Nathan Schneider @ntnsndr@social.coop

Well there may not be a snow closure announcement despite crazy snow today, but at least the @CUBoulder website's top headline today is on our co-op conference last week! https://www.colorado.edu/

@Matt_Noyes @bhaugen @ntnsndr @clayton @natstein agreed. The event was also part of a conference series on "conscious capitalism." That's a term I don't identify with either. But it created an opportunity, I think, to advance more direct challenges to capitalism.

@GuerillaOntologist @tbeckett totally. you're so right about all this.

Today in the quiet co-op consensus: David Brooks talking up worker ownership for the gig economy. https://nyti.ms/2DaRdGA

@Matt_Noyes @natstein @clayton

Totally. "Shared ownership" was chosen for the specific purpose of creating a certain kind of big tent. If we'd focused on more "solidarity economy" framing we wouldn't have gotten many of the legacy Colorado coop players for whom that language doesn't come naturally. The purpose was to create a particular kind of bridge with that event, not to say this language is better than other language.

@neil thanks for this! Totally. Multiplicity is great for lots of stuff but they generally tend to thrive when there is also some centralized force preventing monopolization.

So I guess this means now we're going to find practical, bipartisan, compromise solutions to all of our problems, right?

Don't miss this video on LGC Security, a Black-owned company growing fast thanks in part to being a vendor for @cpaCoop, a mission-driven DC-area purchasing group: https://www.cpa.coop/blog-1/2018/11/2/lgc-security-grows-like-wildfire-with-cpa-co-op

@Greg I say so as someone who lives in and helps uphold a similar kind of place.

@Greg it might depend on what you look like. I once felt that way there but then wondered if others might have a different experience. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/31/portland-white-supremacy-racism-train-stabbing-murder

@bhaugen accountability may be less necessary under decentralization, depending on what that means. It's only needed when exit isn't a real option. I don't need a store I never need to go to to be accountable to me. I do need the city water utility to be.

@bhaugen Thanks. To me, an upshot of this paper's argument is that we can't just have protocols. Or, we can't have decentralization without there also being centralization. And so we should design great decentralized protocols, but we also need great (accountable) centralized platforms.

@bhaugen thanks for this! I definitely don't mean it as automatically pejorative. What word(s) would you be more comfortable with there. I just mean something like "a system of thought with political and social force".

@Matt_Noyes @mattcropp yay!

@bhaugen I'm not sure the meaning of that word is especially controversial. What differences in defining it would make a difference worth mentioning?

@clayton @Matt_Noyes Fantastic!

Cooperatives Europe is circulating a call for proposals (€26,000) for a "knowledge base" platform on co-op development. Any takers? https://coopseurope.coop/resources/news/call-proposals-development-cooperative-knowledge-base #platformcoop

The Ubuntu release cycle is starting to feel like a liturgical calendar for me. Here we go, back into the desert of non-LTS.