# meet.coop, community, solidarity economy and global-South organisations *Mike Hales 15jan2021* ```michaelhalesATmacDOTcom```; ```ATmike_halesATsocialDOTcoop``` The international video-meeting coop, [meet.coop](https://www.meet.coop/), now nine months old, is taking steps to establish a **Community Circle** as part of its governance framework . . see the meet.coop [Forum](https://forum.meet.coop/t/working-as-a-community/416/) and this [initial design framework](https://notepad.diglife.coop/s/l73cbePVZ#). At this early stage, coop members are trying to figure how best to escape the gravitational pull of white-male perspectives and power structures, which is an initial characteristic that this commons-oriented, digital-infrastructure coop has inherited from the world of free software. >Below is a working note. D’you have views on the question below? We’d be glad to hear from you. Via email or Mastodon (above) or in the Forum. ### 2021 01 15 - Working as a community - Mike Hales to Wouter Tebbens, Gary Alexander ```Wouter is a member of one of meet.coop’s founding coops, femProcomuns, Mike has been an Operational member and Gary is an individual member.``` > On 15 Jan 2021, Wouter Tebbens wrote: > My priorities: >- check with Monica and Raquel / femProcomuns > - check with Georgia and Eileen / Simply Secure > - check with Frederic, Yves / Remix the Commons for the french speaking communities > I have more ideas to reach out, like to Asilo Filangeri in Naples, to see whether they'd join meet.coop and possibly share the work programme with them. But that's a few steps until we are there, let us see. Great connections :-) I wonder, what networks we have, that reach ‘South’? . . in the sense that the US-based [MayFirst Movement Technology](https://mayfirst.coop/en/) network, for example, reaches ‘South’ in Mexico and in US Hispanic communities (Mexican, Puerto Rican). - D’you know if the French/[Remix network](https://www.remixthecommons.org/?lang=en) reaches ‘South', via [RIPESS](http://www.ripess.org/?lang=en) or other solidarity economy affiliations? Like, North Africa, maybe? Or does it remain basically white-male, Euro-Canadian? - D’you know if the [Koumbit network](https://www.koumbit.org/en/about) reaches, say, the Caribbean (Caribbean diaspora?)? *Koumbit* is a Haitian name, and being based in Montreal, it’s possible Koumbit has Francophile, North-South solidarity economy connections. In terms of **geographical** service from meet.coop servers (currently, Canada, Germany), obviously it doesn’t make too much sense to be reaching too far at this time? But I think it matters, to begin to escape from white, Euro- and North-American circuits, in building our community. I’m not quite sure how to walk that line, as an actual development path for the coop and its infrastructure and membership. But I feel it will make a lot of difference further down the road, to have non-North people in the founding conversation of the Community Circle? My best hunch is that that the middle way may be to work with organisations in ‘the North’, who are organising among people in ‘South’ marginalised diaspora communities or 2nd-generation communities: Caribbean, North African, South American, Sierra Leonean, Turkish, Arab/Islamic, etc, in European and North-American cities. It then becomes a ‘class-geography’ matter (eg poverty, economic marginalisation, cultural marginalisation, white supremacy) rather than a terrestrial-geography matter? This is complex, and deep historical-embedded in colonial-capitalism, but we need to engage this? What’s your take on this question, Wouter, Gary? Am I too far ahead of the game yet, in terms of the coop's economic and tech-infrastructure reach? Somehow, I feel this matter is at the heart of what ‘solidarity economy’ is about?