 My name is Rachel Strinkalo, a policy officer at Preston City Council, where I work on community wealth building and promoting the Preston model. With these webinars, we want to share understanding of how a co-operative model of doing business can thrive in the digital age and shape a new economy which combines dignity, equality and community. After more than a year of COVID and with the climate emergency intensifying, it is evident more than ever that only an economy built on these foundations will have the resilience to navigate the challenges ahead. Cooperatives are a key element of the Preston model and of community wealth building on which the Preston model is based. Cooperatives is democratically run organizations in which members have an equal call on assets and on any surplus. And beyond their own organization, members are committed to the wider community and to supporting other cooperative businesses. In other words, cooperatives create community wealth. Cooperatives are also an international movement committed to the principles of the International Cooperative Alliance and their origins lie just down the road if you're joining us from Lancashire in Rochdale. So for all these reasons, cooperatives deserve our attention as we seek to build back better from COVID. In today's webinar, we focused on the cooperative ownership of digital platforms and the opportunities this creates for a more diverse and democratic economy. Our speakers today are drawn from the cooperative pioneers of the Northwest in the UK who are transforming platform capitalism into platform cooperativism. We hope today's event will inspire you to explore how a cooperatively owned digital platform might contribute to your own vision for a cooperative economy. Our first speaker today is Vika Rogers from Unfound, Cooperatives UK's programme to facilitate the development of the UK platform cooperative sector. Vika will explain more about what platform cooperatives are and the work Cops UK are doing to support them. After Vika will hear from Jen Smith, co-founder of Signalize, a platform for deaf people to book British sign languages interpreters, which is owned and controlled by both stakeholder groups. Jen is a signer herself and an IT professional. Our next speaker is Debbie Whitten, co-founder of the newly established Charlton Bike Deliverers Co-op, a bike delivery co-op that uses the co-op cycle digital platform, which is now an approved supplier on the NHS's sustainable transport list. I understand that Climate Action Preston is exploring options for a cooperatively run bike project, so a special welcome today to any Climate Action Preston members with us this afternoon. Finally, we'll hear from Lynn Davis, CEO of Open Food Network UK, an open source platform that enables new ethical food supply chains by linking local producers to local consumers. We are particularly excited to hear from Lynn today as the Lada in Preston has plans to become a local food hub within the Open Food Network. I'm also very pleased to welcome Sam, who will be interpreting throughout the session today. Thank you Sam. Before we start, a couple of bits of housekeeping. Each speaker will talk for about 15 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of questions. So do put your questions in the chat and the speakers will pick those up at the end of their presentation. We're going to record the webinar today, which will be edited and posted online, and we'll let you know when it's available. Finally, please would you turn your cameras off and make sure that your mics are switched off too. So I'd like to pass to our first speaker this afternoon, Beaker from Carps UK. Thank you. Thank you, Rachel, and do interrupt me if I go over time, but I should be able to stay within my time. So welcome everyone. As Rachel mentioned, I work for Cooperatives UK and I run the unfound program which is set up specifically to support the development of the platform cooperative sector. I'll just start from a brief introduction of platform co-ops and then give you a bit of an overview of the landscape and the challenges that we're facing in developing this sector and what we're trying to do about it. So, first of all, the concept of platform co-ops and the word let's say was coined around 2015, in particular by two academics, Trevor Schultz and Nathan Schneider. Trevor is based in New York and Nathan Schneider in Boulder, Colorado, and the idea really came as a reaction to the gig economy. So it was sort of at the end of the wave in which there was a big excitement about the sharing economy and Airbnb and all these platforms that would save people from their precarious jobs and offer new opportunities of income. And so these two academics really put forward a critique towards the gig economy and the platform capitalism and said, well, what if we thought of platforms cooperatively own and run? Well, how can we sort of decouple the tech from actually the organizations that are behind them? And what impact would it have if we actually looked at who was behind the tech and how we could do that differently? And so if we try to imagine, if we try to imagine what an alternative to Deliveroo and Uber would be, how would that impact the rights of workers if they were in charge of their platforms? How would it impact how the algorithms worked in determining how they got work and, yeah, and the patterns of working and et cetera? How would Spotify operate if it was owned by musicians or even listeners? Or how would Airbnb operate if it was owned by hosts and maybe the local authority and that they could reinvest the profits from the platform into the local community? Now, what is really exciting is that these platforms already exist as cooperative. So in the case of Deliveroo, we have, for example, co-op cycle, and we'll be hearing about one of the cycle career co-ops that are using this platform. Spotify, we have Resonate, which is owned and run by musicians and listeners. And we have a emerging platform co-op, also called FairBMB, which is really looking at how hosts, like a platform similar to Airbnb, but where hosts would be contributing to the local community. So, but platforms aren't only being set up as a reaction to the existing platforms. What is really inspiring is that joining the cooperative model with the platform model, we can really design some really, really interesting businesses and interesting platforms. And so we'll be hearing more from Sinelize, but they're platforms like Sinelize, like Equal Care Co-op, where bringing the platform model and the cooperative model together really allows to bridge the gap between those that are providing a service and receiving a service. And allows them to build collaboratively both the platform and the cooperative so that it works to benefit them. We also have another type of platform cooperative that I also find very interesting, which is where the technology really provides an infrastructure for existing businesses. And we'll be hearing more about this through Lynn from Open Food Network, but the technology is really there to support existing businesses or to support new emergent businesses. And so in some way Co-opCycle works in this way. So Co-opCycle is a platform that allows courier co-ops to use the platform to connect to allow delivery, to use the platform to sort of organize their deliveries. And so by sort of pooling resources to build the infrastructure, then this allows small local cooperatives also to thrive. And I think that's a really interesting model for the cooperative movement. However, there are lots of challenges and obviously we're not seeing, you know, loads and loads of platforms emerging and it takes a long time. So, you know, we started talking about them in 2015. So there's still like a long way to go before we see a lot of successful cooperatives. And so I'm just going to go through some of the challenges and some of the things that we're trying to do at Co-opCycle, but also that we need to be doing collectively to really allow this movement and this sector to grow. The first one is definitely raising