Yesterday, my colleagues and I were joined by Rosie Clayton for our monthly Co-op Day. Given that the four founding members (Laura, Bryan, John and I) meet every Monday morning, we’ve found that cutting down our monthly meetup to a half-day actually works better. It keeps us focused and the energy levels up.

This time around, it was my turn to set the agenda and lead proceedings. I wanted to focus on a potential bid to the Ufi VocTech Seed Fund around the topic of digital employability. Before we dived into that, however, we reflected on what we’d done, co-op wise, over the last month — including the workshops I ran at the Co-operative Education & Research Conference, conversations John has had, Bryan’s involvement with OER17, and Laura’s preparations for the Creative Commons Summit.

We’ve got plenty of things to follow-up on in terms of work over the next few months, around badges, working openly, and coops.tech. Laura and John are also off to Japan for some follow-up work with a client. Bryan, Rosie, and I were in no way jealous of this!

One of the things that Bryan and Laura are keen to develop is a ‘Privacy 101’ course in a similar style to our popular, self-paced, email-based Badge Bootcamp course. They’re going to work on that when Laura and I return from Canada.

We talked about how a lot of the work we do is making people and communities aware that each other exist. For example, we know of at least three that are currently grappling with what it means to be/work ‘open’ at the moment. At the Creative Commons Summit, we’ll be running a session on at least trying to get the worlds of Co-operatives and the Commons talking to one another!

In terms of our discussion on digital employability, we went down rabbit holes and all around the houses, to get to a point where I think we’re agreed on the following scope for our bid:

  • 16–24 year olds are a key demographic, and we should talk to our friends at Altgen, as well as learn from international contacts we’ve got such as Educators Co-op.
  • Careers education is an absolute shambles and is being replaced by educational institutions teaching ‘employability’. We need to focus not only on the digital knowledge/skills/behaviours required to ‘get a job’ but also those required to thrive as a freelancer and/or in the gig economy.
  • The world doesn’t need another framework, but that could be part of a bigger picture. An inspiration/touchstone here could be Beautiful Trouble: a toolbox for revolution, which is not only a ‘book’ but “a web toolbox and international network of artist-activist trainers whose mission is to make grassroots movements more creative and more effective”.
  • Young people need a way of understanding/navigating the world in a way that speaks to their interests. The solutions to these are usually seen as algorithmic (i.e. Big Data) or human (i.e. mentorship) but could we do something different through community and co-operation?
  • Perhaps the time has come (finally!) for the Digital Skills Sandwich?

It may end up that Ufi funding isn’t the right direction to take this in, but we’ll have a look at the Stage 1 application form when it goes live on 24th April. There’s certainly something here that’s worth exploring, and into which we want to delve further.

We finished by talking about the next year of our co-op. May 1st is International Workers Day and the date we’re choosing to celebrate one year of our co-op! We’ve all (enthusiastically!) decided to renew our membership for next year, and are looking forward to working together, and with new people who may apply to join us on our journey.

We Are Open Co-op works to spread the culture, processes, and benefits of openness wherever we can.