Your Digital Life Collective was represented at Mozilla’s MozFest17 this past weekend in London. I was there with fellow Collective members Laura James, Ross Schulman and John Bevan. (It was great to meet you for the first time Ross!) The coffee was very good indeed, but more importantly we learned more about the critical role our growing co-operative plays.
Mozilla is a non-profit organization with traditional management and a couple of major revenue streams. By far the best part comes from selling the rights to the default search option in its Firefox browser to major search engines around the world, and it also seeks donations and philanthropic funding.
By contrast, the Digital Life Collective is a co-operative that, by definition, is owned and brought to life by each and everyone of us. We’re intent on developing diversified revenue streams. We’re focused on Tech We Trust, including but also going way beyond the Web. We exist to research the best projects, connect the best teams, and nurture Tech We Trust wherever it might be trying to take root. Co-operatively. On which point we’re also active in Platform Co-operativism, with members attending the New York gathering next week.
We have a different model, and one we trust is sustainable. We have a critical role. And while we’ve only just started to get the message out, we now need to scale.
There are one hundred of us now, so by anyone’s arithmetic we should be able to grow one hundred fold again next year. I believe it. Ten thousand members says “we’re here and we’re serious” and more importantly means “we’re here and we’re doing some seriously valuable stuff.”
Bring it on!
LINKS
// Do you know a project that might meet the Tech We Trust criteria? If so, we’ve just now added the facility for anyone to propose a project for our growing ecosystem map.
// Can you help your friends, family and colleagues find us? In “real life” of course, and online via Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, and yes, we syndicate to Facebook too.
// Joachim Stroh and Laura James recorded personal videos last week explaining why they’re part of the Collective. I just did 90 seconds this evening, and we’re aiming to get them on the website this week. Do you have a point of view, a smartphone, and 30-90 seconds? Of course you do 
// Firefox is the only major browser developed by a non-profit with all web users’ best interests at heart, and as someone currently using the beta of the new Firefox Quantum I can vouch for its awesomeness. If you have been tempted away by other browsers, please do give it a go on launch, 14th November.
Best regards, Philip and the member relations team.