awareness. So thank you for setting up this event. It's really important to be able to talk about it. But also through the media, through social media, and we need to raise awareness both with people that want to set up the business, but also with users. So we need people to be using these platforms and understanding why they're much more ethical than the big capitalist platforms. There's a big need for business support, and that's something that we're obviously trying to address. So at the moment we have launched an accelerator program specifically for platform cooperatives. We've just closed the application window for the first edition, but a new edition will be running in the autumn, starting from September and applications will be open from June and July. So do subscribe to our newsletter to be notified about that. And I can put links into the chat and respond to any questions. We also have a program called The Hive that provides tailored support for anyone wanting to set up a cooperative in whatever sector. It doesn't have to be a platform, but if you're ready to set up, do get in touch and find out about that program because it can be really tailored to your needs. And then obviously we're trying to put as much resources online as possible. So visit our website. We've got training events and we've got resources that you can use. Then the other big issue is lack of capital. And this is one of the biggest challenges, especially if we're trying to compete with capitalist platforms, that at least up to now that the main model is built on VC investments. So injection of very, very large amount of capital with the idea of becoming monopolistic platforms that take over a whole market. So we obviously can't compete with that type of funding, but also it's not, it's completely incompatible with the cooperative model. However, the cooperative model has a really inspiring and appropriate form of raising finance, which is community shares. I won't go into the details of community shares because it can get quite technical. But it's basically the idea that you're crowdsourcing equity from your community and with conditions that are really favorable to companies that need or cooperatives that need patient capital. And I'm happy to answer more questions on that if anyone has some specific questions. And just to give you an idea, we're seeing platform carbs raise between 400 and 600,000 pounds through community shares. So this is really, really able to compete with what traditional capitalist platforms are raising in angel investment. So it's a really interesting area, but we're still exploring it. And so it's a new area for cooperatives that are not asset based to be entering. So we'll see how that develops in the next years. We're particularly interested in attracting match funding to community shares. So attracting grant funding that can match what we raise from the community. So we hope to see more developments in this area too. A big problem is also the lack of resources and time of the people that want to set up the carbs because very often they come from a place of need and I'm sure some of the founders on this call will resonate with them. And so there's a great need of resources to support people at the very, very early stages of setting up the cooperative. And so that's really about grant funding, basic grant funding to cover some basic costs and basic salaries. So competition is a massive challenge. It's a massive challenge generally in the platform space. If you read any blogs or anything about platforms, it's a constant competing with other platforms. And it's very much driven by VC funding, the ones that get more VC funding just either buy up the other platforms or just make it impossible for them to operate. So my approach to this is that I don't think we should be competing on the same level, but it's really about competing. So competing for example on price is basically impossible because of the type of finance that they receive. But we can really compete on quality, on the offer, on the fact that we're offering ethical alternatives to these platforms. And I think there's so much we can do with that. And yeah, the platforms that I'm seeing emerge are really all talking about the quality of what they want to provide. So that's really, really inspiring. And finally, regulation. We definitely need more regulation to curtail the power of big tech and the extent that they're taking over so much of our lives. And definitely interventions like, for example, the Greater Londoner Authority banning Uber for certain periods of time because it can help. Or in Barcelona, I think they banned Airbnb for a certain moment of time. I don't know if that's still the case. So by banning them, we allow other types of platforms to emerge that do respect quality of services and workers rights and so on. But we also really need support, direct support for emerging and ethical businesses. So not only against the big tech, but whatever we do in against big tech has to really, really support the new emerging ethical businesses. And that goes from procurement. So that's, you know, really interesting to be talking here as part of this event, but also providing grant funding and finance and business support. That is all I have to say, but I'm more than happy to answer any questions. But also, I think it would be really interesting to hear from the founders that we have on this call from the, you know, lived experience. Thank you very much, Vika. Shall we, I think there was one question in the chat, but could I suggest we perhaps pick that up a little later on because, as you say, we do want to hear from the speakers and then just keep that one in mind perhaps to pick up at the end. Okay, so I'd like then to introduce Jen from Signalize. Thank you, Jen. Hello, good afternoon everybody. So I have prepared a small presentation. And I'm just get that ready now. I'm just going to do it this way because I know I've had issues before losing my mouse. Right. So hello, I'm from Signalize Co-op and we are revolutionizing British Sign Language Interrupting Services for all users. So we are setting up a platform to benefit anybody who basically needs to communicate with deaf people and who needs to book British Sign Language Interruptors. So that's what we're set up to do. We are a multi-stakeholder co-operative, which means we have a membership of user members, that's people from the deaf community, who use Sign Language Interruptors and other communication professionals for deaf people. And on the worker side, we have the interpreters and other communication professionals such as lip speakers, notetakers and so forth. So our background as a co-operative with around about 2009, there were, well, everyone's aware of the austerity drive in the UK where after the financial crisis, yes. Sorry, the screen is blank. I don't see anything. No. Sorry to interrupt. That's all right. No, thank you for interrupting. Let me try again. If not, I could just talk as if, can you see that now? I can't see. I just see a black screen at the moment. Okay. In that case, I'll just, I won't share. I'll just, it could be something to do with a Zoom update. In that case, I'll just talk to my slides instead of showing them. But thank you for that. So, yeah, in around 2009, we, after the financial crash, and then everyone's aware of the austerity drive, the contracting for the public sector for interpreting got more and more centralized. So rather than small contracts that were held locally by organizations, the contracts themselves got larger and larger. And in the Northwest, there was something called the Northwest Hub. And the people that won that contract, the initial contract were capital and services rapidly went downhill. And after that, we saw an MOJ, Ministry of Justice contract that was very large, that went national. And that was the kind of start of the sort of Uber privatization, if you like, of sign language interpreting services, which caused a lot of problems for workers, interpreters, and a lot of problems for the community. And we had a lot of users as well. On