 Good afternoon and welcome to this high webinar. My name is Petra Morris and I work for Corp. UK. We are membership body that represents the thousands of copies around the UK. This high webinar today is focusing on platform corporates and we're helping to create hopefully fairer digital businesses that are owned by their members, the users and the workers in those corporates. This high webinar is part of a series of high webinars that we've been running since the end of last year and continuing into February. We've introduced copies to different audiences. And we really feel that cooperatives are a much more democratic successful business that puts their members at the heart of the business. These high webinars are part of our high business support program which has been running for six years. It's a program that's delivered and managed by corporates UK in partnership with our member of the cooperative bank. And so we're delighted that they've supported this program of support for new co-operatives to start an existing cooperatives. And it's very much part of their ethical about banking policy and their values and principles. So I'm going to, we've got quite a few speakers on the webinar today and I'm going to say a bit more about them shortly but in terms of housekeeping. This is a webinar which is being recorded and it will be sent out to all participants and also uploaded to the website so it is available to you if you miss anything or if you want to check anything. If you want to ask any questions, please use the chat function at the bottom of your screen. You can ask questions as we go along and we may respond to them in the chat, or if we have time at the end, hopefully we can answer those questions and some of our speakers can answer those questions. So we have a few speakers on today. So I will be. I'm also delighted that this webinar has been delivered in partnership because it's particularly aimed at audiences in Scotland today. And our member of co-operatives UK member co-operative development Scotland is part of that partnership and are handing over shortly to Suzanne Orchard who looks after that as part of Scottish Enterprise. Our other speakers today are Vika Rogers, who is our program manager at Co-operatives UK and manages the unfound program which supports platform co-operatives and she'll be taking you through what a platform co-operative is. And we're also joined today by Jen Smith, who is a founder member of Sinelize. It's a sign language interpreting service that uses a digital platform to connect to its members and the people who are deaf and the interpreters who provide those services. And I'll also be joined by Kaylee Reid, who is a member of the Open Food Network, a co-operative whose members collectively own this platform and they use it to trade the food that they produce. So they'll lots of good examples of actual properties. So I'm going to hand over now to my colleague over at Co-operative Development Scotland Suzanne Orchard who's going to say a little bit about what they do in Scotland and why they're on the call today. Thank you for being on the call today with us today. Thank you. Thank you Petra. Hi everyone. Big warm welcome to you all. Thank you to so many of you, managed to make time and join us today. Really delighted to see you. Thank you everybody for this, for this fab intro into platform co-ops and to hear from our fabulous speakers today. As Petra said, I'm Suzanne Orchard. I work for Cooperative Development Scotland within Scottish Enterprise but we do work across the whole of Scotland as a region, Highlands and Islands and South of Scotland to raise awareness of and support the exploration and setup of cooperative business models. To mirror what Petra said, we're really passionate about co-ops and how they offer a fair alternative to traditional business models, as she said, by putting the power and control in the hands of its members. So we've worked to promote and support a huge variety of different cooperatives over the years, but we're really delighted to be venturing into this relatively new exciting space of platform co-ops alongside the very knowledgeable co-ops UK. So I just wanted to touch on, in terms of support, Cooperative Development Scotland do provide exploratory and setup support for anybody really who's interested in exploring a cooperative business model for their project or venture. I just wanted to say that there is support available here from both organisations and we're both really keen and passionate about making sure your project gets the best start possible, so no wrong door there. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Vika who's going to take us on this fabulous journey into platform co-ops. Thank you everyone, I hope you enjoy it. Thank you Suzanne. Hello everyone. So just before we start, I'm just going to activate a poll, if you could kindly just fill it in. It's just really to get a sense of who's in the audience, if you already know about co-ops, if you know about platform co-ops and what brought you here. So I'm just going to leave that up for, sorry, I have to launch it, leave it up for a few minutes. In the meantime, I'm going to start sharing my screen. Okay, so just going to leave that there for a few minutes and I'll start introducing myself. As mentioned, my name is Vika Rogers and I run the unfound program, which has been set up to facilitate the development of the platform carpenters sector in the UK, delivered by Carpenters UK and supported by the Carpetive Bank. So the main, the program mainly focuses on providing business support for platform co-ops, but also we do work around awareness for anything because it's a very new area. We try to channel funding or at least support platform co-ops and understanding their funding opportunities, and we do some work around policy. So let's see if we have, sorry, I need to change screen as well. Sorry. So to get to the poll. So I hope most of you have been able to vote. I see just a few more people are still. Great. So I'm sharing results. I think most of you will see it. So great to hear it see that