Our Vision
People everywhere have been organizing a more ethical economy, but they work in relative isolation, fragmented by geography, sector, and even organizational form.
Many organizations collect information about a small piece of these efforts. In every situation, there is another organization for which that information overlaps. In every case there is an opportunity to share that will strengthen all the organizations participating.
Sharing requires effort, it requires trust, and it requires infrastructure. The Data Commons is a cooperative of organizations that are sharing – sharing the costs of this effort, trusting each other with their information, and building infrastructure to make sharing is easy.
Members of the Data Commons Cooperative are principled economic organizations that want it to be easy to share with each other, and with the world, in the movement for a more ethical economy.
Examples of information overlap
Uniting the movements
The Data Commons Cooperative is a movement-building organization, owned and controlled by cooperative development centers, federations, solidarity economy groups, and others, who want to maintain robust, accurate, useful platforms for sharing information. The cooperative gathers information and creates tools that make it easy for members to access each others’ data, and broadcast information to the public.
Pooling our information will enable the movement’s size and economic significance to be measured. Contributing information to the Data Commons will allow us to amplify the scope and impact of our activities.