a contribution to Platform cooperatives in New York City 13 & 14 November 2015
Hello cooperators!
I had planned to be with you these two days but life has decided otherwise.
I was willing to share with you our Spirit of Cooperation to create Cooperative Platforms, to present my insights and our current work (“Wezer” see bellow) and to weave projects & teams to unleash our potentials.
I agree with Neal Gorenfo’s diagnosis in his recent Shareable.net post. And I’m joyful to feel more and more people nourishing this Dynamic all over the world. Yes we urgently need to provide to citizens an open framework for collaborative apps!
We need a framework of interoperable Apps that replicate the largest commercial platforms most adopted one (Facebook, Airbnb, Blablacar, Uber, TaskRabbit…) and others we haven’t thought of yetcreate new. They must help us manage collaboration, cooperation, production, consumption, innovation, communication, administration and be set up with multiple currencies and reputation indicators. We must be able very soon to satisfy our daily needs without “Death Star” platforms or Death currencies euros/dollars.
Our non-profit association “Valeureux” proposes awakening, training, coaching and facilitation about « wealth actualization’ to grassroots organizations. We offer high expertise consultancy in politic and economic for P2P wealth-makers on a reciprocity-bases.
From my former career as software engineer I’ve incubated an apps framework for open cooperation and have tried for years to inspire coders to make it. Eventually we decided to build it within Valeureux and we chose Odoo as it appears to be the more efficient ways to deliver quick useful apps, and also inspire others projects and coders by showing success cases. We have selected Odoo because it’s open-source with strong open licence AGPL3, it’s worldly used with several region-specific setup, it’s does already main accounting economic functionalities for manyany kind of organizations. We made this choice also because Odoo is in Python so it’s easy to fork and create new modules and because OCA (Odoo Community Association) is quite active and wide.
Wezer, the “dynamize the we” platform has been launched in January 2015, and there are now 5 communities using it and several more waiting for it.
Wezer is a framework of modular apps linked by workflow to save data-entry and increase data intelligence. We have started by the MVC “Minimum Viable Cooperation” connecting existing key apps with innovative key modules.
The plan is to provide:
- all business value chain apps (customer relate management, sell, purchase, accounting, pay-roll, supply, point of sales, marketing…) ;
- some Facebook like apps: profile, groups, discussions, events, messages, chat
- and WordPress/Google apps: Blog, Calendar, Library, Forum ;
- an Ebay/Kickstarter like app: customizablemultiple currency P2P market place ;
- and Trello/Glassfrog like apps: project, task and meeting management ;
- with Loomio/Doodle apps: deliberation, decision ;
- all gamified with customizable multiple indicators ;
- and geographic and thematic maps.
The current available Wezer MVC comprises the five first item above and we need HELP to go further and serve communities.
Getting resources is hard. We’ve got donations, volunteered since 5 years, applied unsuccessfully for 10 bids, and we are now reaching a point of exhaustion. One possible way to overcome “Web agency profit behavior” while having enough resources is to create a “social inclusion association” where we’ll teach youth to serve Wezer communities being funded by French government – but this requires time and effort.
So we are looking for strong cooperation with other projects, communities which can pay us/coders, XML and Python coders, community managers, trainers, money to pay contributors.
We also look for the day when our contributions to a commons project can help us ‘buy’ in other networks. In Wezer ecosystem, any type of contributions is recorded using VALs unit. We can use this VALs to exchange among us and moreover to distribute fairly euros when they come. So tomorrow I wish I can pay my vegetables with some VALs, for instance using “The Credit Commons” proposed by Matthew Slater, or “Love” currency, proposed by Primavera de Philippi.
I know Odoo is not the most advanced and web 3.0 tech but it’s the most efficient outcome we can make available today. Further steps will be truly distributive with API, Blockchain, GNU social, Web semantic… but now The Crisis urge us to be able to satisfy everybody daily needs with less euros/dollars. All of us must have easy access to tech tools that facilitate us to produce, consume and collaborate locally and fairly while keep sovereignty and privacy. The Greek people are waiting for us!
We, actors of Platform cooperativism, need to unite on the Essential and cooperate seriously.
We may map all IT functionalities needed to accelerate economic and political sovereignty, and then gather and combine existing/in process projects. Humorously cooperation between ourselves is the only way to have enough resources to succeed in making cooperation tools. We are since now very scattered, isolated and starveling, many projects stopped, enormous amount of energy is wasted and time is running!!
Let’s let our ego aside and join our Force toward « The more beautiful world our heart know is possible »!
I am ready to let Wezer aside and help other projects more appropriate,
I am ready to open a collaborative space in wezer.org to synchronise active groups on this subject
I am ready to join a Credit Commons circuit
I am ready to contribute to active groups willing to nourish Platform Cooperativism
and you?
Wezer is currently actor of these platform cooperativism initiatives:
- Digital Synergy Day in Paris 8th december 12/2015 (during Cop21) https://www.facebook.com/events/433469586842682/
- Wezer ecosystem
- group “plateformes collaboratives France”
- groupe “Alternatiba mutualisation”
- The Solidarity Economy Software Coordination Initiative
- Open Vocabulary
- Open Map for Communs
- Fair-Coop
More information
- presentation site in French: http://valeureux.org/wezer/
- Collaborative space to make Wezer: wezer.org
- Donate and Contribute: http://valeureux.org/contact-newsletter/
- Teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLsL-aOpv3o (unblocked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZIIqhzik1s)
- White Paper: http://valeureux.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Wezer-white-paper-v1-1.pdf
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Wezer-615727571822407/?fref=ts
- Sybille FLOSS4P2P presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muDCOkPwUJ0 ppt https://copy.com/KtWu9YIoVaWeq7oI