Manifesto for sharing and commons

Hi all, Following up on our great conversation, here is a draft for Open Letter to President of the ICA Ariel Guarco. It's a bit hard to edit here, so I posted it here. It's just a draft, a suggestion, feel free to edit. I spoke with the ICA today and they highly encouraged the letter especially as Mr Guarco is also managing director for now. Can we send it next week? https://pad.riseup.net/p/cooperative_data_commons-keep

@Trebor Scholz thanks! I changed quite a bit, hope you like it. I've also send it to some of my colleagues today. Shall we aim for a final draft end of next week?

@Trebor Scholz Did you mean that you wanted to send it to Ariel Guarco next (this) week? I think that we can have a draft ready to circulate among other cooperatives, consoritiums, and federations, by this week. It will take some time to get their input and signatures, before we're ready to send it to ICA.

It's a bit different in format, as the open letter format --while still a manifesto of sorts, is more practically helpful.

I've read through it and added a discussion point about the initial framing being with farmers, as well as a few other suggested additions. I've copied it to my ChiCommons Owners for their feedback, as well as to USFWC (Tech Peer Network) and Patio (a tech co-op federation in formation, with serious ICA contacts) for their immediate feedback.

I've avoided sending it further until we get through the first draft, but am poised to spread the word through other co-op and data contacts. When we release the draft, we'll want to start inviting comments and signoff from as many relevant cooperatives, consortiums, and federations as possible.

@Steve Ediger (ChiCommons) I changed it to include several (for society crucial) domains. Perhaps these umbrella cooperatives such as energie-samen with econobis (in NL), REScoop (in EU), CoopCycle (in FR), themobilityfactory.coop (in Belgium) and probably several others are interesting, perhaps as examples of initiatives that deserve more global attention and support

I'll make sure that DataCommons gets our feedback in as soon as possible.

Great! I will have a look at it tomorrow and send it to my colleagues. I think it would be nice to put more emphasis on sectoral alignment and focus on standardisation, open-tech and simultaneous support with making both data and code FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable)

Thanks @Trebor Scholz for starting this and @Thomas van Dijk and @Steve Ediger (ChiCommons) for contributing. I am going to put some thoughts here because I'm not sure how they fit in to the letter.

• cooperatives and cooperators have needs that are not well-served by privately-controlled platforms. These may be for privacy/safety, for representation/accuracy/responsiveness to local contexts, for democratic supports (such as voting, decision-making, membership, etc), and for principled sharing (e.g. only with approved others or for approved purposes). There are probably other needs I am not thinking of, perhaps for shared benefits.

• while sharing ultimately saves resources, time and money, the initial set-up of shareable code and data takes greater resources, which is difficult for constrained cooperators, and this is why we are calling on apex organisations and governments to provide support. ( @Thomas van Dijk I liked your suggestion during the (un)conference session about naming a percentage of innovation budgets to be spent on sharing platforms!)

• @Steve Ediger (ChiCommons) I am unclear on the hybrid or dual approach, what that refers to in the text.

  • That said, one thing I am clear on is that sharing is not a once-and-done event but an ongoing process that requires attention, updating, consensus-building, education, and development.

• I am excited to learn more about the types of platforms that you indicated, @Thomas van Dijk . Would it be good to include existing projects that are attempting to build parts of the needed ecosystem, such as CoopCreds for validating identity? DataUnion for providing rewards for engagement? This would be to indicate that we not so much want to create a new thing as bring together the existing projects, articulate shared vision, identify gaps, and think creatively about priorities and methods for further development.

• It may be overkill but I might emphasise the point further about regular people being not that tech-savvy and being approached by platforms that make things easy but whose goal is to exploit them. We will need to also make things easy with the goal of empowering and safeguarding, and to make things easy will take a lot of resources in terms of testing, design, refinement, etc.

@Noemi Giszpenc Thanks good points, I integrated some. Maybe it needs more of a manifesto vibe to it. Clearer, shorter statements. Did put back the urgent call of Trebor in the beginning. I'm open to change.

Perhaps we can begin by agreeing here what 4 activities (or any other random number) are that we wish the ICA would work on. What is the ultimate aim? Are we talking about a supercoop - where coop tech can be developed, like a github for coops? Or a repository where coop tech can be evaluated and "peer" reviewed? A todogroup for coops? https://todogroup.org/ https://ospomindmap.todogroup.org/

the four points are now:

    1. Standardisation and interoperability, focussed on cooperative and citizen needs, (collective) consent and democratic open (API) structures. 

    2. Call for and support open-source tech development, based on open standards, to ensure standardisation doesn't pave the way only for commercial platforms. Promote solutions that are FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and re-usable)      

    3. Creation of knowledge and support hub(s) where cooperatives can turn to for finding open-source solutions and questions concerning the use of it. 

    4. 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. 

It could include a statement to build the foundations of a public digital infrastructure, a digital commons, on top of which cooperatives can thrive, and regular people can also use them. Building on the argument: >93% of all digital infrastructure is already open-source, it's time the cooperative sector makes use of it. It would emphasise the needed support for the cooperative layer on top of this massive open-source infrastructure. To call for investments in user-friendly open-source applications and UI and the support for companies and organisations that implement this, can also be part of it.

Food for thought