Experience and a long history with integral cooperatives, p2p society, hacker ethics and cryptocurrencies unite us as Fair.coop promoters.
Our political background includes significant and very different realities:
The Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) is a self-managed initiative centered on building a new society from below through self-organization and assembly-based action. Since May 2010, the CIC been weaving a network of self-managed projects and bio-regional and local initiatives by mobilizing collective empowerment through mutual support and other common or collectivized resources, creating alternatives outside the action of the banking system and state. This coordination of productive activity which facilitates cooperative work is the basis for the promotion of an integral cooperative public system without intermediaries, and for building a way of life consistent with the principles that unite us in our collective to search for a good life.
This is not the first time the CIC has shared its global vision. As early as 2013, the CIC was involved in launching a call for integral revolution, which means an intensification of sharing ideas and approaches with other groups.
Now, this new initiative involves bringing, also globally, their experience from theory to practice, the way we’ve been doing it for years at local level.
More information about CIC here.
The P2P Foundation for Alternatives is a global organization devoted to the study, research, documentation and promotion of peer-to-peer practices in a very broad sense. Their website is their commons knowledge and is built collectively by the community.
It is a meeting place for those who largely agree on the following ideas, principles and proposals:
– Peer-based technologies have the potential to generate changes in consciousness through individual participation and networking.
– The format of distributed network is a new form of subjectivity and alternative to many systems in the current global political and economic organization.
– These forms of organization create a new public domain, a commons of information that must be protected and extended.
– Principles as developed by the free software movement and movements promoting open access models that can be used in areas of social and productive life.
– It is necessary to connect with the old, traditional social movements of workers and peasants, so together we can make possible a new social order of a cooperative nature.
– The theory of peer society implies that the whole of civil society, the masses, have to be at the center of decision making, rather than the market and State.
– Peer to Peer culture, as a proto-mode of production, is growing at a rapid pace yet is still vulnerable to the capitalism appropriations of P2P dynamics. For this reason it requires more political self awareness, as promoted by the Foundation.
More information about p2p Fundation.
Dark Wallet is a community-based project for developing a wallet with privacy, scalability and integrity settings. Its members view Bitcoin primarily as a tool of trade in a free economy, rather than a simple payment innovation.
Dark Wallet wants to be only the first step of a series of items and tools for markets, self-government and self-organization. Tools we need in our communities to create self-managed spaces. With their involvement in Fair.Coop the Dark Wallet team want to follow the path of enabling tools for decentralized and cooperative self-organization. For Dark Wallet then, DAC means descentralized autonomous cooperative.
More information about DarkWallet.
Kick-off
In April 2014, Enric Duran, co-creator of the concept of Integral Cooperative and co-founder of the Catalan Integral Cooperative, he began to develop an idea that would culminate in fair.coop. After intensive research in the world of cryptocurrencies, he chose Faircoin, for its features and history, to develop the project, and anonymously engaged in reviving the cryptocurrency. Later, he revealed his identity and shared his plan with other members of the faircoin development team to work together.
During the months of May, June and July he shared the plan with various partners from the CIC, the p2p foundation (such as Michel Bauwens and Stacco Troncoso), and Dark wallet (Amir Taaki and Pablo Martin), as well as several individuals and initiatives from around the world, to become the promoter group which has enabled launching of FairCoop on September 17, 2014.
This post is also available in: Spanish French Catalan Chinese (Simplified) German Greek Italian Portuguese