Mission & Vision
We believe that a distributed, democratic, life-affirming economy can best be served by distributed, democratic, life-affirming methods of sharing data.
We ask everyone who wants to use our data to sign a Data Use Agreement, and we want everyone whose data is gathered to sign a Data Ownership Agreement. These agreements establish our principles of consent, stewardship, and responsibility.
Our mission is to provide infrastructure for our members to collaboratively gather, share, maintain, display and deploy information about a generative economy.
Gather: Before you can share data, you have to gather it. We help our members gather data in a way that’s consistent and responsive to their community. We also encourage good data stewardship through respectful data collection, empowering the people whose data is collected, and establishing clear agreements between data gatherers and users.
Share: The Data Commons Cooperative is all about sharing data with other members so that everyone has lower costs and better data.
Maintain: Through tech tools and agreements, everyone has an easier time keeping data up to date.
Display: Everyone loves a good map, app, or directory. And businesses love attention from customers. It also doesn’t hurt to show policymakers that the solidarity economy is more widespread than they might imagine. Which is why we display data through find.coop, our own directory, and help members set up their own displays such as solidarityeconomy.us.
Deploy: Folks in the solidarity economy want to make a difference. We may not have deep pockets but we have people power, and we know that many drops turn the wheel, many hands make light work. But to get those drops to move together, we need access to data, and we need tools.
Bylaws
Bylaws of The Data Commons Cooperative, Inc.
Adopted: June 5, 2012