Empowerment and control were key themes at this year’s UK Co-op Congress, and one area where these issues are reaching crisis point is the digital and AI revolution, which were discussed in a breakout session on ways to grow co-operative tech.
In a breakout session, Shaun Fensom discussed a number of ventures he has been involved in, included internet co-op Poptel, which ran out of capital in 2002; email service mail.coop – which “is not free but we don’t use your data” – and the Co-operative Network Infrastructure on Tameside, a digital collaboration between private and public sector organisations – running on one member, one vote, so no entity, however big, can take over.
The key is to own as much of the digital infrastructure stack, ranging from the physical fibre to the broadband services, as possible, he said. This is tricky in a market dominated by the Openreach model.
“What we started in Tameside is a co-op using bits of infrastructure together in a neutral, innovative way,” said Fensom.
Organisations like the council already had fibre in the ground, and the co-op model was used to bring this infrastructure together – “to facilitate co-operation between different parts of the state… We realised we could also bring in private sector members of our co-op.”
The co-op also runs a data centre, another area where co-ops have scope for growth. Fensom highlighted investment in data capacity in Blackpool, to take advantage of a new transatlantic cable landing in the area, and the availability of offshore wind energy. In co-operative spirit, heat from the data centres will be recycled to keep other buildings in the community warm.
“It’s commonly a widespread belief that the deployment of AI will be a disaster for communities and the planet,” said Fensom. “Maybe, co-operatively, it can be an asset.”
Melissa Terras gave an update on the work of Transkribus, an AI developed at the University of Edinburgh that transcribes handwriting to create digital archives, with half a million users worldwide, including universities, museums and libraries.
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“AI is absolutely everywhere,” she said. “It’s the business mode behind generative AI that’s the problem. It doesn’t care about the planet, about human rights, about humans – it just care about their intellectual property.”
By contrast, Trankribus owns its full stack, and has high member engagement – and, said Terras, the model can be replicated, with the right conditions. Trankribus had €10m of development money from the EU to build the tech; the backing of a focused, engaged community; a large market to serve; and volunteer labour.
“It’s a long game and it takes a long time,” she said.
Richard Rowley, from digital design and tech co-op Agile Collective, described work with a group of councils to develop a model for a local authority website, based on open source tech. The impetus here was to solve the problem of councils individually paying large sums to build their websites when there was a huge overlap between what each authority needed to offer.
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The project was backed by government seed funding but, said Rowley, what turned it from a good idea to reality was the co-op model. Councils had to work together, saving taxpayer money, with profits staying in the co-op and not being extracted to Silicon Valley.
“We can’t always look to government for investment,” he said. “But there is money in the co-op sector. What can we build? What efficiency savings could there be if retail co-ops had a shared tech? What digital needs do you have that we could build a better solution for together?”
But the co-op sector also falling down on principle 6 – co-operation among co-ops, Rowley warned. He studied the UK’s top 50 co-op and mutuals and none of them had a website he could identify as built or hosted by a tech co-op.
