Software Cooperative News

The meeting agenda is already posted for tonight’s (Wednesday’s) SPI board IRC meeting which will be at 2000 UTC.

It’s another pretty lean meeting, with only some minutes to approve, so why not come along and let the board know what you think they should be doing to promote free and open source software?

DoctorMO is calling Paypal the Pocketing Police after this “Paypal [...] decided we were scammers and took our money” comment by Daniel Stone during the Xorg foundation election discussions.

Our co-op has avoided Paypal for a number of years for two reasons:

1. Paypal didn’t recognise UK company registration “numbers” that contain letters (like ours) for years after they first occurred, so we couldn’t register as a seller;
2. the terms and conditions are very unequal, there are shedloads of complaints like paypalsucks.com and I don’t believe they’re all fiction.

We’ve not boycotted it yet because there are two of our current suppliers who are very expensive for us to pay by international bank transfer, accept Paypal and don’t offer much alternative. I think I’ll go ask them again. At least one of them should be sympathetic to Xorg.

Cooperatives-UK Chief Executive Ed Mayo has asked Robin Murray to undertake a brief review of the potential for expansion of co-operation in the UK, and the infrastructure necessary to support it.

The review is intentionally wide ranging. It covers areas for innovation in methods of co-operation and its promotion, and ways in which the movement connects, reflects and supports itself in the era of the web. The aim is to prepare a report with recommendations and a plan for discussion during Co-operative Fortnight in June.

Anyone with ideas about the challenges and opportunities you feel the movement is facing, and what can be done about them – please email evidence to robinmurray AT blueyonder.co.uk by Friday March 5th for a first summary of the issues on Tuesday March 9th.

We’re in the middle of Fairtrade Fortnight and it seems like the most advertised one yet, with Cadbury’s adverts joining the push of this year’s “big swap” theme: replace some of the stuff you’d usually buy with Fairtrade alternatives.

For IT workers, this is easier said than done. It’s difficult enough to find more sustainably-produced products, let alone fairtrade ones. Our co-op has failed to achieve full marks on “Prioritise and promote Fairtrade and other ethical and sustainable initiatives” so far and I don’t expect us to reach 100% any time soon.

Just last Friday, Greenpeace International reported on more toxic electrical equipment, which shows that IT’s environmental sustainability is far from a solved problem. Meanwhile, it doesn’t seem like the fairness side is being addressed much yet. There are no fairtrade electrical product standards yet. Isn’t there demand for fairer as well as greener production?

Anyway, if you’re looking for faitrade products this fortnight, you could try some fairtrade chocolate from the New Internationalist worker co-op. Food is further along, which is a good thing because it’s pretty fundamental to life…

I am MJ Ray and I have not blogged for a week</bloggers-anonymous>

Sorry about that. Basically, it’s been hectic and I don’t want to write about some of the things that have been going on between the co-op and its clients (nothing bad for our co-op, don’t worry!), but I’ve one tip and one request which I’d like to write about now.

The tip: make disaster recovery plans! Have both a general set of principles and specific plans for any mission-critical services.

Think about reasonably common sources of problems and try to set policies to minimise the risk.

For example, would unauthorised access to your social media accounts be a problem? If so, teach your workers not to enter their usernames and passwords into sites linked from direct messages, like in the latest example.

For another example, do your workers have authentication details for your key servers? Plan what you will do about those passwords if a worker vanishes for a few days without warning after an argument at work.

The request: I’m meeting North Somerset Enterprise Agency about cooperatives and local strategic partnership representation – does anyone have tips or advice about this, please? If so, please leave me comments.