In 2015 HelloIdeas worked with Coops UK's Coops Sustainability Unit (CSU) to create a proposal for the cooperative sector to collaborate together to develop open source technology to support their needs as part of an EC funding call 'Collective Action for Digital Commons'. Austria's Centre for Social Innovation (ZSI) took over the project and restructured it with 13 lead partners across 7 countries as 'Collective awareness at scale for a social, sustainable and democratic finance' aka CASCADE. The funding bid wasn't successful. The initial proposal is below, the finished version is attached at the bottom:
The CSU wish to build an open innovation platform to bring together the co-operative movement and the open source movement to help solve the sustainability challenges faced by co-operatives operating at scale in the digital age. This platform will crowdsource from its users requirements for tools to help co-operative societies manage their corporate functions and memberships. These tools will be deployed to a multi-tenancy SaaS solution on which members and management can run their co-operatives. We envisage three distinct elements of the proposal:
- Phase 1: An open innovation platform to select, define and refine solutions to problems
- Phase 2: Building minimum-viable-product CiviCRM extensions to seed the open source community.
- Phase 3: Providing a SaaS portal on which to deploy the tools.
Why CiviCRM?
CiviCRM is the world biggest open-source, non-profit person-management system and is targeted at civic, social, ’third’ and non-profit sectors. There are over 9000 active installations worldwide, managing some 140 million contacts and there are several features that set it apart as a platform for building cooperative infrastructure:
- It fully integrates with the three main Content Management Systems (CMS), Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress, which together make up 91% of all open source CMS used worldwide - 73.2% of all CMS and 28.3% of the entire web - and also runs a standalone version. By integrating with these CMSs it allows many organisations to link CiviCRM with their existing site without a rebuild - and then lets the organisation share access to the core administrative needs through the web, with a detailed permissions system to control access.
- It is localised in over 20 languages, handling country-specific data, addresses and payments.
- A wide range of users at different scales and structures from:
- community organisations such as One Blackpool (http://www.OneBlackpool.coop) using it to handled member registration and directories;
- chapters of a fundraising foundation such as Wikimedia (http://www.wikimedia.org/) with a suite of custom Wikimedia specific modules
- a charity such as Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research, with a database of 400,000 contacts and over 1.5 million payments;
- the New York State Senate (http://www.nysenate.gov/), managing millions of constituents across 62 New York State Senate Offices.
- Comprehensive built in features for many organisational needs. At the core of CiviCRM is the constituent or contact management which links records to the CMS login function and provides a structured view for person records, including relationships between people and organisations (parents, employees, representatives, partners, etc). On top of this comes a range of core components to manage events and ticketing; membership and renewals; payments, donations, taxes and invoicing; custom reporting; mass mail and email-merge, including A-B testing and reporting; and case/profile management; and peer-to-peer fundraising.
- An ecosystem of community extensions that extend the core, from region specific functions such as UK Direct Debit; to end-to-end major software service in itself, such as CiviHR, a comprehensive human-resources management system which spans from recruitment and selection through to employee, holiday and sick-day management. Other extensions include CiviVolunteer - for volunteer recruitment, assignment and management; CiviCampaign to create surveys and petitions; CiviCase to handle case management of interactions with specific people or processes; SMS integration, data visualisations, Mail Chimp integration; HMRC Gift Aid submission; Grant Application management and dozens more https://civicrm.org/extensions.
- A large and active community peer-community creating free resources, such as the CiviCRM book (http://book.civicrm.org/user/); crowd-funding new features and functions through Make It Happen (https://civicrm.org/make-it-happen); alongside an active community testing and bug fixing CiviCRM releases and sharing knowledge at http://forum.civicrm.org/
While CiviCRM is used widely amongst Cooperatives (there is no data available but anecdotally it is considered to be the most commonly used tool for Coop management), there are no CiviCRM extensions specifically for Cooperative management, including voting, and share/dividend management. CiviCRM there offers the Cooperative movement a solid, well-developed framework on which to build coop-specific innovation.
The approach
Phase 1 – The Open Innovation Platform
The open innovation platform will bring gather the collective experience of communities which have taken the co-operative model as their legal form. It will quantify which are the most prevalent problems, it will refine problems to the core issues, and it will filter out problems which are not specific to co-operative communities.
