The reply claims that it’s only since 10th January which is rather at odds with other claims that it has been happening since at least March 2010 in some situations.

I started buying from o2 in December. I was using Three, but their network where I stay in Norfolk isn’t reliable and you can’t just buy a device in a shop for The Phone Co-op. The dongle from o2 is a recent Huawei USB device that just worked in debian and was fairly easy for me to get working in Ubuntu. There’s space in it for a memory card, so maybe I could boot from it… but that’s an idea for later.

The o2 deal is OK but not great, and the included wifi is nowhere near as good as it looked: when it says it includes “BT Openzone” that doesn’t include any of the “BT Openzone-H” hotspots that are much more common. You’re only allowed to register one device for wifi, so no using your phone, tablet and laptop at different times!

I can’t believe it’s legal to advertise that as “unlimited wifi”, but o2 is still a better offer than access to “BT Openzone-H” hotspots at £39/month (yes, that’s the price for wifi-only…).

Ultimately, I think the problem is that there’s a rubbish choice of mobile (wifi or 3G) internet access providers in the UK. It’s a completely and utterly failed market, so you need to use Virtual Private Networks and similar tricks to protect yourself from the dysfunctional networks. My VPN meant my mobile number was safe: how about yours?

As luck would have it, I had already proposed a resolution about protecting customer privacy to The Phone Co-op (affiliate link) for our AGM on Saturday 4 February (if you’re a member, let me know). We were trying to find a compromise wording and I don’t think this little o2 scandal has hurt my proposal at all!

At least the phone co-op’s mobile service is based on Orange’s network, which wasn’t affected. How does your network perform? There’s an Internet Service Provider evilness test which might tell you.

Eli Sarre from Essential Trading speaking at C-SW Annual Conference

Last Friday (11 November 2011), I was at the Cooperatives-SW annual conference at the Cube Cinema in Bristol, titled “Growing Your Co-operative” and sponsored by the Co-operative Membership South and West. It was another sold-out event, featuring headline talks from Co-op Party member and Labour MP Kerry McCarthy, Eli Sarre of Essential Trading worker co-op (pictured), Carole Theyer of Sparks Inc and Jim Pettipher from Co-operative Futures.

There were also some great workshops – I went to a finance workshop led by Ian Rothwell from Co-operative and Community Finance and a regulations one with Paul Martin of Kabin (details may appear on their event page) – and a brilliant lunch from Runcible Spoon (and those of you who know me will know I have been livid with some co-op event lunches!) with some time to chat and network, although I also went to a fringe meeting about the RISE problems.

The event concluded with the formal AGM of Co-operatives SW (electing a new chairperson and approving transfer to a new co-op corporation) as well as a bit more chat afterwards. I felt it was a great event and well worth my time being there. I’m glad that some people from outside the co-op movement, from community businesses like the Strawberry Line Cafe and a few people considering joining or forming co-ops, were there and I hope it was good for them too.

UWE Frenchay, Bristol: Venue of the RISE EGM

The RISE co-op is the sole shareholder in the Social Enterprise Mark CIC and its members have been called to an Extraordinary General Meeting during the lunch break of next Tuesday’s “Knowing and Growing” conference at UWE Bristol. The RISE board has proposed Four Special Resolutions that would dissolve the co-op and transfer all assets as windfalls to the SEM CIC and a trust, ignoring RISE Ltd’s Memorandum of Association. software.coop is calling on other RISE members to attend the EGM and oppose this demutualisation attempt. Update: dissolved but not demutualised (see below). Update 2: new vote called (see below).

RISE is constituted as a common ownership co-op and its Memorandum of Association contains a clause that directs the assets to be transferred to another common ownership social enterprise organisation if the co-operative is dissolved. However, unlike the CIC asset lock, there is no independent regulator enforcing it and, unlike in many co-ops, there has been no requirement for new members to pledge to obey the RISE common ownership clause at an individual level and there has been no member education about common ownership in the last three years.

This demutualisation is the wrong solution for RISE because:

• it has recieved much public money and money from members on the understanding that it would be kept in common ownership;
• there are common ownership social enterprises that could really benefit from the legacy assets at this time of budget cuts, but if those assets go to a CIC, they are lost from common ownership;
• the EGM is the day after the global launch of the United Nations International Year of Co-operatives, which is about promoting mutualism around the world and the RISE co-operative should support this;
• many RISE members are mutuals, including the world’s largest consumer co-operative and demutualisation would be embarassing to them;
• demutualisation should be discussed seriously, through a proper democratic process before the regular Annual General Meeting, not sprung from the board to members in a short meeting during the lunch break of another event;
• the proposal has not been published on RISE’s website or email newsletter;
• appointing the former directors of a dissolved co-op as trustees without member oversight seems unlikely to secure the assets in the long term.

software.coop will vote against the demutualisation, in favour of social enterprise, and calls on other RISE members to show solidarity with the co-operative and common ownership social enterprise movements.

