Panel: Let's talk about co-ops!
E146 | Sun 16 Jul 4:30 p.m.–5:30 p.m.
Presented by
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Aaron Wolf
@awolftune
https://wolftune.com
Aaron is a FLO activist, co-founder of Snowdrift.coop, and community music teacher. He has worked for many years (mostly volunteering) on social, political, and economic aspects of technology and media.
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Dan Fourie
http://www.danfourie.net
Dan Fourie is a worker-owner at Interstitial.coop, a full-stack engineering consulting firm that builds solutions for a just and sustainable future. His experience is in mechanical/chemical systems design.
He is excited and curious about organizational design, from worker cooperatives to living communities to activist movements, and how these networks can be spaces for healing and growth.
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Denver Gingerich
https://ossguy.com/
Denver is a software right-to-repair and standards activist who is currently Director of Compliance at Software Freedom Conservancy, where he enforces software right-to-repair licenses such as the GPL, and is also a director of the worker co-operative that runs JMP.chat, a FOSS phone number (texting/calling) service. Denver writes free software in his spare time: his patches have been accepted into Wine, Linux, and wdiff. Denver received his BMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. He gives presentations about digital civil rights and how to ensure FOSS remains sustainable as a community and financially, having spoken at conferences such as CopyleftConf, LibrePlanet, LinuxCon North America, CopyCamp Toronto, FOSSLC's Summercamp, and the Open Video Conference.
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Joel Brock
https://techsupport.coop
Joel is a founding member of the Tech Support Cooperative, a worker-owned IT services co-op working extensively with free and open source solutions. The Tech Support Co-op grew around an open source Point of Sale software that was being developed and propagated throughout the national food co-op industry. The Tech Support Co-op formed among key collaborators within that software development community to address a lack of any formal support for the software, and to better coordinate future development.
Joel has 20+ years experience working at the intersection of technology and cooperation. He brings a unique dedication to the cooperative business model and hopes that he can share some of his enthusiasm for co-ops with you.
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Keegan Rankin
https://agaric.coop/people/keegan-rankin
Keegan is a Free Software user and contributor, and web developer. As a worker-owner of Agaric Technology Collective, Keegan has contributed to Drupal Core, a wide variety of contributed Drupal modules, and the Drutopia distribution, among several other Free Software projects. Independently, Keegan is an amorphous person with a constantly evolving set of interests, and a tendency to make music with the surrounding objects.
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Valerie Young works at Igalia, a worker-owned co-op, focusing on web standards related to accessibility. Her work there includes co-chairing the ARIA working group of the W3C and being an editor of the CORE-AAM specification. In the course of her career, she has worked up and down the web stack -- from building web apps to standards and standards testing in browsers, and more recently on the browsers themselves. From the moment she learned about the free software from fellow nerds in college, she has been an advocate for it.
Outside of work, she has spent her whole adult life participating in non-hierarchical co-operative structures, from housing co-ops, to political projects, to academic conferences and community farms. Valerie is endless curious about ways to organize work that lead to empowerment, self actualization and joyful collaboration for individuals involved -- she has seen many successes and many failures and would love to hear from you about yours!
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Watson
@elementwatson
http://www.vulk.coop
W. Watson has been professionally developing software for 30 years. He has spent numerous years studying game theory and other business expertise in pursuit of the perfect organizational structure for software co-operatives. He also founded the Austin Software Cooperatives meetup group and Vulk Coop as an alternative way to work on software as a group. He has a diverse background that includes service in the Marine Corps as a computer programmer, and software development in numerous industries including defense, medical, education, and insurance. He has spent the last couple of years developing complementary cloud native systems such as the cncf.ci dashboard. He currently works on the Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) Certification and the Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) Test Suite.
Aaron Wolf
@awolftune
https://wolftune.com
Aaron is a FLO activist, co-founder of Snowdrift.coop, and community music teacher. He has worked for many years (mostly volunteering) on social, political, and economic aspects of technology and media.
Dan Fourie
http://www.danfourie.net
Dan Fourie is a worker-owner at Interstitial.coop, a full-stack engineering consulting firm that builds solutions for a just and sustainable future. His experience is in mechanical/chemical systems design.
He is excited and curious about organizational design, from worker cooperatives to living communities to activist movements, and how these networks can be spaces for healing and growth.
Denver Gingerich
https://ossguy.com/
Denver is a software right-to-repair and standards activist who is currently Director of Compliance at Software Freedom Conservancy, where he enforces software right-to-repair licenses such as the GPL, and is also a director of the worker co-operative that runs JMP.chat, a FOSS phone number (texting/calling) service. Denver writes free software in his spare time: his patches have been accepted into Wine, Linux, and wdiff. Denver received his BMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. He gives presentations about digital civil rights and how to ensure FOSS remains sustainable as a community and financially, having spoken at conferences such as CopyleftConf, LibrePlanet, LinuxCon North America, CopyCamp Toronto, FOSSLC's Summercamp, and the Open Video Conference.
Joel Brock
https://techsupport.coop
Joel is a founding member of the Tech Support Cooperative, a worker-owned IT services co-op working extensively with free and open source solutions. The Tech Support Co-op grew around an open source Point of Sale software that was being developed and propagated throughout the national food co-op industry. The Tech Support Co-op formed among key collaborators within that software development community to address a lack of any formal support for the software, and to better coordinate future development.
Joel has 20+ years experience working at the intersection of technology and cooperation. He brings a unique dedication to the cooperative business model and hopes that he can share some of his enthusiasm for co-ops with you.
Keegan Rankin
https://agaric.coop/people/keegan-rankin
Keegan is a Free Software user and contributor, and web developer. As a worker-owner of Agaric Technology Collective, Keegan has contributed to Drupal Core, a wide variety of contributed Drupal modules, and the Drutopia distribution, among several other Free Software projects. Independently, Keegan is an amorphous person with a constantly evolving set of interests, and a tendency to make music with the surrounding objects.
Valerie Young works at Igalia, a worker-owned co-op, focusing on web standards related to accessibility. Her work there includes co-chairing the ARIA working group of the W3C and being an editor of the CORE-AAM specification. In the course of her career, she has worked up and down the web stack -- from building web apps to standards and standards testing in browsers, and more recently on the browsers themselves. From the moment she learned about the free software from fellow nerds in college, she has been an advocate for it.
Outside of work, she has spent her whole adult life participating in non-hierarchical co-operative structures, from housing co-ops, to political projects, to academic conferences and community farms. Valerie is endless curious about ways to organize work that lead to empowerment, self actualization and joyful collaboration for individuals involved -- she has seen many successes and many failures and would love to hear from you about yours!
Watson
@elementwatson
http://www.vulk.coop
W. Watson has been professionally developing software for 30 years. He has spent numerous years studying game theory and other business expertise in pursuit of the perfect organizational structure for software co-operatives. He also founded the Austin Software Cooperatives meetup group and Vulk Coop as an alternative way to work on software as a group. He has a diverse background that includes service in the Marine Corps as a computer programmer, and software development in numerous industries including defense, medical, education, and insurance. He has spent the last couple of years developing complementary cloud native systems such as the cncf.ci dashboard. He currently works on the Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) Certification and the Cloud Native Network Function (CNF) Test Suite.
Abstract
Join co-op representatives as they swap stories, compare notes, discuss tactics
and problems with each other, and answer any questions you have about what it's
like to work with free software in a co-op--a relative rarity--in the tech
industry.
Join co-op representatives as they swap stories, compare notes, discuss tactics and problems with each other, and answer any questions you have about what it's like to work with free software in a co-op--a relative rarity--in the tech industry.