like people are dining and have heard about co-ops, platform co-ops a bit less, which is guess why you're here. And interesting to see also about how, what brings you here. So quite a diverse audience. So thanks a lot. That's really helpful for us. Okay, so let me share my screen again. Great. So moving on. I'm going to start just with a broad description of what we mean by platforms and platform businesses and then move on to the concept of platform co-ops. So this is just a very broad definition that I find quite useful a platform business is a business that uses a digital platform to trade connect people and they'll pull resources and data. Now we've all experienced how the platform economy has grown in the last decade and how it is more and more dominant in our lives, especially in the last two years with the with the COVID pandemic and how it makes a lot of things easier for us accessing services, ordering food, etc. Unfortunately, though it comes also with quite a lot of negative personalities or consequences for those that use them or provide services. So I'm just going to go through a few of these. So first of all, what we're, you know, people are coming more and more aware of is the platforms collect and hold large amounts of users data and do not always disclose how they use them and don't necessarily use that information in appropriate way. There are also problems with the way this data is processed and the bias that's embedded in the algorithms and how these algorithms allow the who runs the platform to exert really top down control. Where, for example, Ali rates are determined simply by an algorithm or accounts are deactivated and so effectively uses a fire fired through this concentration of data and the way the platforms are set up. This gives a lot of power to the owners of the platform. And so we're seeing that platforms are perpetuating dangerous forms of surveillance capitalism leading to concerns about privacy online security and right racial and gender bias. And we're seeing how they're really impacting negatively communities and workers rights. So for example, they facilitate dependency on precarious income streams and working conditions they can have negative impacts on local communities as they introduce disruptive economic economic practices, Airbnb being an example. And they, they create, they openly oppose collective action or create obstacles for it. And what we have seen is that they have also really benefited and have exploited exploited economic crisis is both the financial crisis and the current crisis where platform businesses have seen an exponential growth. And their business models are very aggressive and extractive in nature they just, they extract this proportion of value from other people's work and assets. And they tend to want to create monolith monopolies by becoming the single provider of a service, or by destroying their and by destroying their competitors or buying them up. And this is very much driven also by their finance financing model, which is very often based on VC funding which requires very high returns. And they tend to grow so exponentially they tend to aggressively lovely governance or attempt to at least circumvent regulations. Now this still sounds horrifying. And we're obviously not the only people talking about this but what what we question is, is technology really the root cause of these problems, or is it the business model on which they're built. And is there actually a lot of potential in the technology in solving big challenges that we're living today. And is it not maybe, if we were to propose a different business model behind these platforms that that these impacts would be completely different. What if platforms were collectively owned by their users by their providers, and they were democratically controlled. So, just to use our imagination. Imagine if delivery was owned and managed and democratically controlled by their riders is Spotify was managed and controlled by their musician by musicians. Or if Airbnb was controlled by the travelers and hosts and invested profits into local communities. And what is really exciting for us is that actually these alternatives already exist in the cooperative movement and our aim is really to, to support and grow these initiatives so we've got a great initiative that is Europe wide which is called cycle which is software for courier cops to set up their own cooperative. We have resonate, which is a music streaming platform owned and controlled by musicians and listeners. And we have fair bnb, which is community powered tourism, as they talk about themselves, where any profit is reinvested in the in the community and they work very closely with with local authorities. There's much potential for more and this is where we really want to support this this sector. So, let's go a bit more into detail of what we mean by platform co-ops. So, a platform co-op is democratically owned and controlled business that uses an online platform or mobile app to trade connect people and or poor resources and data. A platform co-op will operate according to cooperative principles. I won't go too much into detail. They're there. And we've got both organizations have got lots of resources on their websites to dig deeper into them. But the basic idea is that the carpet of the value values and principles define both the way the business is run, but also shape the way technology is used and determine how data is collected and processed. And the opposite is also interesting to look at. So what what can technology do to support cooperatives and transform them. So, here are just some aspects that I just wanted to go through because just to go a bit more into detail of some of the great potentials of technology digital technology. One of the main things that we talk about when we talk about platforms is that they eliminate the middle man and so the the the opportunity to really put people in connection providers and receivers of a survey service directly in connection between them. It allows people to choose how much they want to either provide a service or a user