This post is also available in: Català (Catalan) Español (Spanish)
Som Energia and CommonsCloud (SomNúvol, in Catalan) share a cooperative model that includes user-members (individuals and organisations) in the cooperative self-government. User-members are not treated as customers but as active participants in the project, as their choice contributes to a social transformation. With this model and shared values, the two cooperatives have signed an inter-cooperation agreement whereby members of each enjoy benefits when contracting services.
Som Energia is a non-profit consumer cooperative, founded in 2010 in Girona, which brings together consumers to self-supply electricity from renewable sources. Currently, Som Energia has tens of thousands of members throughout Spain, to whom it supplies electricity. The cooperative also promotes renewable energy generation projects, mainly financed by its members.
CommonsCloud was born in 2018 as a project promoted by the multistakeholder, non-profit, social initiative cooperative of workers and consumers femProcomuns , created in 2017. The model of Som Energia and Som Connexió (the latter created in 2014) of including user-members (individuals and organisations) in the governance of the cooperative was an inspiration for CommonsCloud. It was born as a project antagonistic to the tech giant corporations that use the consumer as a product or raw material for their business model. With CommonsCloud, more than two hundred members mostly from Spain, and more than half of them being organisations, currently self-provide digital free software tools with an ethical approach to data handling, for two thousand users.
This inter-cooperation agreement brings advantages to the members of both co-operatives, who can get CommonsCloud’s services without having to become members, in the case of Som Energia, or who can enjoy discounts in the first year, in the case of CommonsCloud.
Advantages of CommonsCloud for Som Energia’s member organisations
- Member organisations of Som Energia who become members of CommonsCloud-femProcomuns SCCL can benefit from a 30% discount in the first year, from the date of their registration, on the fee for the CommonsCloud tools they contract, and must contribute €10 to the share capital of femProcomuns; thus acquiring political rights to participate in the assembly.
Advantages of CommonsCloud for Som Energia individual members
- Individual members of Som Energia who join CommonsCloud-femProcomuns SCCL can get a 30% discount in the first year of their membership on the fee for any tools they contract from CommonsCloud, and must contribute €10 to the social capital of femProcomuns; thus acquiring political rights to participate in the assembly.
Advantages of Som Energia for the member people and entities of CommonsCloud-femProcomuns
- Members (individuals and organisations) of femProcomuns who use CommonsCloud can contract electricity with Som Energia without making the €100 contribution to the social capital and under the umbrella of femProcomuns with consumer rights but without political rights to participate in their assembly.
How to do it?
See the CommonsCloud website for details on how to enjoy these benefits (only in Catalan and Spanish).
Avantatges per a sòcies de Som Energia i SomNúvol