We’ve long talked about what Karrot is for, what’s the concept behind it, and as we go along refining it, we’re coming closer to the idea of supporting the commons, that is, Karrot as a tool to support the practice of commoning. How we define commoning exactly will evolve with our explorations, but provisionally we could say that it’s about self-governing groups owning and taking care of common resources. So far the main practice of commoning that Karrot has supported has been mainly food saving groups.
So what would Karrot be able to offer different groups practicing commoning? What would that mean in terms of features, existing and to be developed? What are these groups specific needs?
Let’s use this thread to collect examples of different use cases, thoughts and ideas.
To begin with, I found this looking quickly into the forum I found:
In Sweden it’s not unusual that instead of having childcare in a public preschool, provided by the municipality, parents associate into a coop that is officially recognized and funded by the municipality. It also involves some shared work, with a lot of organizing and administrative work, besides hands-on contributions to make it work. I’m in one myself and here’s some of the digital needs we have.
Community needs
Shared documents
A cloud of documents for storing all of their documents, mostly written documents with important information. They currently use Dropbox, but experienced a few issues. I suggested their own instance of Nextcloud but the extra cost was an issue.
Communication
E-mail forwarding to all parents/members, but they’ve issues of it now working and not everyone getting e-mail. Whatsapp groups are used for some working groups.
How Karrot is or could be useful
I presented them as one possible alternative to e-mail communication and also to book working days (done manually on a excel sheet by one person assigning others) and other events that we have. Working groups could also use places to communicate and give more transparency and insight to their work.
Sometimes we’ve got hybrid meetings in which the video call feature would be useful.
But using Karrot would definitely not work as a substitute for any cloud to store documents. Some written documents would fit well under agreements, but not the majority. The question then is how to integrate files/folder or interoperate with other cloud services. Can we organize them by places? Should there be a view for all files attached in messages?