they can have more autonomy in choosing a service. Technology allows us for much more much broader democratic collaboration as well and participation technology provide reduces some of the barriers for people to participate in organizations. And it has a lot of potential because of the network effects so in general platform cards we expect them to to scale more more rapidly than than traditional SMEs. And though costs, obviously there are costs starting up. You can stop start up with a relatively low capital compared to to some other types of businesses that the end to scale. So, I'm just going to go over a few Petra please hurry me on if I'm taking up too much time. But I'm just going to go through a few examples. And I tend to group them in mainly two types of platform co-ops. Here are a few examples of platform co-ops where the technology really allows providers of a service and the receivers of the service to come together through the platform either through a booking platform or in the case of a school the classes are provided through a platform, etc. And what is interesting is that we see mainly two types of platform co-ops forming in this way. There's some in which, like in the case of signalized where we'll hear a bit more about them later, in which both the providers and the receivers of a service are all members of the cooperative and that's the case in their case that deaf people and British sign language translators. There are other cases in which and that's the same as equal care co-op with the providers of care and the receivers of care, a part of the membership. In the case of red brick language school, which is a school of English language school. It's run and owned by the teachers, and this is because the population of users is much more transient they might follow a course for two or three years but they don't need the ongoing service. And then we have another type of platform co-op where I talked to them, I talk about them more as like infrastructure co-ops where the technology really provides a way for existing big businesses to connect with new clients. We'll hear more about the open food network later which really wants to transform the food supply chain and provide the shopfront for local farmers or ethical shops. We've got cop cycle which provides a software for small worker courier cops to set up autonomously but can use the software to provide the local restaurants and then co-cars where the software allows people to book electric vehicles. So the next few slides are just really about the support that we provide, but I'm obviously happy to answer any further questions on what we mean by platform co-ops and the examples I mentioned. So we sort of map out the journey in what is also often seen as a traditional startup journey of a tech company. So there's an initial phase that comes before you actually incorporate it as a business where you're exploring the idea, understanding what the ideal cooperative structure is for your platform, identifying the funding team, then and already maybe testing and understanding your users. After incorporation you can finally start trading attracting grant funding, building your platform and we call this the pre-seed stage and then there's a moment in which you're like okay well we want to launch and grow and we're ready to do this and very often just before this happens platform co-ops have raised equity and I'll talk a little bit more about that. This is the typical funding stages that we've seen of platform co-ops in the UK so in this pre-seed phase where you can't start attracting grant funding because you're not an entity yet. Founders actually may be able to attract funding as individuals, so they're like fellowships or founder grants, but also platform co-ops tend to do a crowdfunding campaign and that's really useful because you start to test your idea, test your marketing strategies and identifying your users and accumulating a little bit of money to at least get started. In years zero, so from when you incorporate in the first year, we've seen platform co-ops raise around 75k and then in the following years with a share offer on average sort of raising around 350,000 through equity. Platform co-ops are a really early stage so we're still, you know, this is the information we have, we still haven't got to the stage when we've got lots of platform co-ops that are growing and scaling rapidly so hopefully in two or three years I'll have more data about that. And this is just to give you, I mean there's a lot of information here, don't worry about taking it all in but in general the total investment in platform co-ops has been of 3 million and this is in the form of community shares. Again I can't go into detail here but it's a form of equity that is typical of the cooperative movement up to now it has been used mainly for asset based community businesses so saving the local cinema or the local culture centre etc. We're seeing that this form of cooperative equity has been used by platform co-ops quite successively. We saw it first with the media platforms so new internationalist, community channel, positive news and more recently with Sinolyze we'll hear a bit more from them, equal care co-op and co-cars raising between 250 and 600k through community shares. What is also interesting is that these community share officers have been able to attract institutional investment in the form of MAT funding as well from grant funders. So it's a combination of institutional investment and member investment. The main form of support we're providing to platform co-ops currently is through an accelerator programme which is a business support programme of 10 weeks where we bring together a cohort of teams that are really at the early stages of setting up their platform co-op and it leads with a pitch event where they present their idea and there's a £10,000 prize fund provided by the co-operative bank. Sorry just a few more slides and then I'm done. Who is it for? It is for a team so we need at least you to be a team of at least two members. That's because we really want to support those that are