In particular the platform will perform the following functions:
- Problem identification
- Allow users to submit problems/ideas.
- All users to vote up and down problems/ideas
- Facilitate discussion about each problem/idea between users
- Solution Specification
- Once a problem has been chosen to be solved the solution needs specifying.
- Allow users to co-create the specification for a minimum viable product
- Vote in or out features
We envisage that an off the shelf commercial or open source platform can be employed for this purpose. Examples of these include:
- Commercial
- Chaordix – used by Orange Labs for their Do Some Good CSR campaign which crowd sourced ideas for activities users could do in 5 minutes on their smartphones. The most popular ideas were implemented in app available for download to all mobile phone users (I have personal experience of using this platform).
- Bright Idea
- User Voice – a popular SaaS platform used my digital product developers to get feedback from their users on new features, design faults and bugs.
- Wellspring
- Opensource
- Open Atrium – “a collaborative software platform built as a powerful, flexible, open alternative to the clunky and proprietary solutions that have long ruled this space.”
- Crowdcrafting
- Offiria
- Data Station
Phase 2 – Building an MVP
The tools which are specified in phase 2 will be created as CiviCRM extensions. Extensions be will open sourced to the community so that the future maintenance and direction of the tool’s features can be defined by the open source and co-operative movements. The mission of the MVP will be to solve the core problem unique to co-operatives which is a threat to the sustainability of these organisations. This MVP development will be financed from the project.
From our experience we would expect the co-operative community to suggest problems such as:
- Maintaining a share register with contact details of members, shareholding, accrued share interest, and share dividends. A future feature of a solution might include auto-generation of share certificates.
- Holding annual general meetings (AGMs) with sufficient attendance to meet quorum. A prospective solution would be an online AGM tool which would enable users to submit motions and vote on motions which rule the organisation. This might include voting in Directors or members of the management committee.
- The distribution of interest payments. A solution to distributing interest payments to 100s or 1000s of members in a cost and time efficient manner. This extension may provide the basics of share interest calculation and then several submodules which work with difference online payment facilitators.
Other developments could include a method to transfer member and share data from Microgenius to CiviCRM, and a refined interface for Coop administrators.
Phase 3 – SaaS deployment
The final stage of the initiative will be set up a version of CiviSites run by the CSU called Manage.coop. CiviSites is a multi-tenancy solution for CiviCRM, and Manage.coop would be a SaaS platform for the management of co-operatives. Manage.coop would have a number of user interface improvements and enhancements that would allow it to be used by communities with a low level of digital literacy. It will be stripped back to the core basics of functionality required by co-ops and features added at request. Importantly hosting, and software and security updates will be managed by the CSU so that users can just ‘manage’.
In the long term Manage.coop will run as a self-financing not-for-profit which offered free use for basic features and small co-operatives but would charge for larger co-operatives to cover running costs and future seed development of features. Manage.coop could be a Co-operative itself, with a membership of co-operatives that use it. Should significant sums of capital be required to finance new features, this could be raised from its membership base as community shares.
Tech partners / Suppliers
CiviCRM LLM. The organisation overseeing the development of CiviCRM, with a core team of nine employed staff, has offered their support to this project, on the understanding the code and documentation would be open source and that development would take place in an open way with room for input across the community.
Circle Interactive. Based in Bristol, UK. Circle have a track record of delivering successful CiviCRM projects on Drupal and Wordpress. They are the CiviCRM developer for the Green Party, who recently used the software to boost membership to record levels overtaking that of the Liberal Democrats in the UK. For the NHS oversight body, Healthwatch, Circle developed a network of several hundred CiviCRM installs for each local Healthwatch, all feeding into a central database.
Netribution/HelloIdeas.com. Netribution has 15-years experience in building and sustaining online knowledge communities, alongside CiviCRM, UX design and digital innovation. Launching in 1999 as “hugely influential and pioneering” (Time Out) community for independent filmmakers, and continuing as a research and knowledge specialist across the digital space, with two self-published books; a large digital management report for Informa Media; R&D projects funded by the Technology Strategy Board and Creative Scotland; and mentor work on two EU INTERREG projects in Ireland and Scandinavia.
MC3.coop. As a CiviCRM developer with 25 years of coop experience, Graham Mitchell is active in both the Coop FLOSS and CiviCRM communities and can offer insight and engage with these communities.
