A Digital IYC

Is this what a digital cooperative might look like?
photo courtesy schoschie reproduced under a Creative Commons licence

The International Year of Cooperatives is upon us. Much excitement and activity all round. And of course there is plenty of use of digital media - Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc. - as cooperatives and their federal organisations around the world gear up to spread the key messages and promote their various events and initiatives. All good stuff.

On January 12 a modest meeting will be taking place - suitably in Manchester, UK - to consider the idea of developing a digital strand to the IYC, and as importantly, what will follow once 2012 has ended. The digital world is becoming increasingly intertwined with every aspect of how we live our lives, from the explosive growth of mobile phones in Africa to the development of ultra-fast communications networks and smart grids in our cities.

Many aspects of this increasingly connected world have a distinctly cooperative flavour - from open source software to cloud computing to the aggregation potential of the web in bringing people together to access goods and services. Yet the formal cooperative sector has not - as yet - taken a leading role in the digital sphere. Is there scope for better use of digital tools to the benefit of the cooperative sector? Almost certainly. Is there potential in bringing together cooperative values and principles with current and emerging digital technologies to create innovative ways of meeting needs, as yet unexplored?

The meeting on Jan 12 - which coincides with launch events for the IYC taking place all around the world - will aim to consider some of these issues and look at how we can develop ideas and projects that will build on our shared cooperative values to extend cooperation into the digital space.

Charles Gould talks about using the IYC as a platform for the creation of a "Cooperative Decade", and we see digital as crucial in developing a successful blueprint for that future.

The aim is that this initiative will be open to all, and we very much hope that you will find these ideas as exciting as we do, and that you'll get involved. Whilst dotCoop is pleased to be kicking things off we certainly don't pretend to have all the answers (some of the questions maybe), and so we very much welcome input from all quarters, both within and outside of the conventional cooperative sector.

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