nearly ready to incorporate and obviously to set up a co-op you need at least two people that already have identified the co-operative model as the right model for them but might not know which of the co-operative models is appropriate for their business and that are looking to register in the UK by the end of the year. And so we really support you from that idea phase to making it a reality and being able to launch your business. The application window is open. You can apply until the 6th of March and the accelerator will run from the end of April to the end of June with the pitch event on the 15th of July. Here are a few more resources that we'll share in the chat in the next few minutes. There will be two webinars coming up in February if you want to hear more about the accelerator itself do come along and you can ask any questions about that. Do you register to the Unfound newsletter where we provide any information about events, grants, et cetera, anything related to digital and co-ops. We cover that once a month and visit our Unfound website where you have more information about platform co-ops. Beyond the accelerator there are other ways that we can support platform co-ops. And this is depending on, you know, also on what stage you are at you might not be interested in that very early stage support but if you're in the process of setting up your platform co-op we have an interactive tool on our website that really helps you in the various phases before you set up a co-op all the things that you need to decide and helps you through that. And then, as Petra mentioned, we have the Hive program that offers up to 10 days bespoke business support, mentoring and training. Our advice team also offers various training sessions so you can see all of them on our website and can also provide direct support. We do also visit the community shares unit part of our website where there's more information about raising shares, community shares. Sorry this is a lot of information so I might just put these in the chat but there's a very active international network of platform co-ops and so there's a lot we can learn from other co-ops setting up in other countries. So it's worth looking at the platform co-op website and subscribing to their mailing list and then there are also a lot of international lists or simply following the hashtag platform co-op on Twitter. You can really engage with the international community which is quite active. And that's it. These are my details. So thanks very much Vika for that excellent introduction to platform cooperatives. And I saw some questions in the chat which hopefully we can pick up at the end. I'm going to hand over to our speaker Jen Smith from Sinelize who's going to talk about their cooperative that we supported through Hive and through platform co-ops. So over to you Jen, hopefully you can share your presentation. Thank you very much. Hi good afternoon everyone. Just get this set up now. Okay so I have too many slides really for my allocated five minutes so I'm just going to whiz through them. I believe everyone's getting a copy of these afterwards. So I won't spend too long on each slide and apologies I'm looking that way because I'm sharing on that screen so I'm not, if I don't look into the camera that's why I'm not doing my emails in between slides. So I'm Jen Smith from Sinelize co-op and we are a cooperative of deaf people who receive services and interpreters and other professionals for deaf people who deliver services. So our governance model is a multi stakeholder model. Very early on in the day I attended a presentation with Petra who's on the call run via the Hive series and it blew my mind when we realized that we can actually have a cooperative that involved deaf people and we didn't have to just be a workers co-op but that we could actually involve the service users in the business model and that's it's the first time anything like this has been done within the deaf community before and it's a real benefit to our services and a USP of ours. Unfortunately, this is the an all too common story where family members are relied upon to interpret for deaf service users because of failings in interpreter service delivery or failings in the way that interpreter services are contracted. This tends to happen about once per month where a family member has to be involved in interpreting for their deaf family members and we've actually had two incidences recently in the Merseyside area so it's not a problem that's going away but it's definitely the problem that we're set up to solve. And part of the reason this happens is that users aren't involved which is again one of the benefits of being a multi stakeholder cooperative and that the users are an inherent part of the business model. Previously, agencies have been, they act as middlemen and they, some of them don't even have that much knowledge of British Sign Language or the deaf community so they're not the experts in the services that deaf people need to receive. And yet they're holding contracts partly some of them are large spoken language agencies who get BSL as part of every small minute part of that contract. And it's just a great disservice to the deaf community and interpreters. Sometimes it's a matter of staff training they don't know who has the contract. Sometimes it's just the business model of a private agency there to make more money for the shareholders and not really care about the service that they're delivering or the community that they're delivering it to. And we've had lots of problems with unsustainable fees which nubsly the union for BSL interpreters has been fighting against for a number of years now. And as we can see there it costs 30 million pounds a year to the NHS because of these failures. And often deaf people just don't know who's going to be there at the appointment so some of the things that we've put in place enable the deaf community to understand who's going to be there on the day. So our ethos is that we're the experts we're the ones that should be delivering services not a private agency or someone who a business that