Update 2 November: rise has announced its dissolution but they’ve got to “give further consideration” to where the assets go because the demutualisation resolutions were defeated. I fear that they’ll still try some way to bail out the Social Enterprise Mark despite the rejection, but I hope they’ll do the right thing and give the assets to good common ownership social enterprise like the RISE Memorandum of Association requires.

Update 10 November: We got another “Dear Member” letter today, dated 7 Nov, saying “there are two key issues to be resolved” (which is rubbish because the Memorandum offers a default – I think the board just hates that clause) and that there will be a new postal vote that will run from 18 November to 5 December.

Fans in the Gorge

When I got there, I rode up the Gorge until I had to stop (or else fall off) and it was still packed with fans. It was a good half-hour before the race would pass by, but already almost every flattish piece of land by the road had either a spectator or a bicycle on it. I watched twitter for race news, posted an update @mjray, then put the phone away as the green-fronted police bikes came through just ahead of the racers. I tried videoing the race, but it’s only the second outing for the handlebarcam and I seem to have deleted the recording before hooking it up to the laptop. Thankfully, the itv4 coverage (repeated 13:00) is pretty good. (My back is on TV! Ahem.)

Now, today (Saturday) I will be mostly doing the work scheduled for Friday, but it was still worth it. Go along if you get the chance: Suffolk and Norfolk today, Westminster tomorrow. I suggested it to @enterprisehub’s #coopsweekend because the Rabobank team are doing well.

“My small design firm needs to upgrade its software, which is very expensive. I am wondering what the legalities might be of putting together a cooperative of other designers to share the $4900.00 expense + additional seats.”

Legalities of a buying co-op for seat-licensed software? I can write reams about co-ops but I shouldn’t because:

1. Our co-op doesn’t sell seat-licensed software and we’re basically opposed to that concept, preferring co-operative development of free and open source software (FOSS).
2. This is a site about software, not co-op development. I helped set up our co-op, but I don’t know enough to help many others. For co-op development, our co-op is a member of Somerset Co-operative Services and Co-operatives UK who can advise far better on that sort of thing and publish the damn fine Simply series of guides. We refer enquiries about co-op development to them, Co-operative Assistance Network and the co-operative enterprise hub.
3. Mentioning $ makes me think this is a US-based question, so National Co-op Business Association may be a better place to start. If it’s another dollar, the International Cooperative Alliance membership may show the right country. The legalities vary by country.

Anyway, now the blog is back, I’ll write about software more soon. If you’ve got questions about software for co-ops, co-op-made software and that sort of thing, please leave them in a comment.

Also today, I’m pictured being given a share by Giles Simon of our national co-ordinating co-op on the Co-operatives Fortnight Facebook page. I’m not a big fan of facebook and I still want to try the more sharing alternatives that cyberunions reviewed.

Speaking of cyberunions, apparently they answer the criticisms from my review in episode six which I still haven’t found time to listen to yet – and there’s an episode seven out already. Maybe I’ll start to catch up later today (Tuesday), if I don’t go to the Bristol Wireless Annual Meeting. Tomorrow is another busy day, hopefully including the Koha Town Hall Meeting.

And there’s still half a week of Co-operatives Fortnight to go, so we’re not done by a long way yet! If you’d like to take part, there’s a Co-operative Business Breakfast in Weston-super-Mare on Friday morning at 9am – please leave me a comment if you’d like to come along.

• This afternoon (Wednesday 29 June), we’ll be at Co-operative lending and ethical investment in Bristol;
• Tomorrow, we’ll be at a Co-operative Business Breakfast in Glastonbury;
• Next Friday, we’re hosting a Co-operative Business Breakfast in Weston-super-Mare;
• and we’ll post more events to our co-op’s news page as we find out about them.

As you may know, we’ve already done two events:

First, last Friday, Michael attended the Co-operatives UK Annual Meeting on our behalf. Co-operatives UK is our national co-ordinating co-op and the figurehead for the movement in this country. I didn’t see the meeting (the live video link didn’t work for me, as before), but Michael reports:

“The AGM seemed well organized; it was good to hear about the work they’re doing and the concerns regarding the co-operative situation in Poland. I think it’s important to exercise one’s ability to vote, but would have liked more opportunity to speak with people.”

We couldn’t send anyone to the Mary Portas session on Friday evening, but Paul Dale Smith summarised the session and RuthRosselson described it as “Mary Portas tells Co-op Congress how it is”.

Then on Saturday, I was in Manchester for The Power of Co-operation, thanks to support from software.coop and The Co-operative Bank.

The first session I attended, on mutualisting the Post Office was interesting and pretty full, but I found some later sessions rather frustrating. As well as my usual concerns about surrendering to uncritical use of private-sector software, I got quite annoyed by two sessions on member engagement where the presenters seemed to talk for almost the full time without letting the audience engage! Not good for my blood pressure, that, especially when I feel they’re missing something!

But the real value of the day was in the fascinating discussions I had with many people in the short breaks in the plenary, or while wandering around the exhibition and the marketplace. For example, it was great to see Revolver still selling the T-shirts I mentioned here in 2009 – as well as giving out free samples of their brilliant fairtrade coffee. What comes from the various discussions will probably decide whether we attend similar events in future.

