open source

Democratic control is fundamental to cooperative values: it's the second item of the ICA/Rochdale Principles1 , after being open to all. For most cooperatives, however, democracy means coop members can submit resolutions and vote on these at an AGM (Annual General Meeting) under the principle of one member one vote.

A community-led database of video fingerprints

Introducing a proof-of-concept for a community-run database of rights ownership claims for both Creative Commons and Web Monetizable videos, matched with their ISCC fingerprints.

CiviCRM is regularly used to received payments in – donations, ticket sales or membership fees – but what about automating payments out?

An online event during Covid lockdowns looking at how groups in Canada, Germany, Spain, UK and USA used civic tech to support local communities in their Covid response.

In 2016, joined CiviCRM to contribute to the project and better understand open source. Contributions include raising £5k from Mozilla Open Source Seed Fund for Core Team and community research, raising further funding for Code55 to security audit the software, making a cross-CMS theme, Finsbury Park, to update the outdated CiviCRM interface.

Given Uber's ability – in spite of owning no cars and employing no drivers – to swiftly grow and dominate any market it enters, there's understandably a lot of interest in a driver-owned Coop competitor, not least amidst growing controversies and opposition. In this article, two coop structures are explored, as well as a third, more open and decentralised protocol option.

A short essay for Geo Coop on what makes worker-on-demand (WoD) service Uber unique and what it would take for the cooperative world to do the same. Some extracts:

Uberfication has become shorthand for many new concepts—from the sharing economy to any significantly disruptive digital business model. But what exactly did Uber do that was materially different to earlier disruptive digital businesses?

In short:

Not before time, the new year started with some promising news about selling films online. For the first time, the annual decline in DVD and Blu-ray sales in the US has been outstripped by the growth in digital sales, rentals and subscriptions. Home entertainment rose 0.7% in 2013 (PDF source). $6.5bn – over a third of total consumer spending – came from digital rental, retail and subscriptions, with download-to-own rising a hefty 48% on 2012.

While co-ops and open source both exist within capitalism, and in some ways help drive it, they run contrary to its orthodoxy - as does most of the digital space, driven by unpaid activity. They could offer each other much: making the web more publicly controlled, and mobilising networked people to solve complex real world problems.

This project was motivated by the struggle producers and distributors have to make a return on their work. With online revenues for films still uncertain, exhibition income is more important than ever, as it remains one market where people are happy to pay for content - and the market is healthy and growing. The music industry has weathered many of the challenges of the digital transition thru a resurgence in festivals, touring and concerts, which overtook sales of singles and albums in 2009, as the biggest earner.