Housing Co-Ops and Tech Co-Ops: Combining the Movements
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Hundreds of housing co-ops are using technology to manage their communities and activities. Some are even home to progressive technologists, and are hotbeds of radical innovation.
We'll showcase exciting projects, outline difficulties and challenges when it comes to developing and implementing technology, and open a debate on how the tech co-op scene and the housing co-op scene can work together to solve issues in co-ops and in wider society.
Levent Kerimol
Lev works at the new www.communityledhousing.london resource and advice hub, hosted by CDS Co-operatives and funded by the GLA. He was previously in the GLA Regeneration team, leading on affordable workspace, and establishing the Small Sites Small Builders programme (www.london.gov.uk/smallsites). He contributed to the London Plan and has managed a range of masterplans, developments, and public realm projects around London. Lev also worked with LB Lewisham on the early stages of the RUSS project at Church Grove.
Leo Francisco
Leo lives in Gung Ho housing co-op in Birmingham (currently at https://gunghocoop.wordpress.com/) and will talk about their plans for various anti-capitalist/solarpunk tech hijinks: setting up air quality monitoring station, network-wide adblocking, running a tor relay, and peer2peer and punk2punk sharing amongst radical housing co-ops.
Nick Sellen
Semi-nomadic sometime frequenter of https://kanthaus.online/en. He will talk about the co-operatively run house project, the open source software projects it supports (https://foodsharing.de/, https://karrot.world), and showcase the super cool tech infrastructure that monitors resource usage around the house. He's also looking to find people to create a similar project in the UK.
Szczepan Orlowski
Szczepan lives in Sanford housing co-op (http://sanford.coop), the oldest purpose-built housing co-op in the UK. The co-op has recently overhauled G suite in favour of Nextcloud. Earlier this year Sanford kickstarted a Community Land Trust initiative made of housing activists from local community groups and several other housing co-ops in South East London (https://slcash.org/). Szczepan would like to outline the challenges they are facing and discuss potential collaborations between housing and worker co-ops.