doesn't know anything about the deaf community. We do this by having regular meetings and because we have specialist knowledge and community ownership there is very important it feels like it's very much our business as a community, and that somebody else isn't delivering it for people in the community but we're delivering it for ourselves. And that's really important. So that's our journey some of which Vika mentioned is exactly the journey that we've been through. We started discussions we had a lot of support from the hive which really acted like a springboard for us and enabled us to get off the ground really quickly. We started six months later as sign code.io which on reflection was an awful name and we had awful branding, but we managed to get some funding to turn that around. And we rebranded and we raised 328,000 in community shares and again had support from coops UK to do that. And the biggest thing that we've had so far is we're now the sole supplier on an NHS framework agreement in Merseyside which is a massive win for us and it's been an absolute pleasure to deliver services now as a cooperative in the area. We feel very much as if we fit into this new post COVID economy and we're fighting to be part of that economy and get services to recognize our value which because of the framework agreement we now are building up an evidence base of exactly how we can deliver services a lot better than some of the other players in the market out there. So how do we compete with everyone else. Well, we're the experts and using tech we have lower overheads, a leaner business model. Most important, very importantly, we have less administration fees and therefore we don't put pressure downward pressure on fees to the end supplier which are the interpreters we have many discussions about pricing about what's reasonable and what's sustainable, not just for the business but individual interpreters so we don't operate in an extractive economic model, we operate to make sure that the whole business as a whole is sustainable for everybody. And we co-design with users as much as we can. And that's that's work that's very much ongoing we're putting a lot of resource now back into the platform since we raise money for community shares in order to continue improving what we have not just for all of the users but for the services that we're providing for so NHS organisations and the users are the people power can't be underestimated with with our business in the fact that a lot of businesses being brought into the cooperative by the members themselves whether that's the user members or the professionals that work and own the co-op. So this is just some possible tips on how to get started, which will be shared a bit later, that's a brilliant book. Some of the resources that Vika had shared to do with the platform cooperative consortium. It's all worth reading. That's a sneak peek of the platform which is in beta at the moment that's the one we're doing a lot of work on. One of the things that we do is we we make sure that we get the, for example, the text number of the deaf person who has an appointment, and we include the profile link. So one of the things that happened at the start of the contract was an interpreter turned up at a GP surgery. And the deaf person said oh I knew you were coming your photo popped up on my phone did the GP send this to me. I didn't know that came from signalized so it was the link to their profile on the platform, which nobody else does in the country but we take the time to do that. And it just means that a deaf person and look up that interpreter if they don't know them already and find out some publicly available information about them such as the work that they like to do. So what their name is, which organization they're registered with it's something that alleviates a lot of stress and anxiety for deaf people as they're on their way to appointments. And so for us it's about continuing work that we're doing on the platform we also have a video service that we're delivering to an HS organizations on Merseyside and it's about continuing to test that and develop it alongside users to add features that they may require that into the actual platform itself a bit better. So we're continuing that work at the moment. We've also applied for funding for an outreach worker so that we can increase the membership of deaf users on Merseyside which has been something quite that's quite difficult to do in the pandemic, with a lack of events face to face in the community. So what we'd like to do is actually employ somebody who is deaf themselves to liaise with the local community better to engage and to do events and also provide training because what we've what we have known is that there's a lot of digital exclusion in Merseyside with deaf users so we think that there's going to be a lot of training needed on how to use the video service to encourage uptake of that and increase people's access to health services and reduce health inequalities which was part of the tender negotiation at the time. We're recruiting quite heavily at the moment because what we're finding is we're scaling quite rapidly so we need people around us quite desperately actually we're looking for a bookings administrator at the moment. So if you know anyone that's interested in cooperatives and might want to work with us then please do encourage them to apply and details are on our website at the moment which is signalize.coop. And we of course are working hard to increase business and gain more contracts, so that we can keep scaling. And like I've said before we're just investing a lot of time and energy into the platform and the tech itself to just keep streamlining our model. So that's what we're doing. And if you'd like to get in contact directly there are our details there sorry it was a bit of a whistle stop tour but the I believe the presentation is being shared later and I'm happy to answer any questions as well. Thanks very much Jen I think that should be a very inspiring stories for others who are looking at that journey and obviously they can see