the back of that, the union was set up by one of my colleagues, Nikki Evans, so the National Union of BSL interpreters. And we were doing a lot of research into the contracts. And one of the very first things that we had to do after we set up was basically campaign against a contract that wanted level two BSL, which is the equivalent of knowing holiday French. If you like, and it was it was clear that these contracts have been drawn up from a place of little knowledge. So we campaigned as a union to basically scrap the framework was the name of the campaign. Since then, there's been many reports from the deaf community from the British Deaf Association as well. And Nubsly also more recently had a dossier of just grace, which basically collated all the evidence of these poorly managed contracts. A lot of these agencies such as Capita and some of the other ones are very proficient at getting contracts but not necessarily experts in sign language interpreting all the deaf community were basically snapping up a lot of these contracts. And it became clear after a few years of union work that we needed a legal entity to be able to bid for contracts and go into direct competition with these larger spoken language agencies and that's how they're basically the co-op was born. And because there were such problems in the Northwest, that was where we decided to start and we now have a membership of all about 75 people, about 15 deaf community user members and 50 interpreters so we're increasing quite rapidly. It's a shame he can't see my screen because I was going to share just the headline of an article this happened in February it's an incredibly sad story. And the headline is daughter had to tell her death father he was dying as hospital can get assigned language interpreter. The reason I wanted to share this story is this is something that happens at least every year that there's a contract failure and the man in question was terminally ill and his daughter had to tell her father that he only had two weeks to live. And this continually happens we find that family members of the deaf community have to get involved in interpreting because there's been a failing by the hospital or by the agency that's got the contract. So, in that particular case it sounded like a communication breakdown as the hospital was saying that they did have a contract, but sometimes it can be that the staff aren't aware of who holds the contract. Or there is a contract but interpreters won't work for the agency because they're not sustainable fees. There's been boycotts in the past by the Union of certain agencies that have put in for a tender unreasonable prices without consulting interpreters as to whether they'd work for those prices. So there's this history of agencies promising the earth but being unable to deliver and with a lack of monitoring can often end up with a contract for four years leaving the local deaf community without appropriate provision. There's well users report that there's no communication with the agency in question so they're on the way to the hospital and they don't even know if an interpreter has been booked because what happens is the agencies operate as middle men in the middle and there's no communication between the interpreter and the deaf user the hospital. It's all via the middle man the agency in the middle and then things start to go wrong double bookings cancellations deaf people don't know if there's an interpreter but it's not an efficient system. I had a quote from equal care co op who we very much following in their footsteps they were one of the pioneers of the platform co op movement in the UK and this is a quote from them. It's the power in the hands of those who matter the most, the people who give and receive care and support. So we're basically following in their footsteps by saying that we're the experts as people that have provided interpreters for many years and people who know how to run a booking service for interpreting that we can do this a lot better. And the reason we can do it a lot better is because we've got the co op structure behind us as well as the tech which brings us to the digitalization so with the tech what that gives us is a more sustainable business model. We have lower overheads because we have more automation, we have a leaner business model, because we have more automation, we have less administration fees, and we can pay better, and also compete on price I know if he can mentioned price earlier. It's not easy, we can't compete with all of the agencies out there because they do undercut and various and have various. Let's just say poor working practices. But we hope that in the future that interpreters will vote with their feet and come to work for the co op rather than anyone else because they'll get sustainable fees and then input into the business shared ownership and democratic decision making so we have the tech on one side supported by the cooperative model of governance that enables us to we see it thrive as a community and offering a service. We also, we also use sociocracy for our democratic decision making. I just wanted to mention that because we've already seen some really powerful examples of basically deaf people in meetings saying like I've never been able to talk about the lack of provision that I've had in such a way where I know that people are listening to me and things might actually change. Like we know that some NHS organizations and councils have had consultations. I'm sure you've heard of the word non-saltation where it feels like you're constantly being consulted but nothing actually ever happens. They're sort of tokenistic consultations and that's one thing that we want to avoid. That's one thing by our governance structure that by bringing users in we're actually one of the first people in the country. Well, we are the first people in the country that where deaf people deaf people are co owners of the business and a co run the service which has never happened before. Other businesses might have advisory boards or one or two deaf people owning the company. But it's never happened before that the whole of a community have this opportunity to become part owners in a business and doing it alongside interpreters as well. And we've had the equivalent light bulb moments in workers meetings where people just constantly use words like cathartic where interpreters are saying you know I've never had the opportunity to talk in this way and resolve issues in this way collectively and together. Sometimes being a freelance interpreter can be quite lonely you're working. A lot of people decide to work freelance because of the flexibility and control over their work. And what we're trying to do is offer that flexibility and control but within a supportive environment that's a collective where people can come together and feel much more supported than they do out in their own working. I was also just going to talk about what the platform actually does so we're in the last stages of testing the platform. And we want it to be better safer quicker and more cost effective so better because it's more automated and easier to see what's happening in the process of booking an interpreter so it's more transparent for the user that's actually trying to book an interpreter. It's safer because we monitor our interpreter registrations we automate the process of checking them, such as checking their DBS checks and other police checks and when they've expired and whether their registrations lapsed. We want the whole process to be quicker rather than going through an agency middleman coming and then finding out whether you've got someone booked or not this is all done so that the user takes control of their own bookings. And more cost effective so again lower admin fees means sustainable fees for the interpreter as well as being able to be cost effective and competitive. And what this can do are predominant target for business the moment is the public sector, because we think that's where the social impact is the greatest. Because the contracts are so can be so shocking some of the