Abstract
The Co-operative Cloud is an international, democratic federation with members representing developers, administrators, and users of our system for setting up community technology infrastructure.
Since 2020, our tools and configuration have been used by worker co-operatives, trade unions, artistic collectives, friend groups, other libre software projects, & home-hosters to provide privacy-supporting, user-empowering platforms to their members and supporters. Co-op Cloud has been used on recycled servers and upcycled laptops as well as traditional "cloud" providers, helping extend the useful life of otherwise-forgotten hardware, & squeeze the most out of cheapest hosting providers' cheapest services.
In this livestream (hosted on a Co-op Cloud Owncast instance) we'll get into detail on the governance side of Co-op Cloud: the issues we saw with other models of community-building and software maintenance which led us here, our inspirations in building the Co-op Cloud Federation, the resources that have supported us along the way, & some tales of the rough and the smooth of our experiment so far.
We hope this session, including Q&A, will be useful to anyone involved, in or considering starting, a public-interest technology project.
Community-operated social networks, governance, and moderation, Open licensing and business models