each other, by bypassing the big tech giants - i.e. the perfect answers to points 1, 2 and 3 in the open letter ;)

In cooperation!

Oli

@Noemi Giszpenc - hi Noemi, no - I'm not aware of any.

It's a conversation that needs to be grown. There are already AI architectures that are being used (especially in business localization) - most of which still require a human-in-the-loop - however, the accuracy rate is now basically equivalent to human translations. Not for all languages, only the select few deemed "large" or "influential" enough.

The need is real. And the potential seems massive. Auto-translation of Twitter from Ukrainian into other European languages is what pressured the EU to get involved. I'm not thrilled that the primary example is military, but it makes the point. When we (the general citizenry) understand and can communicate with each other easily across languages, this leads to new alliances.

@Stephanie Jo Kent That would be a great feature of code and platforms built by and for cooperators. Right now, we have the manifesto in Spanish (see https://datacommons.coop/es/manifiesto-de-cooperativo-infraestructura-digital/), but we don't have a translation of this Loomio thread into any other languages. Do you know of tech infrastructure that would allow that?