new stories that come out about, especially for spoken language interpreters but it's quite often the same agencies that hold the contracts and interpreters that were supposed to be professional have been signed for fraud and all sorts when they weren't actually interpreting properly. And also in police cases where cases have had to have been thrown out of court when they get caught because the interpreting that was done at the police station wasn't good enough. There are lots of problems with the spoken language sector as well and obviously we're not here to for the spoken language sector there is another co op being set up for spoken language and we're very much in contact with them and hopefully they'll will be able to bid together for certain contracts in future. Next for signalize we will be launching the platform and it's MVP phase so minimal viable products and then iterating on that in the future with more features and especially looking at the back end so rather than the front end that users see how we can actually use data effectively for our own use and also for commissioners benefiting commissioners in the way that we collect data automate it, saving us on admin time when it comes to monthly reporting and stats when it comes to auditing and also potentially the use of shared data so cleaning up the data anonymizing it and then being able to share it for the community good we're really interested in that at the moment as well so we're working with a data analyst and data scientists which is really exciting. We also have live a community share offer. It's a shame you can't see the link but I shall put it in the chat in a minute so if anyone's interested in finding out more about community shares and also investing and becoming an investor member I can tell you now plug alert that the signalize offer is incredibly good so you get 5% interest and it currently attracts tax relief of 30% so if you're looking to save on your tax bill, or you have a large community gains bill coming up then you can offset it with an investment in signalize and we're currently at I think it's 205,000 pounds that we're at at the moment it runs for about another 20 days we may extend if necessary and we're aiming for a 300 maximum because we realize we're quite niche and not everybody perhaps is interested in deaf people or sign language interpreting so we just went for a 300 maximum. But we would absolutely love to smash that target and we'd love to welcome more investor members so if you have 50 pounds to spare or more, then please take a look that I'll look at the link that I'll pop in the chat later. And also, if I would encourage you to use our service as well so you can book interpreters like Sam, for any live events, webinars, or face to face booking as the world's reopening now after COVID, and I should also pop that link in the chat as well so I haven't been watching the chat. Just see if there's any questions come through. So that's the end of my presentation. Yeah, I'll share the slides afterwards. Do you want me Rachel to start answering questions. Yes, we have one question from Hera. Hi Hera and Zola I think was interested in the response. They're wondering about the possibility of franchising your approach. Yeah, absolutely. We're definitely interested in talking to people that might be interested in the platform as well. Our main efforts at the moment are concentrating on the UK and getting it launched in the UK, getting interpreters signed up to the platform, and not just our worker members, but we know that a lot of the community outside our membership in the Northwest are excited to, but yes after that we would be very interested in seeing what the potential is for working with others, and potentially franchising it it would be very easy to replicate what we're doing for the sign language interpreting profession elsewhere in the world but also spoken language and potentially other areas as well and I'd be, I'd be very happy to have a chat with anyone about that. Okay, another couple of questions. How similar is British sign language to American sign language. Oh, so there's a, there's usually a sign language for every country. And American is quite different. So due to historical links of the way deaf people have traveled, there are quite, there's a quite a large similarity between Australian sign language and British sign language. But American is quite different. Okay, just one quick final question from Debbie. She says what geographical areas do you cover for face to face work? At the moment we're concentrating on the Northwest, but we do plan to expand so we started off in Mersey side where the need was the greatest but we find that we're getting approached by a lot of Lancashire interpreters as well and because of the geographical spread and also the way that you know the deaf community is a diaspora, it's spread geographically around the country. Obviously deaf people don't all live in the same place and also interpreters there's only about 1250 in the country. So we're actually in short supply. So we would service face to face booking, say Greater Manchester, North Wales, Mersey side and Lancashire, predominantly Mersey side but we can cover some of those areas as well. We do actually have an increasing membership in Manchester from people that are interested in the platform and our work. So if you're in any basically any part of the Northwest we can probably cover it. Okay, well thank you very much. I think just one final, there are a couple of questions, but I think we should probably move on. Maybe you could respond to those in the chat, Jen, or indeed I think will people have your details. They want to get into a more detailed conversation about aspects of training, etc. Well thank you very much. That was really interesting and I think your backstory, how you came into being and the forming of the Union and the fact that your model actually could replicate across quite a number of sectors which have become characterised by contracting and a very poor quality of contracting and outsourcing I think is really inspiring. So thank you very much. I'd like now to hand over to Debbie to completely different theme bicycles now so thank you Debbie. Okay I'm just going to share my screen hope it works. Let's just. You can see I can see you Debbie yeah. Yeah, can you see. Right, okay. Okay, we can see screen to that so that I can see it so I think we're okay there. Okay, so thanks so much for having me on your panel. I've been so inspired by the stories I've heard so far and it is. Yeah, it's fantastic to hear other things that are going on in the cooperative platform arena. And so my name is Debbie and I'm a co founder of children bike deliveries. We are not a digital platform ourselves but our user of co upcycle a cooperative digital platform that I'll talk about in the presentation. And what we do at children bike deliveries is offer car free deliveries to and for local residents businesses and community organizations by a variety of bikes trikes and trailers. And Chilton is an inner city area of South Manchester and websites there and I can put it in the chat for you to have a look at more info about what we do. And Chilton is a very diverse area, but we really cover Chilton and its boundaries so probably we're covering about a five mile radius at the moment. So, okay, just trying to work out how I can get to my next. There we go. So, how we began. So we're actually brand new we were born in April 21 from a grassroots response to the COVID crisis. So, and it really came from a desire from to think about what can we do to help our community at the beginning of the first lockdown. We were all cyclists and selfishly and we were all thinking and how can I stay on my bike and still get out and about. But we all have a shared passion for active travel and climate change leading to reduce the missions and increasing well being. So we thought about how can we support our local independent high street, and five of us came together and thought, okay, let's let's do this. So, in the very in the early days we just source