Sustainability and digitalization as haystack sticks
The comprehensive labor and consumer cooperative femProcomuns has approximately 200 member users, including organizations and individuals. Fifty-five percent of the member organizations are cooperatives, and 29% are associations.
From configuring air quality sensors to be carried on bicycles to analyzing the sustainability of a collective project, to the deployment of a new digital office in the cloud. All of these activities are what femProcomuns makes available to public administrations and the solidarity economy, as well as to its user members, currently numbering around 200, approximately half of which are entities and the other half individuals. The three areas of activity of the cooperative, created in 2017, are guided by the principles of open cooperativism, community self-management, ecological, economic, and human sustainability, shared knowledge, and replicability. "The purpose was to create a strategic social tool that would contribute to consolidating an ecosystem based on the socioeconomic model of the commons," its promoters point out.
![Social meeting in May at Masia Brichs, in Ardèvol (Solsonès)](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 1683 1273"%3E%3C/svg%3E)
Cooperative activity groups
The femProcomuns cooperative is one of the driving forces behind the Barcelonès Nord Cooperative Athenaeum and is a collaborator of the Canòdrom de Barcelona Athenaeum for Digital and Democratic Innovation. Today, the cooperative pursues three lines of action through its cooperative activity groups.
The first is SomNúvol, which since 2018 has offered joint digital tools for collaborative work based on free software. These include, among others, an ERP-CRM for financial and organizational management, an office for file storage and sharing, calendars, forms, email tools, and videoconferencing, which are used by nearly two thousand people through the hundred member organizations and the hundred individual members. Those responsible emphasize that more than 33% of members are women, 9% more than last year.
On the other hand, the XOIC (Open Internet of Things Network) aims to contribute to the deployment and sustainability of an open, free, neutral, community-based, and technologically agnostic Internet of Things network "to promote technological sovereignty, social autonomy, and technoethics." Specifically, the XOIC works on the use of sensors and actuators in areas such as air quality, mobility, water management, waste, etc.
And finally, Transitant, which, delving into the philosophy behind the femProcomuns project, has developed methodologies to accompany collective projects with a view that integrates the community, the resources, and the workforce it mobilizes: how it shares knowledge and how it governs itself.