taking a little bit of time to get to where you are now and it's great that you've now got that contract and you are rapidly growing so I hope we can continue to support you on that journey, particularly as members of the Co-operatives UK so thanks Jen. So I'm going to hand over to our final speaker today, and Kayleigh Reed, as we mentioned our presentation before from open food network, and they've been established a little bit longer than signalize so they can, actually Kay can also talk through their journey and what they do. And again it's just another example of co-operatives operating in different sectors in this way so thanks very much, and over to you Kay thanks very much. Thank you Petra and thanks for inviting us here to speak today sorry a bit husky I'm recovering from Covid so hopefully my voice will stick for the session. So I'm just going to share some slides. So the OFAN is essentially it's a global collaboration that was founded in Australia in 2012. And now we're an international community within 20 countries and more join us every year so we're constantly growing. Our global network of local instances work together to develop open and shared resources knowledge and software, essentially to support a better food system. And our flagship project is our open source software platform, and that can be used to set up online shop fronts or food enterprises but it's also designed to enable collaboration between food enterprises between suppliers and producers with food enterprises. People have used the power of this feature to create food collectives, manage food hubs and to take their farms markets online. And being a global collaboration we hold everything we create as part of the common so it doesn't belong to a single entity but instead it belongs to the whole community. And we operate on an open and transparent governance model. In reality this looks like a lot of stuff happening on Slack, which is open for everyone to see. We use collaborative decision making within our global network and we work collaborative with farmers and food enterprises in each country to design software resources for their needs. So on to the open food network UK. We were founded in 2015 by two members of the open admin team, and also our first food enterprise software user to him about a food hub. So I'm not a founding member with the open for two years so I couldn't really give the founders journey justice, but I can talk today about how we work as a cooperative today and what that looks like. Our team is now nine people so we're constantly growing just recruited to new people and we're looking for a finance and admin lead so growing to that team. And so our teams also growing. And our goal has always been that the community of food enterprises using open food network co owners and designers and creators platform. We work with food enterprises that are driven by their communities and how social and ecological values at the core of what they do. And we help them to grow online and to coordinate region and streamline their admin processes. And our vision is for an interconnected ecosystem of community food enterprises which exist in thrive and a food economy which is more diverse vibrant and inclusive, celebrating growth provenance and culture. And we want improved markets for ecologically produced food to encourage more producers to adopt ecologically sustainable practices, buildings tops on and biodiversity. And we also want healthy communities where community food enterprises produces and local institutions collaborate together to enable communities to eat healthy food. And this is what we do so as I mentioned before the main thing that our main project is our is our software platform. And that enables up front with tools and features that make running community food enterprise simple. And another massive part of what we do is we support food enterprises with training and mentoring online. And in person as well to share experience and problems of collectively, and this strengthens our network and movements and community food systems. And this is where my role in in the in our cooperative fits in in that I have, I support food enterprises with their marketing and I also been running like a series of webinars where food enterprises can meet each other and create their own bonds and networks together. Among other things as well. And our platform cooperative was growing from the real needs of food hubs and farmers across the UK and globally. And I think it really helped that as part of our founders team, one of the food enterprises that uses the open food network is one of our kind of founding members. And also during COVID it showed how vital digital infrastructure can be, but without cooperative economy the games of private. And also building software with social aims is difficult to fund. So our funding model works by spreading the cost of building a collective. And because of this, that means we can pull our funds globally and pay for our software delivery team. Also all our coders open source and we put effort into building and expanding our community with processes for welcoming, rewarding and managing contributors. And just a little bit more about our UK team. So the way that we operate is we're non hierarchical and what that means is also we avoid depend over dependence on specific individuals within the team to do a certain thing and we ensure that every role can be done by others in the team. And that's also one of the reasons I'm presenting here as well so we try and share these responsibilities as a team and encourage each team member to grow and expand their skills so they can take on more things which makes it more resilient as an organization. And we also operate according to sociocracy principles. Which means that it's really important to us as a collective to create psychologically safe environments and our decision making is made through consent, as opposed to voting for example. We also a holiocracy holiocracy or it's pronounced that wrong, which is a method of decentralized management and decision making is made through kind of self