to cargo bikes one was on loan from transport for greater Manchester, and one was on low cost hire from Manchester bike hire. We quickly got on with creating a logo or web page Facebook group an email address and a phone, and off we went. We recruited a small pool of volunteer riders and develop some protocols, and we reached out to all our traders that were still open. We also reached out to local food charities and the COVID-19 streets group. And we responded to our top requests for help whenever we could there were people shielding obviously at that time. We access support from our local co-op network and co-ops UK and. Beaker mentioned before about the hive so we had support through the hive in setting up our governance to becoming a co-op which has been fantastic. We obviously talked to others doing similar projects in other places to ourselves. And as part of that Googling around we discovered the co-op cycle Federation we knew nothing at all about digital platform economies. So we were really inspired and excited by co-op cycle and we're very excited to be part of a European Federation just at the time of Brexit. And we joined them in August 2020. So our purpose is to promote the use of bikes and enable people to use them for local journeys. Enable our members to make their contribution to a greener children. So very much from a green roots but we also want to be able to raise sufficient income through our offer with traders and businesses to pay a living wage and fund our voluntary work. And employing really particularly young people in the career business with a decent hourly living wage is one of our key aims as we move forward. So what are we actually doing now? So we have two arms, a community and commercial arm. Being rooted in the COVID crisis the community arm was really our starting point. And now we still do daily pickups of surplus food to food banks and food clubs all very local. We support a couple of organisations with their weekly distribution of free meals to vulnerable people and vulnerable groups. And we've been involved in a lot of one-off community projects. Wednesdays and Fridays are our local traded deliveries to residents. What we've done is tried to funnel our deliveries because to try and make it worthwhile to actually pay riders an hourly living wage. But we do do ad hoc deliveries on other days. And very recently we have secured an NHS contract which is really exciting. So twice a day we are picking up blood samples from our local GP surgeries and cycling over to our local hospital. And that has definitely been a very exciting development. We're trying to develop business to business work. Already we're supplying bread to one of our local grocery cooperatives in Chilton. But those two areas really are where we see our business growing as we open up post-COVID. So what did we achieve over our first year? Well we've now managed to raise funds to buy an e-cargo bike and an e-cargo trike and a customised trailer. We've built trustee partnerships with 13 local independent traders and community groups. We now have a pool of over 20 active riders to support both our voluntary and paid work. We have our NHS contract. We have some great visibility on the streets, both locally and on social media. And we are very much a part of a network of other bike delivery organisations. We are aligned with local climate change activities, walking and cycling campaigns and actions against food poverty. And literally just this week on Monday we formally launched our multi-stakeholder cooperative. And we now have 54 members drawn from riders, traders and community. And throughout this time we've been an active member of Co-op Cycle, developing our use of the platform. And where we can also support newer cycle co-ops. So York Collective are a site in Co-op obviously in York. And they have been really supportive of us. And then as newer co-ops emerge there's one in Chester that has recently started and they got in contact with us for chats about how to set up. So it's a very supportive community. So just to say a little bit about Co-op Cycle. So these are a few of their slides that I'm sharing with you. And they're a network of local worker owned bike delivery co-ops. And they are very much strengthened through the power of collectivity. And there if you wanted to have a little more information about them there. Website details are there and I can also put those on the chat. Co-op Cycle started in 2017. Where a small group of rider activists in France created a union. And basically they were fed up of being ripped off by the gig economy. And wanted an alternative model to the extractive commercial platforms of Uber Eats and Deliveroo and the like. And now there's a network of 70 local co-ops internationally. Co-ops are in Europe. The biggest ones are in France and Germany. But they are growing all the time. So Co-op Cycle being a member of Co-op Cycle is more than a collective digital platform. It's a federation to pull resources and expertise. So supporting new co-ops, sharing experiences that can come together for bulk purchases. Providing advice around management of contracts and wages. So how does Co-op Cycle work? Well, it starts off with a very democratic model. Where in the decision making process, each co-operative has one vote. And the federation structure I think is very similar to the sociocracy model. That's what I've just spoken about. It's very much based on working groups. There is a general assembly of all members. And I think there's over 500 members now. And they are the members of the individual co-ops. And there are different groups, working groups, looking at all the different aspects of the platform development. They have, I think, now two employees. But the actual platform, digital platform itself has been very much driven by Mechs, who is the digital expert. I'm very lucky to have a cycle enthusiast who also has that software expertise. So yes, now they have two salaried workers. They're made up of the Co-op members and 15 volunteers. So how do we communicate? So there is a Slack where all the issues that you might have, everything from day-to-day glitches with the platform, help I can't do this or this has gone wrong, to development ideas, to sharing news stories, all goes through the Slack. So you really feel part of an ongoing development process. And I am not a tech person at all myself. However, the support that you get from the tech guys, and it's not just a one-way process between you and the platform, you and Co-op Cycle, you'll put a query on how you can't manage something on the platform or can it do this or do that for your Co-op. And you'll get responses from people from also a whole range of Co-ops to support you. It's a very, very supportive place. Lumio is what they use for decision-making. They recently had a number of votes that came out of their annual, genuine meeting. And there was a very, it was most digital, well I've never done a digital democracy before, but it really does offer a very transparent and very democratic way of making decisions. And they also have an annual general meeting where people come together and decisions are made in real life rather than COVID life. So how has Co-op Cycle helped set up and grow our commercial arm? We could not have done this without Co-op Cycle and it has been absolutely integral to us that we work with a platform that shares our cooperative values and being part of an international community connecting to other Cycle Korea Co-ops has been really important, that sense of community and of growing together. Absolutely, fundamentally, it's given us access to a digital platform that we don't have the technology or the financial resources to any extent at all to be able to create ourselves and be able to afford it. It's also given our traders access to that platform as well because we work with local independent traders where that sense of support has been really important. It's enabled us to pay out, which is really, and that's what has enabled us to pay our riders a living wage for our commercial work. If these platforms