🫱🏼🫲🏽 Local Organizing
On the topic of starting a tech coop, here are some insights we shared with each other:
- You might not need a coop! Associations, Foundations, even informal gatherings might be more applicable, depending on your local law and organizational needs. Sometimes you'll establish multiple orgs to cover all your needs! Let your first interactions with collaborators dictate your administrative form.
- Finding partners is a difficult step! But it's important to have redundancy - you don't want a project to die when you fall ill. Consider starting with international coop work.
- If you have the means, doing pro bono community work for a few years is a good way to get started before you start looking for contracts.
- Consider establishing small trusted groups ("pods") of just a couple of people each. These often survive when people change orgs. E.g. income sharing, mentoring.
(🧵 2/5)
Last call to back the Kickstarter! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ww3/housingjustice
RE: https://floss.social/@gnome/116251314283038831
Your donations help GTK development:
- infrastructure maintenance, like CI/CD pipelines and GitLab
- community events, like hackfests for planning
- grants for targeted projects, like accessibility
If you can, consider setting up a recurring donation to the GNOME project
“It feels like Squid Game”: #China’s workers scramble to keep up in the #AI race - https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ai-anxiety-openclaw-jobs-redundancy/ this will not end well
Afroman’s Defamation Trial Is Going About As Well For The Deputies As Their Original Raid Did - https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/18/afromans-defamation-trial-is-going-about-as-well-for-the-deputies-as-their-original-raid-did/ this is epically hilarious
Your AI chatbot may be stealing your conversations.
Many #BigTech platforms:
• use chat inputs for training
• store conversations indefinitely
• process data in centralized clouds
What does that mean for #dataprivacy?
We break it down 👇
https://nextcloud.com/de/blog/the-problems-with-big-tech-ai-data-collection-privacy-concerns-and-how-to-protect-your-data/
"FBI admits buying Americans' location data and says it won't stop"
"Patel defended the practice as lawful and useful for national security work, citing compliance with the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.Read Entire Article"
https://www.techspot.com/news/111739-fbi-admits-buying-americans-location-data-wont-stop.html
The most damaging #Brexit Myth: “The UK could keep all the benefits of EU membership with none of the obligations.”
Many Brexiteers genuinely believed:
- the EU would prioritise trade over rules
- the EU would split internally
- the EU would treat the UK as exceptional
None of these things happened because:
- the single market only works because its rules are non‑negotiable
- Brexit made the 27 more united than ever
- the EU applied the same terms to everyone
@tante This is why I hate talk about "good" uses of #LLM / #GenAI technology.
Those tools are rooted in harm, whether it's theft of creative works, exploitation of developing world labour, or abuse of scarce resources. You can't use them without being complicit in that harm, no matter how noble your cause.
The U.S. federal government is once again debating whether to extent warrantless surveillance under FISA.
Restore the Fourth has a petition to representatives, asking them to cosponsor reforms that would restore warrant requirements here: https://actionnetwork.org/letters/no-to-mass-government-surveillance-cosponsor-plewsagsra
Sharing and signing the petition would be greatly appreciated!
Boxes of goodies are ready for the new volunteers trying out the node setup instructions over at https://lores.tech . This will bring us up to 7 people trying out nodes in their own homes, which gives us some great practice on how to coordinate a digital commons for a region like Merri-bek.
A couple of new reviews posted:
https://the-counterforce.org/gul-demo/
https://the-counterforce.org/the-smarthearts-not-forgotten/
https://the-counterforce.org/stresssysteem-de-vorige-oorlog/
https://the-counterforce.org/the-dissidents-d-o-v-e-a-better-world-split/
https://the-counterforce.org/red-wine-glue-vol-2-comp/
https://the-counterforce.org/komatiite-famine-pact-ep-demo/
https://the-counterforce.org/vending-machine-live-at-abc/
Reminder there are also RSS feeds for everything on the site! There's an RSS feed for reviews only, if that's all you care about: https://the-counterforce.org/tag/reviews/feed.xml
It's contribution time! A couple of days ago we added an new recipe to @coopcloud
Until now, there was only a generic recipe for PHP applications, but now the catalogue contains a dedicated @moodle recipe which we already use in production.
https://git.coopcloud.tech/coop-cloud/moodle
Feedback welcome.
#ShlaerMellor, #FunctionPointAnalysis, #punk, #environmentalist, #unionAdvocate, #anarchosocialist
"with a big old lie and a flag and a pie and a mom and a bible most folks are just liable to buy any line, any place, any time" - Frank Zappa