On the first day of September in the Year of Our Lord 2017, the We Are Open Co-op joined together in a celebration of piety towards intellect. Wait…what am I doing here? I’ve been reading Shakespeare and watching Braveheart. Ignore that voice, I was trying too hard.
The We Are Open Co-op finally got together for a Co-op Day, a monthly meet up that hasn’t been happening monthly. Lately, we’ve been having a hard time finding time. But here’s the thing, when we finally got together last Friday, it was like coming home. Over the past several months, the Co-op members have been busy with a variety of things. From Planet 4 (me) to working with Human made (John), from work at Totara (Doug) to illustrating a book on leadership (Bryan) , the We Are Open Co-op has had the Co-op in a back seat as we have been working as individuals. To be fair, we’ve been pretty good doing Badge stuff through the Co-op, but I would be remiss if I didn’t admit Doug as the driving force there.
It’s true, our individualism took over and that’s ok. However, we founded this co-op to work together, as a collective, and it was our ebb and flow from that idea of “cooperativism” that drove our meet up. We started our day identifying our strengths and talking about the kind of work that makes us happy as individuals. This allowed us to marvel at each other’s uniqueness before looking at ourselves as a collective.
In the past, we’ve tried to speak as one voice through the vehicle we call the We Are Open Co-op. We tried to personify We Are Open as it’s own thing. A collective voice. But we are not a collective voice. We are a collective OF voices. Together, we are a choir.
We’re singing a song of rebellion. A challenge to capitalism, while living inside of it. An attempt to unsettle people and organisations, shaking them up so that they reject their previous (terrible) plans. We shun buzzwords and aim to make complex things more straight forward rather than complicating to complicate. We help people think beyond the status quo. We find connections between seemingly disparate bits and use those connections to create more equitable credentialing systems, better learning programs, more holistic engagement platforms and [insert a bunch of other words]. We like systems and big strategies. We like pushing the world. We like to think about things, and aim to change things through usurpation. Like this crazy wasp John compared us to.
In a giant, rambling, several hour conversation about the things we care about, we kind of realised that we’ve been looking at our Co-op a bit too…traditionally. As if we’re some sort of “normal” business. But we are not normal, and we don’t want to be.
We talked about:
- Exploring the concentric circles of “the Radical Backpack”: What if we lived if a world where your credentials were owned by YOU? What if your future employer need only look at the URL you sent in order to establish that you did, indeed, complete the entire TEFL Certification? What if no one had the power to alter your learning pathway because it was all in blockchain? What if the storage of these credentials and your history was decentralised?
- Taking a step further into identity and verifiability: What if you had a verifiable identity? How does logistical identity and personal identity coincide, overlap, diverge? What do we need to do in society to ensure that in the future we own our identity?
- Eating at the insides of capitalism: Again, read about this parasitic wasp. How do we make it impossible to make money on stuff that should be free (education, identity, etc)? How do we live inside a capitalist, individualist society, but pick away at it to contribute to a better, more just future?
We’d love to hear from you, especially since a big theme of this month’s Co-Op Day was about growing the Co-op and getting new members. We’ve realised that we’ve put barriers in the way and been a bit too preoccupied with process. So, whether or not you are interested in membership of the co-op, we’d love to hear from you.
Sounds big, right? Well it is. The We Are Open Co-op has big ideas about all kinds of things because we’re interested, engaged citizens who work to make the world a more equitable place.
From now on, we’re going to embrace ourselves as a collective OF voices instead of trying to be a collective voice.