What were your main objectives during this reporting period?
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The needs of our participating cooperatives are incredibly diverse, and their readiness to adopt new technologies and platforms differs greatly. Our project's goals are ambitious, complex, and highly dependent on recruiting a community of contributors to help grow and sustain the effort. As a result, we are working very closely with our partner cooperatives and the larger platform co-op community throughout the design and development process, using iterative and open source methods. Our design process typically starts with the creation of the simplest possible intervention into the problem space—a sketch, a prototype, a workflow or journey—which we then share openly with co-designers and the co-op community to critique, help refine, and transform our initial assumptions. We build from small successes, and aim to design simple, constantly-evolving artifacts whose provisionality invites greater feedback and improvement from our community. Over the course of many iterations throughout the project's timeline, these designs are extended to provide new features, greater robustness, and to respond to emerging needs.
During this reporting period, we:
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In general, our approach is to make frequent, small, incremental changes to our processes and project roadmap after each iteration milestone (based on the results of team retrospectives and assessment of our collective progress), rather than implementing major, sudden changes in direction. In keeping with this, in the second year of the project we will focus more on encouraging greater participation by the platform cooperative community, and on recruiting other open source developers and designers to adopt and help build upon our tools. In particular, we have developed an "embedded" a co-design kit that will support cooperatives in self-identifying their priorities and needs for the Learning Commons and Labour Platform, including activities they can use to create prototypes and sketches of these tools. We have also recently adopted an ongoing series of informal conversations, critiques, and feedback sessions with the broader platform cooperative community, and will continue this practice next year.
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