were taking a 30% cut, there's no way we could have competed in any way. It's created a trusted professional workflow for traders. When a trader comes to talk to us about what we can do with them, the fact that we can set them up on our platform, get them to have a look at it, rather than what we did right at the beginning was emails and texts and Excel spreadsheets. This gives a real consistent, trusted workflow in a way that orders can be traced and so on. Co-opCycle provides an app with all the information and maps for our riders. It works extremely well for the riders on the app. It's very similar to... I did a little stint with Delivery before all of this, and it does work very similarly to a Delivery app. Also, the Co-opCycle platform can offer a shop front for independent traders who don't have their e-commerce, only e-commerce, and we've got a couple of those working with us. It just provides capacity for growth into all sorts of different areas. Why isn't that moving along? Okay. Sorry. I've just gone too far now. Okay. Moving ahead, we're looking to expand our service across South Manchester. We want to pay for more rider hours and secure more public sector delivery contracts. We've just started talks with our local authority about library books for people who are housebound. We're looking at a crowd funder for another bike, and we're also starting to look at where we can host our actual bikes in a kind of community hub premises. We currently use a couple of our founding members backyards and locked up garages for the bikes, which really isn't sustainable for further growth. That's what we need. But really lying behind all of this is our membership of the Co-opCycle platform. We haven't moved into the takeaway business, which is what the platform is mostly set up to do at the moment. We had a little flutter with one of our key traders, and it really is a very complicated, difficult thing. Trying to compete with delivery or Uber Eats in the mainstream market isn't what we're going to be doing. It is about supporting independent traders and independent food outlets. Success really, for us, is being part of that community, part of the digital platform community and part of our local community. With a couple of quotes here, it feels good to be part of an organisation that's making a difference in the community from one of our riders, and children bike deliverance has been essential to our start-up. We look forward to keeping bikes at the heart of how we work. So that's it from me. Thank you for listening, and I'll share some of those links in the chat. I'll stop sharing there. Okay. Thank you very much, Debbie. I'm going to jump in with a question, but I think you may be able to pick some up in the chat after. We know that in this country, a lot of cities are moving towards clean air zones, basically keeping motorised traffic out in the centre of cities. I think some of the Birmingham area, there are quite a few. Are you seeing an interest in the kind of service that you've set up in those areas? Or indeed, do you see any way of seeding your idea in those cities? So local groups, local cycling activists are encouraged to do what you've done? Yes. In Manchester, we are very much in touch with what's going on locally with the last mile provision. Last mile, and there are a couple of other cycle courier companies that are much bigger than ourselves that are involved in that last mile. Competing in that arena, we are not ready yet in terms of the size that we are. We are more interested at the moment in what's called only mile. So we have a direct business to business relationship rather than picking up at the end of a whole trail of deliveries. In terms of reaching beyond our area, I think for us being local and community based and our networks has been what has made us a success. And what I'd like to see is to support other areas, to support them to set up Bristol cycle deliveries or Ermiston cycle deliveries, rather than us expanding. We're not looking to franchise out or expand ourselves, but to support those other networks. Oh, you're on mute, Rachel. You're still on mute. Sorry, I was trying to do two things there because we just need to check that Lyn is still on the call. But thank you, that is really interesting. I think the way that different policies get intersected is quite exciting, isn't it? So the move towards clean air zones was active travel and cooperative development. Yeah, I mean, the five of us came out of really walk-ride children, which came out of sort of walk-ride Manchester, which is the whole campaign around cleaner air and looking at making the streets much more pedestrian and cycle friendly. So really that was our roots and where our interest in this came. Thank you. Right, I think we've got Lyn back. Thanks, Jess. So just before we ask Lyn to join us, have we got any more questions in the chat? Do we just have a quick look back there? No, I think that's it. So I just like to thank you very much, Debbie. That was really interesting because we got a real sense both of your business and how you came into being, but also how the tech, how co-op cycle has really made a difference. And I think it's very exciting for any... I do believe there are some people in the Preston area who are looking at this as a project. So if you're out there, if you've been listening, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah, Debbie will be willing to talk to you. So thank you very much. So our last speaker this afternoon is Lynne Davis from the Open Food Network. Lynne, you're very faint. I had some slides to share and everything, which I have actually written just emailed to you. So if you happen to get that email, you might be able to access my slides and share them on my behalf. But right now it is Zoom on my phone. So does this work? Can you hear me if I talk like this? We can hear you, yes. Rachel, if those slides do come through, then please feel free to share them and we can coordinate getting the right slide in the right place. Otherwise, I'm going to have to play the game of just presenting from my slides without you getting to see them, which I'm very sorry about. Okay, I've got your slides. This is such an excellent tackle. I've got to work out how I can share them now. But you carry on and I'll see what I can do. The point of sharing then we can just coordinate which slides. Enable community-led food systems. So we essentially, as we said at the start, we aim to be an infrastructure to provide software that helps community-led food systems to thrive. And we do this in the interest of building kind of food sovereignty, so like direct control and ownership over how our food systems work and putting that control into the eaters and the producers and the workers in between the most important people in our food system. And just going to move that over. Yeah, so our kind of vision and if you are on the slides at all, let's move to the next slide. Our vision is to move from this kind of world of global uniformity into a world of diversity. And so to us this is kind of really central to the mission that we need to be on in the 21st century. I think lots of us will kind of have images in our minds or on slides about huge, massive scale tractors over our kind of arid landscapes, plowing up fields and comparing that to maybe a vibrant vision of forests and trees and diverse crops in kind of growing between each other with a lot of space for wildlife and biodiversity as well as human crops. And so that's kind of on the field scale, but also when you think about the business scale, we have a similar, oh look at this, screen sharing, excellent. So on the business scale, we have a similar issue where we have say, massive monopoly scale companies with huge packing and distribution that doesn't have, so yeah, the slide before that one. Where the workers don't necessarily have much control over the way that the company is led and we end up with these very streamlined, very efficient, very cold and dry businesses that really don't give any empowerment or a sense of vibrancy to our local economies. And