Dear all ,                                                          November 17, 2016

Four days have passed since our event. I immediately jumped back into teaching but now I have a moment to thank you for your contribution. But this is more than the usual “Thank-Yous.”

More than 2000 people watched the video live stream and the archived videos are now available here and in the Internet Archive just like in previous years. In the end of this email, I’m linking to a lovely Shareable article by Darren Sharp about our gathering.

A few photos taken on Friday by Christopher Chavez are available on Flickr. And unsurprisingly, there are hundreds of tweets at hashtag #platformcoop.

Before the end of the year, we’ll also make a short documentary on platform cooperativism available to you.

Last week, the people who had committed to the consortium met, got to know each other, and were able to start planning future actions. I promised you that this consortium will not be another academic bullshit center. And indeed, you will see concrete actions coming out of it in 2017 already. 

Apart from the upcoming #platformcoop events in Melbourne, London, Québec, Berlin, Naples, Barcelona, Boston, Amsterdam, as well as Brussels, all scheduled for the winter 2016 and spring of 2017, we also made concrete plans to establish legal foundations for platform co-ops in the United States.

Out of our long list of planned activities on the Consortium website, we will prioritize three most urgent projects for 2017. 

We also discussed and identified people who will be on the board of the consortium. For now, these include Mayo Fuster, Six Silverman, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Micky Metts, Felix Weth, Fredrik Soderqvist (still working on him), and yours truly. The idea is to have representatives from unions, academe, platform co-ops, policymakers, traditional co-ops, technologists, and designers. Down the road we should vote on this. This group was not elected.

Next, I’d like to invite all of you to financially support the Platform Cooperativism Consortium. If you’d like to donate, just email me. It’ll be a painless and quick process.  And on that front, I already have some good news.

#Platformcoop  newsletter
It just took a few days, and we already managed to raise funds and hire one half-time researcher who will start next week! 

This person will 1) create a #platformcoop newsletter and distribute that in our network, informing people of current developments in the ecosystem. If you would like to feed this researcher information about your project, we would really appreciate it. 2) This person will also work on fundraising and communication (responding to people who need advice, connecting them, etc), and 3) keep the platform.coop website up to date.

Do keep us updated about your events so that we can promote them on platform.coop and cover stories about your projects.

Feedback
Gathering like ours always have the inevitable tension between squeezing in as many relevant people/projects as possible while not creating an overly exhausting schedule. As if that was not enough, this is also a meeting of various cultures: technologists, scholars, social entrepreneurs, and policy makers. I would appreciate if you send me some feedback: What worked well and what could we do better in November 2017. I’d think, for example, that we should have more focus on discussion throughout the event and a slightly more relaxed schedule. Also let us know what you think about relatively banal things like snacks and drinks. Was there enough of it and would you have preferred other food? Did you think that the room worked out or would you rather be in a more traditional auditorium? 

When you send your feedback, please also include suggestions for speakers for next year’s event already. Issues that I already identified for the 2017 event include cooperative investigative reporting (e.g., Banyan Project, Positive News).

Sponsor the 2017 Event
Please consider becoming a sponsor of next year's event. So far we have a  $15,000 commitment from the university. That covers coffee and bagels and the program. These events cost roughly $35,000. If you are committed to these events, please let us know if your organization or you personally could co-sponsor our next gathering.

As promised, you can read Darren's Shareable article here.

Thank you all for your contributions.

Warmest,
Trebor

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R. Trebor Scholz

@trebors