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A gentle introduction inside the ecosystem |
The Open Cooperative Ecosystem is an open networked organization that works toward creating and assembling economic and organizational software for use by groups working for systemic change on the ground. Our work is toward a collection of small opensource software applications that interoperate using standard vocabularies and protocols, to provide operational and analytical infrastructure, something similar to an operational system for a community.
Groups seeking change have many difficulties obtaining useful software. Our goal is to have freely available, modular, pluggable, and well documented applications, that can be assembled to meet a community's needs. This will allow future developers to create new open source applications for a group's specific needs or as technology advances, in their choice of languages, and plug them in relatively seamlessly. It will also allow existing software apps to create the linkage to be able to plug into the software ecosystem.
We are developers as well as facilitators, activists and users of our own applications. We have a committed core team with strong heterogeneous skill set and collectively many decades of experience. We also have looser circles of developers around the core that work on specific apps as needed. We always work in close collaboration with user groups actively working for change, so that all the work remains grounded in real needs, and immediately useful software is created.
In the past several years, we have worked with several food networks, and sensorica, an open value network that designs opensource hardware. As of over a year ago, we are focusing primarily on the needs of FairCoop and Bank of the Commons, with secondary work with Mutual Aid Network.
We have taken an economic model that originated in academia called REA (Resources- Events - Agents), and further developed it for the fair and sustainable economic networks of the future. This continues to inform all of our work.
Inside an Open Cooperative Ecosystem any kind of events can be represented:
- flexible networks of networks relationships
- resource management and recipes
- planning and coordination for producing, using, exchanging and sharing value
- tracking events that produce, use, exchange and share value
- tracking contributions from individual network members of work and resources
- connecting value streams from idea to manufacture to end use and following them back
- distributing income according to contributions using "value equation" decided by contributors
- accounting views for a network, organization, project, individual
The main point of an Open Cooperative Ecosystem is that everything is connected to everything else, thanks to its underlying syntax model: REA
It can handle any economic relationships, value networks, distribution of value and ecological requirements.
We are developing software for transitioning to the next economy. Not this economy, the next economy.The next economy must be driven by human and ecological needs rather than profit. And it will be networked.
The Open Apps Cooperative Ecosystem team is an open nonhierarchical group. Our governance is based on open assemblies and consensus decisions.
Since our main focus is ecosystem interoperability and interconnections, we welcome any kind of diversity and experiments that can bring values to the ecosystem and can test the boundaries of our protocols and tools.
Our workflow so far includes weekly meetings to update ourself about our on going work and monthly meeting to shape together with the ecosystem our roadmap, plus daily chat to foster collaboration and development.
All our work code, documents, articles are released opensource from the beginning.
We think that a digital cooperative ecosystem nowadays is critical to spread selfmanagement activities and help the creation of alternative realities based on cooperation, decentralisation of power and mutualism. We try to embody these values in the way we craft our software and ensure that the protocols and tools we build allows these possibilities.
You can follow the instruction to create your own instance of the Open cooperative ecosystem, or register to the faircoop one, and join the faircoop network.
Join the Welcome or the Devs telegram group.
We accept donation in faircoin: fNwjJzntaQ8P95mappWQkEiSVrtDqDzj4X