For a while now, since realizing that co-op values and principles and open source ones overlap quite extensively, I’ve been noticing something interesting capitalism (or just our Western culture?) tries to convince us of. It involves a pseudo-humanist state of mind, and I can’t quite figure out where or how the norm is established. We function inside of an individualist culture. We’re taught a sort of protectionism about ourselves, our friends, our families, our neighbors. We’re taught to protect our ideas. Protect our money. Protect our climb up the corporate ladder.
This individualism inherently ignores the collective – the dichotomy is evident. We divorce ourselves conceptually from “the others”, but I don’t know how exactly this happens. Which bit of our psychological conditioning is doing this to us? Is it that we “own” our own toys as children? Is it that we’re asked not to talk during tests? Is it the advancement of the nuclear family as an ideal?
For whatever reason, while it seems to be a mental exercise to work on behalf of a collective, we easily aim to make our individual situations better.
Solidarity amongst co-ops is a true state of behavior. What I saw at the CoTech Retreat was not a group of people working to make their individual lives better, but rather a group of people committed to working on behalf of the collective whole.
November 27 – 30, the entire We Are Open Co-op went to the CoTech annual meet up at Wortley Hall (Doug wrote about his experience here). CoTech is a co-op of co-ops, a sort of meta structure designed to encourage and support the co-operative movement. Specifically, all of the co-ops that are part of this network focus their work in something digital and techie. It is a collective of anti-capitalist, shakers and movers who are looking to change the system by not only proposing an alternative system, but living the values of an alternative system and proving that it can work.
I was asked to help facilitate this three day event and helped my co-facilitators design and deliver a participatory agenda for the 65 people who showed up to push the meta structure of CoTech to the next level. Using some of my go-to methods, I helped run the room and tried to give everyone the experience they came for – a productive and inspiring couple of days.
Being the facilitator of such an event means that you don’t have time to deep dive into any one topic. The position does allow for a broad overview though, and broadly speaking I think people got what they came for.
This is a community that I was a part of without having been onboarded into it. I didn’t know anything beyond the “yeah, We Are Open Co-op is a member of this network”. That didn’t mean anything to me before this event.
Now it does. I’ll be contributing more intentionally, and trying to find ways to work together with others in the network. There are two things I will do immediately, the first is to share some resources around diversity and inclusion, since there are others in this network who acknowledge a imbalance in terms of representation. The second thing I’ll do is introduce a community call. I will propose running one once a month to try and help members of the network keep up to date with things that are going on.