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| A Cooperative Alternative |
The Cooperative Cloud is a platform built by and for worked-owned technology cooperatives which proposes a shared social and technical infrastructure for the operation and management of free software applications.
The project arose out the understanding that technology cooperatives continue to struggle to deliver free software solutions without relying on monopolies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon for technical infrastructure and software tools. The contradictions of working with these abusive and extractive forces brings the idea of offering an alternative into question.
The technological crisis is a social crisis. Therefore, building an alternative digital future cannot be done without broad and meaningful cooperation. The Cooperative Cloud project takes as its starting point the existing free software community standards, tools, approaches and governance methods to build up a platform which cooperatives can make use of to deliver a sustainable and ethical alternative ecosystem.
The Cooperative Cloud should not be seen as a technical solution for a social problem (i.e. "Big Tech"). Owning the common technological means for delivering free software is only one part of the struggle to reclaim technology today. If antitrust litigation dismantled GAFAM tomorrow, we'd need our own organisations and robust technical capacity to fill the resulting vacuum. From this perspective, the project can be seen as another approach to building community power by focussing on the cooperative ways and means of managing the free software applications on which so much of our lives have come to rely on.
The project was initiated by Autonomic.