so when we talk about diversity, we need it everywhere. We need it across our landscapes, through our communities, throughout our economy, throughout representation. And so this is what we aim to do as the open food network. And so to the next slide. Basically, you know, if we want to have diverse agro-ecological food production, then we need to have diverse rigs to market. Those kind of farming systems they have, they will have smaller, more regular harvests of a much greater variety of crops. If we want to have diverse businesses, then they require diverse business models where loads of people feel inspired and like they are empowered to kind of create businesses that genuinely serve their communities and our food system is full of businesses like this. They tend to be, you know, they're not at the scale of the Tescos and the massive dominating actors within food retail, but they play a really important role. Businesses like food hubs or verge box schemes, local food deliveries, buying groups, people who are doing kind of aggregation or producer collectives, farmers markets, clicking collect schemes on a small scale. So yeah, and these kind of businesses, they actually really proved their fundamental importance during COVID, you know, like across the sector. Businesses were growing by 900,000% overnight when supermarkets weren't delivering, they couldn't take any more online orders. Food, you know, community-loaded food enterprises were supplying every order and they had those local links with producers, with their communities and they could bring up people who were shielding and make sure that they got food or they knew which producers used to supply pubs and were now looking for routes to market. So these businesses, you know, not only, they've proven to be much more resilient, not only are they more resilient from an ecological perspective, but they're really resilient in terms of crisis when shocks happen. These are the businesses that can really support communities and so this is the infrastructure that we want to build up, a kind of a world where we're fed by these kind of food enterprises that are well-networked, that coordinate with each other, that can effectively share the appropriate data so that we can find the efficiencies where they need to exist, say in logistics, but we can put that control in the hands of the producers and the communities where it belongs. So that's a bit about what we're about and we think about what we do and a perspective of seniority. So where it is the most appropriate kind of point of governance or coordination, organizing at the most local scale possible. And so sometimes that most local scale is, you know, the land beneath your feet, the farm that is growing that carrot. Sometimes it's a regional area where you're coordinating the producers to create a regional distribution scheme. Sometimes when it comes to the software, it's actually on a global scale. So, you know, there's lots of reasons to try and pull resources and the more that we bring other countries and people and, you know, from around the world within to the open through network global community, the more we realize that the problems are the same everywhere. And the solutions are very similar and by pooling our resources we can come up with these kind of the shared global commons which benefits everyone. So to the next slide. This is an example. So we work with food hubs across the country. We work with thousands of producers across the country and tens of thousands of shoppers and all kind of creating these bespoke and really local, really fitted to context food enterprises. So the Lada is a beautiful example where we've been kind of in conversations for years and very excited about working together more closely in the coming years. And so the Lada, maybe many of you know about it and I'm not sure where the K was able to join this school but hopefully she's about. But it's a fantastic social enterprise combining cafe with training and food sales and they're using the open food network to kind of add more flexibility to their model for retail and wholesale and doing things like providing flexible pricing and voucher systems and being able to better support folks on low incomes so that we can address food poverty in a dignified and empowering way. So if we go to the next slide. On my screen because it's not going to happen for me. So yeah you know by bringing together producers across the country and the world that are organizing in these community food hubs we can share ideas, skills, knowledge and poor resources around the world to create a global commons as we design for a more diverse food system and this is what we're all about and it's fascinating to see that you know when we started we were like okay software yeah we want to make software that's shared and now we really realize that sharing ideas, skills and knowledge is just even more important than building the tools themselves and you know COVID in the first lockdown we were organizing webinars with Beijing Farmers Market and you know farmers in Italy to try and coordinate and understand how we should respond to this as a collective of community food enterprises in the UK and this was before government even announced lockdown you know like this was at a time when everyone was panicking I'm sure we all remember it but there was no guidance for food enterprises these food enterprises were growing really fast as more and more people were ordering from them and they had no guidance whatsoever so we were able to work with the global community to pull those ideas and knowledge as well which is an incredibly powerful thing to the next slide so yeah what we do we do build a software platform it's an integral part of what we do making these tools that are all about creating reducing the admin overhead trying to make it more simple and effective to run these kind of community scale food enterprises because the most important work happens at the community scale with the people with the farmers so the software to try and take some of the boring admin side simplify that as much as possible so that there's more you know the very low margin for the existing food anything from that can pay fair living wages and can go into putting that community work fast but we also we also understand that community food enterprises are it's not a straightforward thing to do it's an incredibly difficult thing to do particularly in this current world where food is just so incredibly cheap so we also do a lot in terms of sharing resources we have a learning community and also figuring out how to best contribute to research and contribute the data that we're able to build and organize into so that we can make a stronger case for these kind of food enterprises and feed that into different kind of research work that's happening so to the next slide a little bit about our journey so we've always been built by people who are farmers or running community food enterprises themselves in the UK I mean my own journey to this was being a farmer training as a farmer and realizing as we lost one of our main market for our produce that we then needed to find a new market and there was just no option we had no option to read the market so we developed this kind of there were a number of farmers that lost their market at the same time so we came together to build a community food hub and then realized that it was a great model but it needed software to make this happen and this software was kind of an online farmers market and this software was we couldn't fund the development of the software ourselves so we linked with other groups across the UK and in particular Group in Stroud Tamar Valley Food Hub Vipe Diet were also part of the initial conversations and we started the journey of trying to build a collaborative software and found that there was a group in Australia called the Open Food Network who were a few months ahead of us in software development so we joined resources and joined in with them to try and make this an international project and it has grown from there with groups in France