I am on a reference group for open government in Australia – so pleased to see that a “MashupAustralia” competition starting to find the best new ways of using public data for citizen re-use – with a website of government data to support the mash-up contest. They have also launched a ‘Not for Profit Public Service Information Project Ideas’ contest this month.
There is nothing like a good competition to get co-operation started…
I have travelled North by train to Stirling (castle here courtesy, under creative commons license, of heroesnotzombies.wordpress.com) to visit Johnston Birchall and colleagues. Johnston is a friend and one of the Britain’s leading researchers on co-operation and mutuality.
One of his current passions is for farmers’ co-operatives, but he warns against the tendencies encouraged overseas by development donors to see these as NGOs. They are businesses and have to deliver marketing benefits to their members to survive and thrive.
He distinguishes co-operatives and mutuals as democratic businesses that are about members rather than shareholders. The three defining characteristics he sees are member ownership, member control and member benefits. Johnston has recently completed a short report with Richard Simmons forthcoming for the Co-operative College on co-operatives in international development and has been working on what will be an outstanding project for Co-operative Development Scotland – looking at the comparative performance of the co-operative sector across different countries. In Finland, for example, the co-operative sector accounts for a remarkable 21% of overall GDP. In Switzerland, it is 16% and in Sweden, 13%.
I spoke at the launch last night of Prashant’s excellent new book, The Economical Environmentalist.
He is always so good with numbers – and not shy at presenting them – and he took a particular shot at meat eating in a time of climate change. These were my favourites:
Autumn walk in the Darent Valley and I encounter an unusual stile.
It invites you to climb over it, or walk around and wonder where the hedge has gone.
I have had a wonderful trip to mid-Wales to stay with my friend Pat Conaty.
Pat is a tireless and relentlessly optimistic pioneer of a wide range of self-help and co-operative initiatives – from community land trusts to National Debtline, which is now a lifeline for a quarter of a million people a year.
I have been reading, pre-Copenhagen, the work of EcoEquity. They have put together a framework for a fair and equitable way to divvy up action on climate change, based on what they call ‘greenhouse development rights’ and meeting a target of no more than 2° warming. It is good stuff and there seems to be reasonable agreement that that level of warming over pre-industrial levels is the maximum that we should expect to manage.
Call me frivolous, but I wonder if one more way to bring this all home is to run bets on whether and when the world will reach the 2° threshold. After all, we bet on everything else, there is a betting shop in every high street and taking a punt has become an everyday part of our culture. Would Camelot, Ladbrokes or Coral run this?… the biggest bet yet.
Perhaps the proceeds can go into development rights and the winner can choose between a fat payout and a comfortable life-raft…
Wonderful, wonderful news today that the co-operative theorist and researcher Elinor Ostrom has been awarded the Economics ‘Nobel’ prize.
Her greatest work has been to show how co-operative systems of management succeed in contexts where market theorists long predicted failure. Markets are one system of property ownership and management but there is another great system which are the ‘commons’. Grazing land, fisheries, parks … Garret Harding long ago predicted that these end in tragedy, because people operate in a selfish way, with the incentive always to be a free rider. Drawing together examples from across a range of settings, Ostrom demonstrated the ingenuity and resilience of co-operative systems of resource management.
Hers has been an economics of the everyday majority and not the service of a rich elite.
In her more recent work, she has drawn on game theory to develop and test a grand theory of institutional design. It is complex stuff, but also an uplifting reminder that human behaviour in our capacity to collaborate is so much richer and more creative than the traditional theorists of the dismal science of economics would have us believe.
A day as far away as can be from all work today. I accompanied my mother on a visit back for the first time to the place where she was born.
Not a home or hospital birth but a castle birth. Stone Castle is where my great grandfather was working at the time. In Northern Kent, Norman in origin, it lies within sight of the Thames and now on the cliff edge of the quarry that has become Bluewater Shopping Centre. It was on my visit there a couple of weeks ago to launch a consumer rights campaign that one of the staff mentioned Stone Castle and it rang in my head until, talking to my mother, we could put two and two together.
It was a moving day – a day that could have been a WG Sebald novel… full of memories, the shadows of family now gone, a day for sharing.
It is my last day today at Consumer Focus – before a total break and a new start at Co-operatives UK in November – and I have been to be frank no use to anyone, all churned up and emotional.
I only really worked out what was going on inside me when I gathered in the afternoon with so many of the staff and partners I have worked with on consumer issues over years.
When you leave a job, you say goodbye to colleagues. But it is not normal to say goodbye to someone if they are a friend.
Friends stay with you. I hope they, and I, do.
One of the things I was told when meeting the Co-operatives UK team was that the registry for mutuals held by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) was lagging way behind what companies can expect in terms of online access.
So I was very pleased to hear now from Hector Sants at the FSA that they will upgrade the register over 2010, to benefit the UK’s 11,000 mutuals on their records. I don’t start until November, but my first request for co-operatives in the UK seems to have paid off!