Were you in Birmingham? How was it for you? Are you supporting Co-operatives Fortnight? How, where, when and why?

In general, it’s a very good show and worth a listen by anyone from the union movement, in my opinion. It’s available in Ogg as well as MP3, which I think is also a plus point.

There were a couple of points where I was ranting at the radio, though…

The first was the choice to try Skype alternatives. Leaving aside the danger of playing the “alternatives” game, I can understand why they chose that (the change of corporate control to Microsoft has been in the headlines recently and the phones affect them but not their listeners or readers), but open internet phones are a bit fiddly because they try to move quite a lot of data (audio) in real-time and a lot of domestic network devices don’t behave correctly with the protocols that they use to do it.

I agree with their conclusion that the problem is probably networking, but I wonder why they didn’t log in to their routers, look at any debugging output and try to find the setting to change? Or try switching on debugging in the software and see what’s wrong, or send it to someone who can help? Instead, it seemed like Linphone and Ekiga got blamed for not doing Skype-style router-busting without asking. They don’t mention whether they tried switching on the STUN option mentioned in the Linphone FAQ and I don’t see a email on linphone-users asking for support but I don’t read every mail on that list.

Am I being unfair, expecting them to seek support? Maybe but I’m not sure. If you got the software from a store, what would you do? Would you throw it away and tell people that the stupid thing doesn’t work? Moreover, would you use your podcast to say it doesn’t work because users need to be “clever enough” for that “obscure” tool? That’s a great way to scare people off unnecessarily.

Wouldn’t you usually think you might be overlooking some detail and ask for support, from its maker or the place where you got it? I think you’d ask. I’d probably ask, even though I’m available for hire to fix FOSS problems and it’s not the proudest feeling when I have a script-reading call-centre worker solve my mistake.

Of course, with most from-store software, you’ve paid an artificially-inflated box price, but the bigger cost is your time and that’s the same for downloaded free and open source software, so why give it less of a chance to work?

I also think they had easier options, like switching more of their website over to free and open source software, like getting rid of the rubbish comment system which doesn’t work if you don’t let it run javascript on your browser. I’ve had a bit of discussion with them since the show and it seems my first suggestion may no longer work (typical!), so we’ll see how that goes.

Back to the show: the next segment did a good job of linking FOSS to the co-operative movement. I really think they should call it Free and Open Source Software and not just “open source” because I feel the freedom should be important to the labour movement. Also, calling the whole thing “open source” seems like calling all of the political left “Revolutionary Socialism”: inaccurate at best. I don’t often express this objection these days (I’ve bigger targets to work on), but it’s important when trying to inform new audiences, else they only see part of our rainbow, a less radical part.

Pretty interesting to suggest Orbea bikes as Mondragon’s most famous brand. I’d pick Eroski or Caja Laboral. What about you?

Then it moved on to a pretty good description of UK co-ops, mentioning co-ops that I’m a member of (the Co-operative Group) or buy from (John Lewis and Suma). I was surprised that it seemed to stop short and didn’t mention any of the co-ops that work with free software, or with any software in fact. Of course, I’d love software.coop to be mentioned, but there are other interesting and very different ones like BristolWireless.net and OSAlliance.com. Globally, many of the worker tech co-ops are linked through the tech-coop mailing list. This was the second part where I was shouting at the speakers. After all, Debian is a great voluntary project making a fantastic GNU/Linux distribution, but it is not a worker co-op by a long way and I suspect some of my fellow developers would be horrified to hear that suggested. Why not mention some actual tech worker co-ops?

Finally, before the listener feedback, suggestions of tools which union activists could use. There was some minor confusion about exactly which version or name was really FOSS and a surprising claim about openoffice into LibreOffice (I thought Oracle were still screwing that up with Apache’s help but I may have missed some news), but it was a good list of door-opening suggestions. I hope some activists will take them up.

It seems there’s an earlier show about open social networks, which is a topic I’ll look at after I finish my series of posts about mailing lists. So, please let me know if you have comments on this show, that show, open social networks or mailing lists which you think I might find interesting, or if there’s anything above you’d like me to expand upon (or correct – often, correct…).

1. I am standing for election to the UK Worker Co-operative Council. Thank you to software.coop for the nomination and help. Voters can ask me questions on the uk.coop site.
2. I was renominated to Kewstoke Parish Council and even though there’s no contest (just enough candidates to fill the council), I’ve another 16 pages of legally-required forms to complete to take up office. I hate bureaucracy and I think it deters a lot of good people from helping their villages.
3. I’m contemplating standing in the co-operative group area committee elections again.

So, I’m far from idle. I’m still developing software for clients of our co-op but not finding time to write about it just now. Maybe this would be more interesting to readers: I’ve moved my wifi antenna out of the metal box it’s been in for a while. Now it covers a half-decent area, I’m looking at installing CoovaAP to offer some free public access wifi while trying to limit the risk of illegal activity. Would you do it? Do you run a public wifi point? What should I watch out for?