Survey of potential data-sharing organizations

We are surveying the needs of organizations that maintain lists of their membership or constituency and see a need for collaborative data-sharing. Tilt the future in your favor by taking the survey.

Thanks to all who already did so: NASCO, Cooperative Development Institute, Cooperative Maine, U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, Southwest Cooperative Development Center, Northwest Cooperative Development Center, Food Co-op Initiative, Third Coast Workers for Cooperation, Valley Alliance of Worker Co-operatives, Democracy Collaborative, Canadian Worker Co-op Federation, Common Enterprise Development Corporation, New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives, Madison Worker Cooperatives, Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives, Ontario Co-operative Association, Cooperative Development Foundation, Ownership Appalachia, Ohio Employee Ownership Center... We really appreciate it!

FACT Social Justice Challenge 2010

Voting for the FACT Social Justice Challenge 2010 is now open on NetSquared. The goal of the challenge is to use web or mobile technologies to foster collaboration around social justice issues. The DCP has a proposal in there, which we invite you to vote for:

• http://www.netsquared.org/projects/data-commons-project

We propose building a collaborative directory of the rooted economy.

Our goal is to develop a democratically controlled, accurate, comprehensive, publicly searchable and updatable database of cooperative economic initiatives in North America. Rather than building just another website, we're experimenting with doing so in a (de-geekified) version of how programmers develop the open-source Linux code.

A vibrant movement for a cooperative and democratic economy is growing in North America. Offering innovative and effective alternatives to the “business as usual” of the distant, unaccountable corporations that dominate our economic, social and political landscape, cooperative enterprises and the organizations that support them are building an economy that truly works for people and the planet. But these efforts are often fragmented by geography, sector, and even organizational form. To succeed in changing the economic status quo, people need to find each other, help each other, work together, and be counted.

We're working on several fronts to make this happen. We're compiling a list of directories of the rooted economy (see http://datacommoners.blogspot.com and let us know about more to add, big and small). We are on track to create a Data Commons Cooperative to foster collaboration in the long term. We are developing free and open source software to show directories and make them editable, wiki-style (see http://proto.find.coop, source code at http://launchpad.net/datacommons - this directory will be used by Cooperative Maine, the California Center for Cooperative Development, and the Regional Index of Cooperation). In the course of our work, we've found that plenty of small and large groups are willing to share their data, but that right now it costs a lot more (in time) to do so than it ought to. People like to keep their data in spreadsheets or databases on their computers, and many are reluctant to move those online (e.g. to services like Google Docs). This is understandable, since it is most comfortable to edit data this way, and databases often have fields that should not be made public or stored externally. But that means sharing data can be a tedious and messy business of filtering, exporting, emailing, hand-merging, etc. Another sore spot is making updates to information: any update made in one spot filters slowly or not at all to other locations, and takes a good deal of effort to get there. We want to create a free and open source tool to speed up the process of sharing data and maintaining it up to date.

As it happens, a lot of the pieces are already in place. Programmers have created awesome tools for collaborating in comfort among themselves, which we believe could be just as useful for stream-lined knowledge sharing. What is needed now is a small, committed team who can bring “distributed revision control systems” to our communities in a useful form.

We've already developed a free and open-source program for merging tabular data, ssmerge. There aren't many such programs out there, and we believe ours out-performs them. We are integrating that with the fossil system (http://www.fossil-scm.org) for managing shared repositories. Fossil is free and open source, by the makers of Sqlite, a database used in Firefox, Skype, Apple Macs, many smart-phones, and plenty of websites. Fossil is uniquely lightweight and dependency-free, making it a pleasure to adapt to new uses. There's a first prototype of this work at http://share.find.coop (with links to documentation and download for Linux, Windows, or Macs). We believe it could be extended to become a great tool for easily sharing parts of spreadsheets and databases, with pain-free two-way flow of updates and additions between collaborators. That would really change the culture, just like similar tools have revolutionized the software world in favor of openness and distributed collaboration. We hope FACT will support us in bringing this change to life. For programmers, distributed revision control systems such as "git" and "bazaar" have proven their feasibility, and can scale from the smallest personal project to the largest (e.g. the Linux kernel). The Data Commons Project has data-sharing partners of all sizes, so we have a strong need for a similarly flexible tool. We suspect others have this need too. Our practice and commitment is to release all our code as free and open source, in ready-to-reuse form. If successful, the tools we build will have no need for central coordination, so there will be nothing to stop our work being used in any country, by any community, without needed to talk to us.

Here are some concrete examples of who we are working to benefit. This work will benefit large umbrella organizations such as NCBA (National Cooperative Business Association) and SEN (US Solidarity Economy Network). They will be able to systematically pull data (with filtering) from small, active networks and pool data with other large peer organizations with overlapping fields of interest. Just as importantly, the work will magnify the impact of data collection activities of smaller networks, such as Cooperative Maine, that focus on specific geographies, sectors, and/or organizational forms. The data-sharing tools and repository we build will assist collaboration between those networks and the overlapping umbrella organizations that represent their interests.

In general, through the proposed work and our other efforts, here's the "status quo" we're trying to improve on (quote anonymized on request):

“For [our co-op directory] we used a database that [a large co-op] had used previously and we added minimal additional data to it—I’m not sure what its origins are, however. I found that [a large sectoral umbrella group] was unable to provide a database of their members due to agreements with their members not to share data and [another large sectoral umbrella group] does not share [member organization] data because changes occur so frequently that the database would quickly become outdated. Those two entities hold a good chunk of the database info I had hoped to collect. The smaller cooperative organizations often do not have a well organized database—I got a [small co-op sector] list in a Word doc. So, those are some of the challenges I faced. That said, I think there are many in the cooperative community who would love to see a comprehensive cooperative database come to fruition.” – a co-op data aggregator

We are excited to find ways to systematically "hold a mirror" to bottom-up community driven organizations of all kinds, so that they become visible individually and in aggregate to their peers, to researchers, and to civic institutions.

Want to help? Vote here before October 15th:

• http://www.netsquared.org/projects/data-commons-project
• How to vote

Funding!

We have just received word that an application submitted back in February to fund organizational and business development of the Data Commons Cooperative has been approved. We now have the means to really research what services we can provide to whom at what cost to become a sustainable democratic business. For our early adopter data sharing organizations, this is the time to get to the nitty gritty! More details -- and ways to help us figure this out -- coming soon.

Solidarity Economy Maps

The DCP has recently made contact with a few groups affiliated with the Solidarity Economy Network that are working on mapping the solidarity economy in their locations. These are greater Philadelphia, New York (with an emphasis on Brooklyn), and Monmouth County, New Jersey. Each group is at a different stage, but they are all eager to figure out how to make their efforts usable and shareable with others. Hence their interest in the Data Commons! Stay tuned -- one day these efforts will grow into what Ethan was describing in an earlier post on mapping solidarity economy networks.

Early Adopters

We're reaching out to organizations to become "early adopters" of our services (along with the organizations already on board: CDI, USFWC, NASCO, and GEO). This would mean investing about 5 hours/month, as an organization, for a year. Different people could rotate around the responsibility of talking with us. Mainly what we would want is feedback, information, ideas, concerns on what you are doing now with information that could be made easier if the maintenance were shared with other organizations, what technology you are using and how best to interface with it to make your lives easier and save you time, money and aggravation, what you think of the ideas we have on what we could do and how to do it, new ideas about data use and presentation that would enable novel business opportunities, and so on.

Since we are gearing up to become a consumer-owned coop, this early "sweat equity" investment would count for most or all of the equity investment to join as a member of the coop. And the better feedback we get, the better we make our products and services, the more valuable being a member is.