Disclaimer: cooperativehousing.eu is under construction and is being brought online to allow participants in an international alliance of cooperative housing organisations (see the presentation at the bottom of this post) to experiment with the technical and functional capabilities offered by a collection of sophisticated and versatile open source packages. While security and privacy concerns have been taken seriously during setup of this website, no guarantees can be given during this testing phase that the data and content provided by subscribers will at all times be properly protected and preserved. As a user, please do bear this in mind when using this website.
At present the domain registration cooperativehousing.eu and the services provided on this domain are owned, maintained and financed privately by @Rob as a courtesy in anticipation of the establishment of a legal entity for the pan-European alliance of community-led cooperative housing organisations.
Ideally data ownership and the commissioning for software development would be in the hands of the associated cooperative housing organisations themselves. There are good examples of cooperative software development by a collective of grassroots organisations; take for example The Mobility Factory or Gebiedonline.nl who employ professional software developers while being self-governed by its users, each member organisation being a citizen’s cooperative or initiative.
Reimbursing the start-up costs of cooperativehousing.eu @Rob is willing to handover the domain, server configuration and data to its intended users. Subscribers are encouraged to discuss in this thread how best to achieve this goal legally, organisationally and economically.
A fiscal host like Open Collective Europe might serve as an intermediary solution until this community has established its own legal entity.
Consider this site as an experimental setup to see what might be possible and make this idea a little more concrete. Members of the international cooperative housing movement are invited to read and comment on the values and principles behind this site and how these might be translated into a practical digital platform design.
click here to see a presentation introducing the various European organisations for cooperative housing.