Digital businesses frequently challenge conventional business models with their flat structures and their emphasis on collaboration - both between employees and between companies. Digital technology enables new and different ways of working, such as crowd sourcing and funding, models that use technology to enable collaboration on a new scale. In fact, cooperative ideas are even more deeply embedded in the digital economy. The Internet itself is dependent on peering points, many of which are run as mutuals - like the new IXManchester exchange.  Optical fibre networks, particularly in countries like Sweden and the Netherlands are being built using co-operative models. The new Corridor fibre network in Manchester - soon to go live - will explore the notion of shared ownership of digital infrastructure by the businesses that use it. Co-operative models have even been proposed as a way to deal with the problem of financing content production on the net.

This seminar brings together practitioners from the digital world, including some that have used mutual and cooperative models, with people from the co-operative movement to understand how mutual and digital ideas are working together.

Speakers include:

John Souter, CEO LINX on mutual Internet exchanges
Barry Forde, B4RN on cooperative fibre networks
Paul Hazen, OCDC on US telecommunications cooperatives

By video
Tad Deriso, CEO of Mid-Atlantic Broadband Communities Corporation of the US on a mutual backbone

And other speakers to be confirmed