A Technical Cooperative for Educators
Notice: Coopercate has joined forces with the OpenCoopt Technology Cooperative. Please join us there!
What follows is a description of the original vision of Coopercate.
“Sharing Technical Expertise with Our Members and the World”
Our Mission
Our mission is to benefit the cooperative membership by sharing technical experience across the various member organizations. We cater to education institutions. We can lower the costs of educating children while also improving the global community through our contributions to the ecosystem of freely available resources. We do this by nurturing the best technology professionals around.
In other words, we:
- Foster community and cooperation.
- Make technology accessible to our members and the world.
- Develop the best talent in every industry we touch.
History
Coopercate was conceived by open source enthusiasts and educational technology consultants who were struck by the empowering nature of software. In 2009, they worked to found a community which could help member organizations leverage freely available resources to achieve their goals. As a by-product, this community would produce further resources which would go on to benefit the world.
Tapping the Open Ecosystem
Our resources include:
- Open Source Software
- Creative Commons
- The Public Domain
- OpenCourseWare
- And our members.
Our Contribution
Unfortunately, it can be hard to navigate this ecosystem of available resources to find the tools that meet your organizational needs. Selecting and deploying these solutions takes expertise, and technical expertise is expensive. Even if you have the resources to hire an experienced engineer, your expertise is to educate, not to manage a technical team. Finding reliable technical advice is often a gamble, and retaining technical talent is a chore.
Coopercate exists to pool resources from organizations like yours and hire technologists with experience solving your problems. Because we are a cooperative, we answer to our members instead of shareholders. Because we are not in the business of selling software, we can share our results freely. Selling our services to non-members helps bring in resources that reduce the cost for member organizations.
Check out our Services page to see how membership in a technical cooperative can benefit your organization.
The Cooperative Tradition
Member owned collectives have been legally organized in the United States since the country's formation. They provide a way for members to offload common needs to a mutually administered organization, and focus on their most productive passion. This legal organization ensures that the collective's interests stay in line with the those of the member-owners. Coopercate is founded on this tradition of collaboration. We handle your technology needs and let you get back to educating, while preserving your voice in the organization.
A Growing Organization
The Coopercate community of education technologists is still in its infancy. Our ability to benefit our members will grow with time. By joining now, you will have the opportunity to shape the community and help us prioritize what initiatives we tackle next.
Presentation on Technology Cooperatives at Utah Open Source 2009
