Do you want a better internet?  One that balances the needs of creators and consumers?  A more democratic internet?  I do.  That's why I'm investing in a music coop: Resonate.

Stream to Own

I've been a member-owner of Resonate for a while, and listen every day.  It provides an eclectic mix similar to a high quality college radio station.  At first glance Resonate is a streaming service like Soundcloud or Spotify.  But dig deeper and the you'll find major differences:

• You only pay for what you listen to.
• Each listen debits your balance a small amount.
• On the 9th listen you own the track. 

This tiered pricing model incentivizes discovery.  Owning actual tracks helps fans develop deeper ties to the music they love.

And I own more than just tracks.  My member share means that I own a portion of Resonate, I can vote on how the business is operated and at the end of the year I can share in the profits.

Over the past year Resonate has added more content, more features, and most importably a sustainable organization where fans, musicians, employees and labels can work together towards common goals.   This is the kind of “cooperative internet” that I always imagined would emerge back in the pre-web era.

“Purpose above Profits”

"Purpose above Profits" was the slogan at REI as I shopped for the holidays.  It’s a reminder that the REI is a Member Cooperative.  With my $20 lifetime membership I get dividends based on my purchases while supporting outdoor and environmental causes.  In 2016 REI gave back 70% of profits.

This is but one example of how Coops can offer sustainable services for the communities they serve.  Growing up I had electric power from an Coop.  When I lived in Switzerland there’s a huge retail chain literally named “Coop”.  I currently use and support my Credit Union.

Overall Coop businesses are more sustainable, and are oriented to the long term interests of their member-owners.

But the growth of the Internet and the Web bypassed the cooperative model.  This despite the fact that open source and much of the shared internet infrastructure are structured like coops.  It wasn't until 2014 that the concept of Platform Cooperative was coined.   The rise of pseudo-"sharing" platforms like Uber and AirBnB and the rise of decentralized technologies like blockchains were two key reasons that many now embrace the concept.

Early Stage Capital

But a problem emerges, how do you bootstrap a Cooperative where there are significant barriers to entry?  That’s where Supporter Shares come in.  Anyone can invest in these shares.  Each year the co-op sets aside 10% of profits and issues dividends to Supporter Share owners.

But remember that Supporter Shares don't get you extra voting power.  A cooperative is still one-person, one-vote.  The upside is that there are no leveraged buyouts, no dual share structures or non-voting shares.

The Future Internet

The Internet I want is a democratic one where creators, consumers, supporters and employees can work together towards common, sustainable goals.  By using and investing in Resonate I hope to advance those goals.  Liz Pelly captured the sentiment in "Protest Platforms" that "Resonate is particularly interesting for the way it advocates for broad decentralization of data, power, and money in music".

The Resonate Project Map details where the project is going and the plan to achieve it.  I’ll admit that the content catalog is small, (but growing!) and the technology is very beta (but improving!).  I still use and enjoy it every day.

I hope that you'll consider joining the coop as a member owner and see for yourself.  If you want to accelerate this type of work consider purchasing Supporter Shares.

And finally, I hope that you'll consider supporting a new generation of online platforms that include the same kind of values that Resonate promotes.  All while listening to and supporting the artists we love.

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Didn't realize I was doing "ledgers" way back at the University of Minnesota.  As you can see we weren't that excited writing line-of-business apps.  Also funny how Privacy Enhanced Mail never took off.  Pity that.

Here's the executive summary for Forms Nirvana from an old design doc:

This document describes an open-architecture forms routing and approval system suitable for routing requests through a multi-person authorization chain. Once a request has been authorized, the completed request can be automagically submitted to another system (for example, the financial system for posting to the general ledger). While WWW is initially envisioned as the vehicle for user interaction with the system, the request routing logic is separated from user presentation so that other technologies (such as E-mail with digital signatures) can be used as well. Provisions are also made for entities other than human signers to be part of the authorization chain, so consistency checks can be automatically applied to the form's content.

You can read more about Forms Nirvana in this Minnpost article.

Tagged: #throwbackthursday

I'm still pretty happy my indieweb publishing experiment.

Content is flowing in all the right ways.  Posts end up as Posts.  Photos are uploaded native with backlinks. POSSE via brid.gy just works.  You can see that Brid.gy polls Google+, and then saves what it finds back to the original post by sending Webmentions.  The result is a full archive of activity around this content.

Oh and cross posting to SoundCloud worked perfectly.  And so do embeds..

After a fix from the Known Team WebHooks are working.  I get a POST whenever content changes.  To test this out I send the URL to the Internet Archive Save Page.  Voila!  Instant archiving of my content.  [Next up, backups in IPFS]

I was able to set up the Known open source software on my own server.  Next step is to pull a backup from the hosted version I'm using so I can experiment further and contribute back to the project.

Mobile Posting via Chrome on Android is working well.  You can access the Camera and a rudimentary file picker.  HTML editing is workable, but not great.  I installed the Url Forward app so I can also have native sharing intents.

Bumps

Of course there are some issues encountered...

Spelling errors mean you Publish Once, Edit Everywhere.  Or if you messed up the URL, Publish Once, Delete Everywhere

I tried using a native web mention to reply to another post, but it didn’t appear on the target site.  There wasn't any visible UX feedback.

I found that there’s no UI support for backdating posts.  Okay, I’ll try Micropub to post.  Nope, very rough implementations, but Quill seems nice.  Eventually I wrote a stub post in Wordpress, exported, imported and edited.  Phew!

But.. it appears that brid.gy doesn’t syndicate to old posts like this.  Even when I went back and pointed links at each other.  I’ll have to followup on that.

Also, I lost the first version of this post due to a CSRF error since I left it sitting too long in the browser.  Oops.

TinyMCE still is a pain and loves using &nbsp; and CMD-9 is bound to <address>..   I might have to use Markdown instead.

I miss @ mentioning people, and wish there was a UI for that.

Native Google+ support in brid.gy needs an API.

But still overall quite happy with the way this is going.  I hope you're enjoying the journey with me.

Tagged: #indieweb #withknown