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We are a non-profit and social initiative, worker and consumer multi-stakeholder cooperative, created in Catalonia in 2017, with the aim of consolidating a commons ecosystem, based on the principles of open cooperativism, community self-management, human, ecological, economic sustainability, shared knowledge and replicability..

We are building a strategic social tool to make commons activity viable and sustainable.

  • We work with the Commons sustainability model: community, participatory governance, resource mobilization, co-production, shared knowledge.
  • We organize ourselves into operating commissions and groups of cooperative activity.
  • We use free technological tools to facilitate management, participation, co-work and communication processes.
  • We promote the cooperativization of work and opted for the general social security regime.
  • We provide cooperative funds and capital to gain solvency and economic strength.
  • We work on the sustainability and communitary management of commons oriented projects, participation, knowledge and free technologies as well as their social application, and we pay special attention to the processes, ways of doing (things), collaborating and co-creating.

What we do:

  • Sessions and participatory processes of mapping, diagnosis, co-creation and co-design.
  • Training, advice, consulting and support to groups, organizations, institutions and communities.
  • Pool and share free software technological tools that solve the needs of telework, storage, management and digital communication of people and organizations with techno-technical solutions that do not monetize personal data.
  • Deploy and maintain community management and use infrastructures.

See our services and training catalogues.

How we organise ourselves:

We want to be an agile, democratic organization that can experiment with different forms of participation and sustainability.

  • The highest decision-making body is the General Assembly with the participation of worker members and people and entities that are collaborating partners and users; the Pinecone or bulk (pinya) that supports the cooperative.
  • Trunk (tronc) assembly, made up of the most active members and the founders, guides the course of the cooperative and makes decisions between assemblies.
  • femTreball assembly deals with the issues that affect the work partners and makes the decisions that are their regulatory responsibility.
  • Operating commissions (femAdmin, femComunincation, femSystems, …) make the cooperative structure work.
  • Cooperative Activity Groups (GAC) are organized and managed autonomously to carry out activities and projects exploring sustainability models in the hybridization of the commons, inter-cooperation, co-production and the social market.
  • GACs explore ways to encourage the participation of users, members or not of the cooperative, in the orientation of the projects.

We often use castells (Catalan human towers) terminology (pinya, tronc, …). For more information see the cooperative statutes and internal regulations (only in Catalan for now).

What inspires us?

    • The commons as a social and economic model based on collective self-management, co-production and shared use.
    • The principles of cooperativism.
    • Open cooperativism and platform cooperativism.
    • The movements of free software, hardware, culture and knowledge.
    • Emancipatory social movements such as feminism and environmentalism.
    • The experiences of self-management of social centers, consumer groups, time banks, communities of makers and developers,…

Do you want to know more?

We host sessions and support participatory processes

  • To map, diagnose challenges and needs, collect proposals, prototype, co-create and co-design.
  • Face-to-face, semi-face-to-face or online.
  • In the form of workshops, hackathons, teaching activities or as modules within broader programmes.

Previous experience:

  • Workshops and hackathons in deployment pilots of the Open Internet of Things Network.
  • Participatory process to identify needs and collect proposals for the incubator at Coòpolis
  • Initial sessions and prototyping modules in different editions of La Comunificadora programme at Barcelona Activa
  • Open and collaborative documentation and rapporteurship, facilitation, diagnostic and mapping processes with Teixidora.net
  • We have designed and produced the Commons Economy Card Game as a tool to understand and discuss this model.

We offer training, consultancy and support

  • To collectives, organisations, institutions and communities that want to move in one or several aspects to common models of participation, knowledge sharing, co-production or use of free technologies.
  • Face-to-face, semi-face-to-face or online.
  • In the form of talks, workshops, courses, teaching activities or as modules within broader programs.

Previous experience:

  • Workshops and specific training for organizations.
  • Participatory sessions to analyse the internal organisation and to define changes, transformations and / or collaborations.
  • Consulting for the digital transition towards free technologies and in the use of facilitation and collaboration methodologies.
  • Advice and support responding to needs
  • Sessions in Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Masters and university extension courses.
  • Training sessions in different editions of the La Comunificadora programme at Barcelona Activa  and in the training programmes of Coòpolis and Barcelonès Nord cooperative athenaeums.

We pool and share free and opensource technologies

  • That solve the needs of teleworking, storage, management and digital communication of people and organisations with techno-ethical solutions that do not monetise personal data.
  • That facilitate the sharing of knowledge, informative, educational and cultural content, open data and collaborative work.

Previous experience:

  • We have created CommonsCloud.coop as a cooperative service where people and user entities are partners.
  • We promote Teixidora.net as a platform to share openly, re-elaborate and re-use documentation collected collaboratively at events.
  • We participate in EduCoop to share educational content and offer an educational program on cooperativism.
  • We participate in DADESS.cat to promote open data from the solidarity economy.
  • We participate in Meet.coop to offer a videoconferencing tool under the principles of cooperativism.
  • We have supported organizations in the migration to free software and technoethical telematic tools

We deploy and maintain infrastructures

  • Community management and use.
  • With the participation of civic entities, public administrations, cooperatives, companies and individuals.

Previous experience:

  • We are contributing to the development of the Open Internet of Things Network, supporting The Things Network Catalonia community, in collaboration with city councils and sponsor entities, installing antennas, promoting use cases and holding technical workshops and exploring social uses.

What is a multi-stakeholder cooperative?

  • A cooperative is an organisation that cooperativises a human activity (work, use or consumption, housing, services, school, …) making it collective management.
  • A multi-stakeholder, integral or mixed cooperative is a cooperative that integrates more than one type of activity. In our case: work and use / consumption.
  • From the field of digital, knowledge and urban commons, multi-stakeholder cooperatives have been seen as a solution to be explored to bring together in one single democratic organisation the agents that jointly generate value around an activity.
  • Cooperatives have traditionally given continuity to forms of organisation that had previously had a communal model, such as the supply of water and food, training and culture or collective work. Multi-stakeholder cooperatives, like some traditional common institutions, open the possibility of including different activities in the same collective organisation.

What is a non-profit and social initiativecooperative?

  • A non-profit cooperative cannot distribute benefits among members, surpluses are used to endow cooperative funds, to invest in activities or to achieve the corporate purpose.
  • A social initiative cooperative seeks to solve needs that the market does not solve or that it solves poorly, with special attention to those social sectors that are excluded or at risk of exclusion.