Notices by Neil Ashton (nmashton@social.coop)

As I gear up to take another crack at learning Spanish with Duolingo, I wonder: are there any #platformcoop (-ish) alternatives emphasizing community control over data?

A Duolingo-like tool for education in endangered and otherwise under-resourced languages would probably be nice. But it seems very inappropriate for Duolingo Inc. to control and profit from the fruits of those communities' cultural heritages.

#translation platform question:

What good F/OSS web platforms are out there for coordinating volunteer translation of short texts (on the scale of brief conversations or even individual utterances)?

Per my recent toots, there’s an urgent need for translation of Mesoamerican Indigenous languages. Some of that translation will be remote. I’m betting it’d reduce everyone’s stress and labor to have some lightweight infrastructure in place to facilitate that work. But what?

**** U R G E N T E ****

RAICES necessita traductores voluntarios que hablan las lenguas mesoamericanas indígenas (#zapotec, #nahua, #man, #quiche #kichee, #maya, #mixe, y #mixteco). No es necessario que usted esté en Tejas o en los EEUU. Puede traducir remotamente.

volunteer@raicestexas.org

[via @peacefulwrrior@twitter, @minh81@twitter]

Many #coop success stories I've read about seem to be about taking root in a community and meeting needs that aren't going away anytime soon: food, houses, childcare, etc.

Can #techcoops ever follow that model? Most tech work uses ephemeral tools to meet transient needs, and tech firms are rootless by default. Are there any meaningful generalizations we can draw from the exceptions?

I was excited when I heard about #CoTech from Harry Robinson of #Outlandish at Open 2017 last year—excited and sad that there wasn't an equivalent on my side of the Atlantic.

I'm curious how CoTech has developed since then. Any news / reflections published somewhere?

I'm hoping Bryan Conlon will be joining us here on social.coop, as you'll have lots to talk about. Bryan is a union organizer in North Carolina with an interest in cooperatives. He has developed a compelling strategy for building a material basis for sustainable working-class struggle rooted in the union cooperative model, called the "commonwealth network":

https://thesouthlawn.org/2017/10/25/the-commonwealth-network-a-theory-and-model-for-political-production/

https://thesouthlawn.org/2017/10/28/the-commonwealth-network-in-practice/