organizing teams rather than through a traditional kind of management hierarchy, which kind of forces the sense of individual leadership within teams. And we also operate with transparency. So everything that we do the work that we do is kind of shared in a space where we can all see see what's happening. And yeah that's, that's what I have to share today about us. Thank you very much okay that's brilliant and it's great to see how you've grown over that time and that you're also expanding and like to say it's become even more important, our food supplies and where it comes from and who grows it and supporting them so I'm great to talk about the network and particularly how you organize yourselves as a cox and your decision making. So I'm going to, there's been some questions in the chat. I'm going to see if we have time now just to answer some of those questions. And if there are still questions, people want to ask please do keep posting them in the chat and we've got, you've got a few minutes left of the end of this presentation to try and respond to So I think the first question I had, which was probably one for Vika to answer was from Stan, and he was suggesting whether it might be possible to start the platform cooperative maybe as a sole trader and then kind of on board, and become a cooperative later on in the journey. And so I don't know if you can respond to that Vika and I know from other high webinars, people are always asking well, how do I find my fellow cooperators in the first instance and start my co op. So, and it depends how quickly you want to go. You know, so we see in most co ops, there is a leading founder that has an idea. But to transform that idea into reality, you do need a team and you need other people that believe in your idea. And if you're not able to find other people that believe in your idea then maybe you have to really understand and question at the validity of that idea. We see that the cooperative model works best when you are really responding to a need of people and that the people that have those needs are the founders themselves. And so bringing together people if you share that need together, bringing together those people to build your cooperative is the most likely way to make it succeed and and and grow, etc. And so involving people from the start is really, really important. And beyond that, even for any business. If you want it to grow you need a diversity of skills. So, we see, for example, the platform carbs that are led, maybe by a developer that is able to build the platform really quickly. They might start off quicker than the other platforms but then they really struggle to build the community around their platform and understand the users needs, etc. So really starting from the beginning with a team that collects those different skills and and full understanding of what you know the users needs the providers needs and how they can be involved from the start is really, really important. But that doesn't mean that a business cannot transform from being sold trader or a limited company into a cooperative led to stage it just we feel that it makes it more sustainable if you embed the purpose from the start in your constitution. I think that's a really good response we can again from my experience having that kind of vision that everyone can sign up to and understand it's really important at the beginning and is a collaborative process so I think that's really helpful. So just looking at other questions. This one I think is for Jen that signalize from Robert, and asking if you developed your platform internally I'm sure that's with, you know, your own resources and expertise or whether you developed it and you outsource that work. Does that make sense. Yes it does and the answers both. So when we first started off. I've got some coding experience as well as being an interpreter of 16 years. And we started off with some off the shelf software and myself and another developer, we just got cracking with that made some quite heavy customizations on on there. But I've pretty much been the project manager for the whole of the platform. But without source I think we're on five, five developer teams for different parts of the technology, and I oversee all of that development and project manager that so we've had quite a lot of advice from different people so the short answer is both. So I, I hope that that answers that question and I know different cooperatives take different approaches and I think Vika was saying before that lots of the cycle couriers use a particular software that's already been developed and they can then use so there's different approaches. So we've also had a question I think for K at open food network. Our public sector organizations, part of the networks to create local supply change. And then I don't know if it's one in the same question or a subsequent question and have anchor customers acquire large quantities of food. So I suppose it's, you know, I guess it's what kind of members you have and and how does that help you to kind of scale and and and supply more food is that essentially what they're asking if that's right. I think so, I'll, I'll, I'll try and answer and public sector organizations are not currently part of the network but we do work on projects in conjunction with public sector organizations and one project we're running at the moment which is to support new Welsh new food hubs to be established in Wales and that's in conjunction with the Welsh government so yeah so we do do things in conjunction with public sector organizations but in terms of the part of our network that's that's not currently the case. But that also food enterprises that that constitute part of our network also do work with their own kind of local authorities or like. So for example, Tamar Valley food hubs have got a few different things that they do with their local authority so it's more that not as the our fan directly we have projects where we work with the public sector but then different food enterprises that are part of our cooperative also have their own kind of projects that they work