New Projects

So,  a project I have been mulling on for years is finally beginning to come to fruition.  Called the re.rooting collaborative, it is an initiative to combine the efforts of alternative economy practicioners, stakeholders and motivated software developers to begin a concerted, community effort to imagine, develop and extend open source software to enable everything from various types of co-ops, buying clubs, local food systems to microlending and community currencies.

Yes, there are already many projects underway.  We will be featuring these projects and others, and offer an aggregated space for raising capital to develop specific functionality, and a space for combining ideas and documenting needs to better accomodate the wide array of businesses, organizations and efforts underway.

What was the impetus?

Hot on the heels of two events that I presented at, the Entrepreneurs for Sustainability Startup-Showcase, where I described this project, as well as the Ohio Employee Ownership Center Conference where I presented on our worker collective model for Flywheel Tech Collective, we found that there is substantial interest on the side of entrepreneurs, practitioners and stakeholding organziations in low-cost, appropriate open source solutions to meet the needs of more non-conventional business models.

We have already been working with our colleagues at the Future Forward Institute to begin imagining new frameworks and models, and to gather information about various existing solutions and how they could be adapted to meet the needs of these kinds of entities.  We are already working with various business entities where we are adapting these solutions to their needs as co-ops or social enterprises, but our interest is growing in creating a community-driven platform from which to mobilize resources, input and stakeholders as new projects to begin to meet emerging or existing needs.

Where is it at now?