joining next Group in Catalunya joining next and so the Spanish contingent started and it's rippled up from there over the years so it's been quite a kind of grassroots and exciting journey but we've learnt a lot of things on this journey one thing that we've really learnt is about the that in the long term like building something quick and cheap as a software tool you can do that, you can just whip something together but actually it's really important to be thinking long term every step of the journey and we definitely made this to stay kind of going for new features and not taking care of the underlying infrastructure the technical debt we call it that supports it and because the internet changes and moves so quickly you know new phones come out new tools are happening, new viruses are detected, you've always got to be keeping up with the groundwork that your software doesn't come out of date and it's expensive to do that it's very tempting to cut corners but you're paying the long run and that's definitely I think it's it's hard to understand how expensive software is to build in this way in this world that we live in where you know most software is just delivered to us for free or so cheaply as others sell out data for capitalist gain and yeah this software with social aims it's quite difficult to fund that particularly in low margin areas or where you're trying to prioritise paying fair wages and things like this and as I was referring to earlier like COVID really showed how vital this digital infrastructure can be but you know as we've seen in COVID Amazon have been one of the big winners here and I think society as a whole loses because of that so this is why putting this cooperative infrastructure is so important to the next slide just a little bit here on the power of data so the image in the background is this kind of mycelial network that you might be familiar with and this is really how we see the work that we do trying to kind of become this mycelial interconnected web infrastructure that is self-organising and playing a supportive role to the world around us so you know to be open source this is really important to how we operate and data is a commodity now more valuable than oil to the global economy and in food and farming it's encroaching fast the big tax roll in food and farming so where really to us it's really important to understand how we can use this data for the common good how we can use this data to build to achieve scale where it's appropriate to do so the power stays with trusted people so concepts like data trusts these are kind of concepts that are worth looking into more but I don't have time to explain here but I just maybe a little teaser if you're interested in this kind of thing and also open into operability standards because you know as we grow as a platform we realise that being the one platform to rule them all is not what we want to do it's not our goal we don't want to be the amazon of the food sector we enable a diverse economy of platforms as well that can interoperate but you know don't have to then have delivery trucks driving past each other because it's incredibly wasteful to not be at scale in logistics but if you have to be at scale to get that efficiency then I think we lose as a society because we lose a diversity from what we do so yeah we're exploring ways to do that through open interoperability standards and through working out how logistics can be coordinated and the south west good food network is an incredible example of that coordinating their logistics services across different food hubs and box schemes around the south west and doing so in a way which is you know maintains the local control to those community food enterprises but expands the market for produce where it's appropriate to do so so another really good example to check out if you're interested but that is probably enough from me thank you for bearing with me in this tech what feels like from my end a technical disaster but hopefully it didn't seem too much like it from your end and I'm worried to see the chat for questions so please do say them out loud for me that's alright well thank you very much I don't think it was a technological disaster it took me a while to get my head around it but I'm sorry about that if there was a bit slow with these slides no thank you so much for playing along I'm so glad that worked out because it would have been worse without the slides so yeah thank you okay I'm just having a quick look through the chat there aren't any specific questions I can see but Zolo in Mongolia is I think very keen to get the presentation because he was with us or she was with us last week and expressed real interest in this area so we've got a question from Jennifer who's in the US she says do you have a presence in the US we do have a presence in the US yeah so if you go to www.all then you'll be able to find a link from there to all the different instances across the world and there is a presence in the US that I should know what it is off the top of my head because everyone is like www.all.uk.au the US is not that one though it's something else but we definitely exist there so I'm sure you could find it easily enough and I can see someone in Mongolia and I'm getting chat pop-ups on my phone this is great so yeah similarly from the www.all.uk.au is our global site and from there there's more information about how to start something like this in your local area so you could definitely and we have a fantastic global community we organize on Slack which is not a platform cooperative but we'd love to be organizing on our web tools that do so so yeah we can welcome you into our Slack community and give you all the information about how to get started launching an instance in Mongolia if that's something that you'd like to do very much do get in touch okay well thank you very much Lynn we've got lots of thanks coming up in the chat you'll see that there and thanks thank you to Vika for sharing the US one there we are she's shared it for you that was great well we're nearly on time so I'd like to first thank today's speakers very much for their inspiring contributions I think it's been a really interesting session we've covered three very different sectors of the economy but I think demonstrated in all of them the power of both cooperatives and the power of digital ownership of digital platforms so if any you are inspired to take an idea you have for this further there's plenty of information on the cooperative UK website about cooperatives and also if you follow the links for unfound there'll be details about more information about platform cooperatives and do remember at the beginning that Vika mentioned the accelerator program coming up quite soon so just missed the one that starts the next week or so but there is another one in the early autumn I believe so do look at that there are other support business support for cooperative development generally the cooperatives UK has the hive which I think one of our speakers mentioned and then if you're living in the Preston, Chorley or South Ribble area we do have a a support program for worker start-up cooperatives if you'd like to find out more about I will put Alina has kindly put she's just put the email address in the chat that provides up to 10 days of expert consultancy support to assist with the setup of a worker cooperative so lots of ideas there for follow-up do feedback to us to your thoughts always interested to hear suggestions perhaps for future webinars very happy to look at those so finally once again I'd really like to thank the speakers thank Vika, Lin Jen and Debbie and also just thanks Sam who I think has worked the hardest of all this afternoon so thank you very much Sam and we've had a team promoting and doing the tech for this session so I'd like to thank all of them as well and finally to thank you for coming along and participating I think as I said earlier it's been a very interesting very worthwhile session so and every best wish in your future plans especially if they're cooperative ones thank you very much, bye bye