on I hope that that's, I hope that that's answered that a little bit. Yes, I hope so. If it didn't then these put it in the chat and we'll respond again. But I think the idea of general collaboration and being cooperatives is sort of at the heart of everything we do. And so I hope that's that's useful. And so I think. Oh I think Zika was suggesting that you might be up to respond to the second part of Stan's question around not found out about. Food and at scale is that is that what you're responding to. Would it be feasible to exit as a co-op. Oh sorry Stan's question sorry apologies yeah. Yes definitely it's feasible what I would say. So the question was, would it be feasible to exit as a co-op and say two years. It is feasible. Just be very careful of what legal structure you do choose legal form you do choose one of the main issues is if you decide to raise equity from a traditional equity, then you would have to negotiate with with your shareholders and so that puts on quite strong constraints. So, so yeah, if you decide to go for a sort of okay I'll start with a non co-op and then transition. Try to choose a quite a lightweight legal structure but our advice would be really to embed the purpose from the start in your constitution. And you can always modify that those articles as well as the organization transforms. I know. I hope Stan that responds to your question and yeah I think and also and we haven't gone into any detail in in this session around legal forms and because it's a flexible model and properties aren't determined defined by their legal form so they're all available. That's a company or society a kick or whatever. And we have got other high webinars one that I delivered last last week which is on online at the moment is a recording that does go into a little bit more detail about legal forms and what you should consider. So what we do say is that be clear on your business model and your members are going to be before you kind of decide on on your legal form that has to come first. And so that should be at the end of that journey defining what to choose. So I can't see any more questions in the chat unless anyone wants to type something really quickly now. I don't know. I suppose the other. I think the question that has come up a lot is is around, you know how do you find those collaborators and I think, you know it is about everybody sharing that same vision and maybe, you know I know some people for instance just start on something like Facebook and start a group and trying to start getting interest, or hopefully it just comes from seeing that there's a problem and an opportunity because things aren't being done as well as it should be. So I'm going to ask speaker if she could share that last slide and then I can talk about what support is is available and because already told you about the unfound accelerator which is currently open for applications and all the links have been in the chat. So if anyone is starting on that journey and wants to have some intensive support, and they can apply to that. And then the main sort of website links for cooperatives that cooperatives UK want to start their journey and want to get support is this one here which is UK dot coop forward slash start. And you'll see there lots of funded programs including the high business support program the unfound accelerator community shares, etc. As well as the step by step guides and how you can apply to the hive up to 10 days of consultancy support training and peer mentoring. So that's a program that I particularly run, and it's open all year round, and we look at applications on a monthly basis. And we also heard earlier in session from my colleague and Scottish Enterprise from cooperative development Scotland, and they can also provide support particularly to businesses and cooperatives in Scotland. I think here so Scottish Enterprise comms forward slash CVS and and Suzanne will be the one that will respond to you if you want support there. So hopefully that that's useful. And, and as I say this session has been recorded it will be sent around to everyone that participated but will also be uploaded to our website. And you can also see on our website that we're continuing to run with these webinars, and you can see the recordings of our previous webinars if you want to find out more about corporatives. And so I think we're slightly ahead of time so I'm just seeing if there's anyone else has any more questions or observations or maybe any of our speakers of panelists wanted to add anything. There's one more minute left. I think. I think we have looks like we have in chat we have people here from across the world, not just in the UK. Joining us is that right. So I'm just checking the chat if there's any more questions. And I guess we'll, we'll finish it there unless anyone else wants to add anything at this point. So is there anything you wanted to say about the sport that you can offer at the stage or anything else you want to add. I think that goes into the chat for everybody we are we are based in Scotland. But yeah if anybody's interested in discussing their project and the support that CDS offer please contact me my email address is in the chat there but I think. Yeah, between the two organizations we're more than capable of making sure that everybody gets to the right place at the right stage of your journey. So I'd like to thank all of our speakers for joining us today. Vika from corporates UK and Jen from signalize and also K from open food network. It's just wonderful to hear the stories of our members and our corporates and to get the insight what it's really like to run the co op. And I know that they're always willing to speak to new corporates and share that journey in person as well so thanks again to everyone. I'm just going to just check the chat finally just to make sure it wasn't anything else. So it looks like everyone enjoyed the session so thanks again and we'll finish it there and look forward to maybe seeing some of you at our other high webinars and maybe coming back to us for support. Thanks very much everyone. Thank you.