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November 4, 2024
10 - 11 a.m., Mountain Time
Free webinar

Despite extensive study of co-operatives' real and imagined benefits, we know little about the conditions under which they achieve the lasting scale needed to be a viable alternative and transform the economy. Under what conditions can co-operatives achieve such scale?

A new book by Jason Spicer suggests one essential answer: The cause of co-operatives' comparative weakness in the United States is identified as reflecting the joint effect of economic liberalism and structural racism. Only in the United States did the co-operative face, in its initial development, two well-entrenched incumbents operating with competing ownership models: the investor-owned firm and the race-based chattel slavery system of ownership of people.

In this discussion, Spicer will share his findings, followed by a response from Jessica Gordon Nembhard and a Q&A with attendees.

Jason Spicer is an Assistant Professor in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉäNY Baruch College, where he focuses on social and community entrepreneurship. Prior to joining ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉäNY, he spent five years on the faculty of the University of Toronto (St. George), where he oversaw the economic development concentration in the graduate urban planning program. He holds a PhD in Political Economy from MIT. He is the author of Co-operative Enterprise in Comparative Perspective: Exceptionally Un-American? (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Jessica Gordon Nembhard is Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College, of the City University of New York (¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉäNY) in New York City, USA, where she is also Director of the McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program. She is an affiliate scholar at the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. She is the author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).

Organized by MEDLab community fellow Danny Spitzberg, and presented by MEDLab and the Exit to Community Collective.

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September 23, 2024
10 a.m. to 11 a.m. Mountain Time
Free webinar

At the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Main Street Phoenix Project was founded as an audacious, worker-owned holding company to buy and protect food-service businesses. It acquired two Denver companies but ran into trouble. After closing the company down, founder Jason Wiener has done a rare thing: made the company's operating documents available to the world.

In this event, Wiener will share lessons from the Main Street Phoenix experience and ideas for how those lessons can be useful for emerging efforts to build mutual enterprises. Fellow co-op entrepreneur Alissa Orlando will share reflections on the current state of investment and strategy for social enterprises.

Jason Wiener is the Principal of a boutique law and business consulting practice whose specialty is in cooperative law, shared ownership models, cooperative finance, regenerative capital and financing strategies, sustainable economies law, teal lawyering, virtual outside general counsel, and worker-ownership. He serves on the state of Colorado's Employee Ownership Commission.

Alissa Orlando leads Camillus Partners, an entrepreneur-led fund dedicated to buying, leading, and growing a mission-driven business. She was previously co-founder of the Drivers Cooperative in New York, which is currently launching in Colorado. Before that, she headed Uber’s operations across East Africa.

Sponsored by the Media Economies Design Lab at ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä Boulder, , and the .

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October 30, 2023
11 a.m. to noon Mountain Time
Free webinar

For over 30 years, Marjorie Kelly has helped to build movements like ethical investing, corporate social responsibility (CSR), B Corps, and worker ownership. While these fields have grown, however, many of the problems they set out to fix have only gotten worse. By tucking ethical concerns into the current paradigm, she believes, well-meaning people have inadvertently reinforced that paradigm—or we’ve stayed isolated in our silos, reluctant to see ourselves as part of unified next system beyond capitalism. We haven’t been thinking big enough. We’re not thinking at the scale of the problem.

In this webinar, Kelly draws on the lessons of her career—including her mistakes—to call for a movement that refuses to take the current system for granted.

Kelly's new book, Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises, stresses that the real problem is not a lack of alternatives, it is a system intricately designed to keep the wealthy prosperous and protected—a system biased toward wealth holders. Changing this requires having difficult conversations. But Kelly says it’s time for those conversations. Without a change of mindset, technical solutions and innovative models will never add up to the new system now necessary to our survival. And much of what we build will continue to be devoured.

Marjorie Kelly is Distinguished Senior Fellow with The Democracy Collaborative. Her previous books include The Making of a Democratic Economy (co-authored with Ted Howard), Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution, and The Divine Right of Capital. Kelly has for years been a thought leader in next generation enterprise design, employee ownership, impact investing, and the building of a community-rooted democratic economy. Previously she was a Fellow at the Tellus Institute and cofounder/president of Business Ethics magazine.

This webinar is moderated by Nathan Schneider and hosted by the Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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August 8, 2023
9 a.m. - 5 p.m. (in-person)
9 a.m. - 1 p.m. (live-streamed)
University Memorial Center room 235
University of Colorado Boulder

When the devastating Marshall Fire spread across Boulder County in on December 30, 2021, many of us turned to our phones and our networks. They helped us make sense of the crisis and keep each other safe. We relied on information from local organizations and governments, as well as global platforms not designed for a moment like that, and not designed for our community.

What if we valued local technology the way we value local food and local businesses?

This event explores opportunities and challenges for building healthy tech ecosystems that are focused on the needs of local communities—with a focus on projects active across Colorado's Front Range. What kinds of social media could bring people together rather than driving them apart? What kinds of gig platforms could put workers and small businesses above global monopolies? How can regional journalists develop tools truly suited to their needs? The event will make space to introduce projects already cultivating local tech ecologies in Colorado and beyond, and we will discuss strategies for more intentionally developing those ecologies in the future.

