Our goal with Ampled is to create a platform that is 100 percent owned by its users—our artists, workers, and community—-not investors. It’s why we decided to become a cooperative instead of a standard Delaware C Corporation. However, cooperative or not, building any tech-enabled platform like Ampled requires real resources. It requires people, time, sweat—and money.
If you are looking to connect with the co-op world on-line there are a number of resources. However, a unique one is social.coop. This is a cooperative owned and managed social network site through Open Collective. There is no cost to join or participate; however, if you want to be a voting member, that level of participation starts at $1 per month.
Submission deadline is January 17th.
Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Studies in Co-operation (CASC) / Conférence annuelle de l'Association canadienne
pour les études en coopération (ACÉC)
Western University
London, Ontario Canada
June/Juin 3, 4, 5, 2020[Le français suit]
Bridging Divides: Promoting Economic, Social, and Cultural Democracy
Community kitchens are popping up all around the country and they are truly spaces that can make the world a better place, create friendships and make our neighbourhood feel more connected. One myth that needs to be dispelled is that community kitchens are not only for those in dire need and should be and are for everyone regardless of if you can afford a meal or not.
This has been a significant year for the cooperative digital economy. In this age of pessimism, we need bold near-term alternatives such as digital cooperatives that build a more democratic future with shared prosperity.
The New Belgium sale, however, has one good consequence—it has clarified the essential difference between ESOP 100% employee-owned companies and worker cooperatives. ESOPs are capitalist enterprises where individual values dominate, while worker cooperatives are collective ventures struggling to maintain their values in a hostile environment. This may seem an obvious distinction, but the past practices of cooperatives have ignored the implications of this distinction.
Like movies, TV shows, and books, games are often a reflection of our cultural values. They can also impact and shape what we think about and what we do. That’s why The TESA Collective makes and publishes games that are about fighting for a better future and trying to envision the world we want to live in. It’s also why we team up with other organizations to build games for their causes.
We don’t have a team like a traditional startup. We have people with varying levels of commitment ranging from full time dedication, developers committing nights and weekends, and an orbit of advisors and mentors – all unified around our mission of making music more equitable for artists. Very few of us have been a member of any cooperative. Some of us have started companies before, but none of us have started a co-op.
Platform co-operativism has one advantage compared to many other movements that have shaped the digital economy, such as open-source or blockchain. It is part of a 1.2 billion members strong, 150 year old movement, with a central global organisation. Open source advocates saw Microsoft as the enemy they faced alone, for blockchain it was the big banks. For platform co-operatives, there already exists a co-operative that is a bank and bigger than Microsoft in revenue, the French Credit Agricole.
(function() {var qs,js,q,s,d=document, gi=d.getElementById, ce=d.createElement, gt=d.getElementsByTagName, id="soun_der", b="https://embed.sounder.fm/";if(!gi.call(d,id)) { js=ce.call(d,"script"); js.id=id; js.src=b+"embed.js"; q=gt.call(d,"script")[0]; q.parentNode.insertBefore(js,q)}})()
Chris, Lynne, and Michael all faced significant challenges to employment and each have their own horror stories to tell about short-term menial jobs, and employers who don’t understand that on some days they simply could not get out of bed.
Michael says he had almost lost hope. “I have been diagnosed with depression and [even though I’d submit] applications to every business hiring, they didn’t return calls. When you get no answer and you’ve got depression, you kind of lose hope and just stop caring.”
