peace everyone,
my name is brandon. i thought it’d make sense to re-introduce myself here on the forum. i’m our former Community Lead and recently (beginning March) i assumed the role as interim Executive for our cooperative.
soo a little bit about me. i have years of experience and insight as a cultural creative (dj, multi-media, visual and sound artist), community organizer and cooperative developer. i’m also a founding member of Cooperation Jackson, a cooperative network in Jackson Mississippi, and a Peer Advisor with the US Federation of Worker Coops.
in my role as interim exec, i see my perspective in working with communities from below is an integral part in us aligning our practice with the aspirations outlined in our Manifesto. developing in human-centric ways taking into account expanding access and agency of underrepresented communities with intentionality and mindfulness of the transnational nature of our cooperative.
to this end, and in making appropriate shifts in attempts to address these realities, we’ve also hired a Cultural Strategist, someone who supports our cooperative in setting up an understanding of culture as a precursor to assist with role definitions, recruitment plan and other items as necessary taking into account needs and consciousness toward facilitating openings for global majority participation.
cultural technology or relational tech is something that needs to be prioritized and resourced to enable cultural shifts we’d like to see, in terms of making space for our cooperative to become more welcoming to communities that have traditionally been excluded due to lack of access/resources. i believe it’s imperative that we have a compass that helps to keep an informed human-centric framework for our developers to center their work and build upon.
speaking of development, on the platform development front, we’ve been able to hire a temporary platform lead who’s support our roadmap to fully functioning DSP (digital service provider), delineating resources necessary, personnel and timeline. this person also supports the coordination we have with other platform cooperatives.
we’ve also hired someone to support to do our web transfer from wordpress to golang, with deweb capacity, and also which aligns our membership with our account that processes transactions.
along with this, we’ve also hired someone to support our main coder transferring the backend API’s to GitHub, an space where open source developers could support/clone/and/or add on to what we’re building. this person is also acting as a liaison and communicator between the developers and our cooperative community and vice versa.
in regards to resources and budget, i inherited a pretty tight position financially. though this has been the case, we’ve managed to lock in a collaboration with another platform cooperative out of Barcelona, supporting them on the tech end for them to develop a Spanish centric streaming platform service for their cooperative. this collaboration comes at an ideal time for us as it supports us getting closer to our goal of becoming a fully functioning DSP!
i’m fully aware that we can’t just rely on contracted projected and collaborations to sustain our operations. to this end, we’ve thought about what it could take to be self-sustaining if we only relied on annual member dues, which lead us to a discussion about us beginning a summer membership drive.
Membership Drive info below
Resonate Coop’s Summer Membership Drive has a goal of getting 2000 new listener members by August 31st, 2022.
2000 new listener members with a joining rate of €10 could potentially bring us to €20,000 annually, which would add security in the short run, as we build towards becoming a viable Digital Service Provider (DSP), incorporating the human-centric values artists and our communities desire. If people want to be a part of a community that’s interested in building healthy and sustainable music ecosystem(s), they should become members Join - Resonate
Resonate Membership Drive Game Plan: Resonate Membership Drive Game Plan - Google Docs
if you’re interested in plugging in to support this drive, tap in with us during our weekly Fundraising Sessions on wednesdays. We definitely need support with social media and signal boosting.
but yeah, there’s definitely more i can say, and may add on to this later, but really wanted to re-introduce myself to y’all and share a bit about where we’re at.
if you have any questions or would like to plug in on some of the different aspects i’ve mentioned, please do not hesitate to reach out!
really honored and excited to be working with Resonate in this new capacity
~peace
brandon