Schedule

9:00-10:00am
Room 235

Welcome
Aaron Brockett (Mayor of Boulder)
Nathan Schneider, Assistant Professor at ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä Boulder and MEDLab Director

Morning Keynote
Fernanda R. Rosa (Virginia Tech)

10:15-11:45am
Room 235

Lightning Talks
Josh Ritzer (Nigh)
Caroline Savery (Bloom Network)
Nikhil Mankekar (Colorado Venture Capital Authority)
Becks Boone and Jamie Anderson (Rootable)
Pat Kelly (Colorado ReWild)
libi striegl (Media Archaeology Lab)
LeeLee James (Slay The Runway)
Erika Ianco and Trish Uvenferth (Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center)
Mike Perhats (Nosh)

12:00-1:30pm
Room 235

Lunch and Lunch Keynote
Ted Striphas (¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä Boulder)
Ethan Zuckerman (UMass Amherst)

1:30-2:30pm

Room 235
Panel: Crisis
Nabil Echchaibi (¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä Boulder)
Saleh Khaled Ibrahim
Leysia Palen (¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä Boulder)

Room 245
Panel: Journalism
Stacy Feldman (Boulder Reporting Lab)
Rossana Longo (Colorado News Collaborative)
Linda Shapley (Colorado Community Media)

Room 247
Panel: Gaming
Ann Marie (RemainNA) (¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä Gaming)
Taylor (MustardSauce) Clark (¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä Gaming)
Griffin Opp (CSU Gaming)

3:30-4:30pm
Room 235

Unconference

4:30-5:30pm
Room 235

Reception

Lunch will be served, along with snacks and a reception at the end. This is a free event, but please consider to support our work.

Organized by the Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder and made possible by a generous gift from Colorado ReWild.

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July 5, 2023
9-10:30 a.m. Mountain Time
Free webinar

Nonprofits perform essential work in our contemporary world, whether fighting for human rights or defending the ecosystems we rely on. Now, with the rise of open social media platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky, nonprofits have new opportunities to develop close conversations with the communities they seek to support. Many of these open social media platforms are also better aligned with nonprofits' values than major tech companies have been.

What are the best ways for non-profits to get involved? How do nonprofits navigate this emerging space in an already dense social media landscape? In this webinar, we will hear from nonprofit leaders and technologies on how the emerging social networks related to their organizations' goals.

Speakers:

• (Founder and Director, Distribute Aid)
• (Director of Open Technology, Open Earth Foundation)
• (Head of Community Initiatives, New_ Public)

Facilitated by Nathan Schneider, Skylar Hew, and Reily McGee.

The Open Social Media event series is organized by the Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, made possible by a generous gift from Colorado ReWild. The illustration above, , is licensed through Stocksy, a cooperative stock platform.

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June 13, 2023
3-4:30 p.m. Mountain Time
Free webinar

In the aftermath of a chaotic Twitter takeover, many people have moved away from centralized social media platforms to a new set of social platforms that are open-source, decentralized, and user-centered—like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Nostr. This shift highlights a pressing need for more trustworthy civic spaces. But civic-minded social platforms are nothing new. The advent of Open Social Media has been many years in the making.

This webinar presents some of Open Social Media's origin stories from speakers who have been involved in the development, culture, and communities of their platforms. We will explore how queer experiences and activist movements, for instance, have played a vital role in shaping the design and direction of emerging platforms.

Speakers:

• (co-editor, ActivityPub)

• (founder, Nos)

• (early participant, Bluesky)

Facilitated by Nathan Schneider, Skylar Hew, and Reily McGee.

The Open Social Media event series is organized by the Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, made possible by a generous gift from Colorado ReWild. The illustration above, , is licensed through Stocksy, a cooperative stock platform.

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April 12, 2023
5:00 p.m.
270 at ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä Boulder

Featuring Joan Donovan & Brandi Collins-Dexter

This event features two Harvard-based scholar-activsts who take seriously media that others would prefer to ignore, from the utterances of Kanye West to online havens of White nationalism. Together, they will guide an exploration of how the tactics and ideas circulating in some of culture's most dangerous spaces could be shaping the political possibilities of the future.

This event is sponsored by the Media Economies Design Lab in the Department of Media Studies, in partnership with the program in the .

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​Thursday, March 16, 9–10:30 AM Pacific, via Zoom

​While Twitter is in crisis, another generation of social media is emerging. But before we decide to stay or go or divide our attention across more platforms, we first need to figure out what we expect – or demand – from any platform we use. So, we're doing "A People's History of Twitter" to discuss loss and lessons.

​We're inviting people who depended on Twitter to share their experiences and insights. We welcome everyone with perspectives from journalism, advocacy, private content creation, and all kinds of ways of using Twitter. We're a group of (ex-)Twitter workers, users, and allies who came together around a belief that platforms like Twitter can serve the public interest. Our partners include MEDLab, IFTF, RadicalxChange, and more.

​Together with you in this interactive event, we'll reflect on what we lost and draw lessons for a better future of creating content and sharing news and media. 

​See the program at

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September 20, 2021
10-11 am Mountain Time
Free webinar

In May, Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper introduced the , an historic proposal for opening the doors of the Small Business Administration to cooperatives of all kinds. If made law, this bill would enable member-owned businesses to access resources that other kinds of businesses have long enjoyed. In this webinar, we will hear from leaders in the Colorado cooperative sector about the importance of capital access, as well as a representative from Sen. Hickenlooper's team, who will discuss the bill's progress so far.

• Sandra Baca (Assistant Director, Rocky Mountain Farmers Union Cooperative Development Center) (or director Dan Hobbs

• John Conrad (Special Assistant to Sen. John Hickenlooper)

• Yessica Holguin (Executive Director, Center for Community Wealth Building)

• Doug O'Brien (CEO, NCBA-CLUSA)

• Linda Phillips (Senior of Counsel, jason wiener|p.c.)

Map of Colorado cooperatives from coloradocoops.info/directory. Organized by the Media Enterprise Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder and Zebras Unite.

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