Data Commons Cooperative

“People everywhere have been organizing a more ethical economy, but they work in relative isolation, fragmented by geography, sector, and even organizational form.

Many organizations collect information about a small piece of these efforts. In every situation, there is another organization for which that information overlaps. In every case there is an opportunity to share that will strengthen all the organizations participating.

Sharing requires effort, it requires trust, and it requires infrastructure. The Data Commons is a cooperative of organizations that are sharing – sharing the costs of this effort, trusting each other with their information, and building infrastructure to make sharing is easy.

Members of the Data Commons Cooperative are principled economic organizations that want it to be easy to share with each other, and with the world, in the movement for a more ethical economy.

The Data Commons Cooperative is a movement-building organization, owned and controlled by cooperative development centers, federations, solidarity economy groups, and others, who want to maintain robust, accurate, useful platforms for sharing information. The cooperative gathers information and creates tools that make it easy for members to access each others’ data, and broadcast information to the public.

Pooling our information will enable the movement’s size and economic significance to be measured. Contributing information to the Data Commons will allow us to amplify the scope and impact of our activities.

The cooperative’s first major initiative is to create a decentralized database of entities working toward an ethical economy. This database is a commons, a shared resource that members contribute to, glean from, and help maintain. Updates made to the Data Commons at any time, by any organization, are sent throughout the cooperative, creating the most accurate and up-to-date directory the movement has seen. Contributions to the directory are decentralized with a wiki interface. You can make the updates, or email to your constituency to request they update their listing, decreasing your labor time.” (http://datacommons.find.coop/vision)