Aafter a detailed discussion about who shall participate in the Cooperative Hackathon & Conference, we as a team of 6 participants registered to both the events happening in the same venue. It is one of its kind where Cooperative sector laying strong roads to nurture Cooperative principles while taking a serious look on technology and its effect on contemporary socio-economic conditions. This has provided a better platform for budding cooperatives - to network among ourselves. Apart from that, we collectively considered the integrated hackathon only as a side kick in our journey. Let this story be my rememberance of our experience on collective traveling, public speaking, collective hacking, constructive criticism, community education, skin thickening & critical thinking.
With United Nations 2030 SDG (Sustainable Development Goals), being in air for sometime, it is good that some of the crucial goals are towards cooperative economic and business models. While goals are being conducive for networked cooperatives - economic model, it also feels ambitious while the current dominant economic system in place bog down such efforts. This has further oxidized our interest to see how these could be worked out in cooperative sectors. In the world where business models are channeling towards success formulas, with more and more startups becoming prey to extractive systems, these goals seems not only idealistic but also hard effort for alternative economics. But still, it is commendable for proposing such a guideline to attain them in ethically pragmatic way. But for us, at individual & collective level, such goals cannot be met without criticizing dominant systems& status quo, by acting at local/micro levels, as well as by creating networks for dealing with macro level problems.
CooPon = {Cooperative} + {Pondycherry} - which is a Science & Technology focused coop, emerged from a community spirit that sprouted out from the network of several Free Software & Open Hardware communities. I am pretty much late to join this community in first place, where prior to my joining, several community projects were being practiced - from fun to serious social intervention. This has sparked me to communicate more with FSHM group in Pondicherry because of alignment in interests and thought process. After a long boring history, i kind of became a loosely coupled part of the community, as i always had been in any other tech. communities/forums. But this relationship is a little tighter.
With few of us seriously discussing about alternate life styles, we ended up discussing about socio-political-economy and have thus far understood as much as we can. We also took collective online courses often as recommended by P2P foundation. One of such is the Cooperative Economics, where personally i have learned its resilient history and case studies in the cooperative sectors in the current mixed economy, globally. From such proofs & inspiration observing its working at numeous places, have further catalysed our discussions on pragmatizing the alternative economic model matching our current skill, knowledge and economic reach.
I have to admit, that i am little bit older in the group :) But believe me i am much younger in mind. Now keeping that apart, being rolling myself in the roads of awesome world of depression, cognitive dissonance, took a constant break from usual work culture - boring R & D and allowed myself to learn, practice more on independent research and how to pragmatize it at personal level. This is when i have indulged in analyzing few of social issues i would like to research and share it with others. This is when our RIOT communication channel have been seriously discussing about viable product or service that the community can handle and deliver with cooperative organization strategy that we learnt from the shoulders of yester-generations & internet. This has led us together to create a cooperative in Pondycherry itself, while still some of us working in other organizations; some being full time or freelancing, have engaged to not only use the cooperative model to sustain ourselves aligned with out passion, but also through which we would like to see a progressive change even when it would bring a small social impact.
We have been expecting this event from January of 2018. In the meantime, our organizing and development activities had went through significant changes and influenced our way of association, deliberation, etc... After deciding who needs to participate in both the conference and coopathon we have managed to take part in both and learn as much as possible from both sessions. Our cooperative mode of working has enabled us to shift the focus from competition in the hackathon to networking, critical thinking and questioning researchers, experts, etc.. participating in the event, there by we can actually understand how the overlap between the cooperative sector and technocratic sphere will emerge. The above photos show the whole coopon cooperative worker group along with organizers and other participants. Without boring any further, lets excurse how the days have been spent by us at the event.