A decentralized co-op network supporting food security

Hi everyone,

I am new to the forum and I am looking for information and contacts regarding the organization of cooperatives. I haven’t found much on my own and I hope to find some people who have done some research before and can share it with me or are interested in developing and discussing this topic further.

For a while now I am researching and developing all kind of ideas to live a life that is closer to my personal philosophy and ethics without breaking up with my surroundings. I can get quite paralyzed sometimes when I become conscious about the difference between my actual lifestyle and my ideals. I would like to live a life that keeps me in touch with my human nature, socializing, eating good food without having to give up the pleasures of modern civilization such as running water, high speed travel, electricity and the internet. I would like to go in a shop and buy things knowing that they align with my ideals. For me there is a pathway that can incorporate all those things in an achievable way for everyone who likes to attain them without demolishing civilization or overconsuming into the future.

One of the issues I encounter over and over again is the power of the default option or industry standard. To make a good choice that protects the environment, health, human rights and other crucial factors, one has to put in the time and effort to research and discover.
This is a task that is almost impossible to achieve due to the amount of research needed which leaves us with the default option which usally generates social costs much bigger than neccessary.

To solve this issue I dreamt about a network of intelligent swarms. Swarm intelligence is harder to corrupt and more transparent than our current system thanks to the more decentralized way of decision making and the ability to adapt the standards to the personal needs.
In the past few months before discovering Cardano I became inspired by the “economy for the common good”, an economical framework that uses the common good matrix to make it possible to measure a variety of different values. Incentivizing organizations to increase their common good score instead of only optimizing for profits. I also became fascinated by the idea of a food co-op and decentralized social networks such as the Fediverse. I found myself trying to setup a network but became overwhelmed by the organization and complexity.

I would like to share and discuss an idea and get some feedback because I feel like it would advance the adoption of Cardano while supporting more resilient societies by increasing the security of supply chains.
I am imagining an app or website much like a social network to fund cooperatives seamlessly and easily. This is how it could work using an example of producing ready to eat food. Different actors generate accounts: Consumers, chefs, food producers, kitchen owners, etc. Everyone enters some data like location, food you are eating/avoiding, rental costs, experience, etc.
Let’s say I am vegan consumer, I can lookup the location I am staying at and see if there are any vegan food groups already active. If not I can create a new group looking for more members with similar dietary requirements. I then start getting matched with other people in the surroundings and we start a discussion. We decide within our group who would like to eat high quality vegan food ready to be picked up in reusable containers fits quite well together. We decide on a governance level to rectify our group more formally and ensure the safety of our organization. We meetup and browse the organizational template platform. Thanks to this platform it is much easier to setup an organizational structure. Like an appstore for management structures groups can browse through all kind of different ways to setup a cooperative with reviews and rankings providing a navigation tool and adjustable parameters to fine tune the basic structure to the individual needs. A set of questions to be answered by the group could narrow down the potential options and give guidance for inexperienced groups. Experienced groups or cooperatives can also come up with their own complete management design. Once the group has decided their governance model, which is safely stored in the form of smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain the members can transfer the agreed amout of currency into the group wallet to rectify the contract and fund the group. This could be an amount to fund a week of food to a cooperative food store.
Once the wallet has received the fund the cooperation is funded and the shareholders receive their governance tokens or other custom ecosystem tokens and the day to day activitys can start.
In case of the ready to eat food co-op members would vote on the meal plan, quality and quantities for the coming week. A prepared database with recipes and quantities can provide a quick “choose and go” way of preparing the meal plan.
After deciding on recipes the food co-op meal plan can be made public for independent chefs/kitchens to offer them work and for food producers which gives them the opportunity to sell goods. Depending on the organization all members could be independent and matched by the parameters which creates a flexible marketplace based on transparent values or longtime contracts.
Automated scripts could automatically pick up on the public demand and match them with food producer stocks. Therefore, a food producer only has to put in their available quantities and price to get matched with available clients. If quantities are not sold they could be reduced and matched with possible recipes to incentivize food manufactures to buy them and use them before they go off. This could offer a great opportunity for smallscale independent chefs and kitchens to produce goods for the open market and this increases efficency of the system by reducing waste. If this platform is integrated chefs can also easily find out which type of recipes are in high demand in their area.

Thanks to the blockchain technology the whole system has a great track and traceability which needs to be made available to the whole community. A wide certification system that can save all kind of parameters for products or profiles can create a good base for users to make informed decisions. Over time users and group accounts will collect reviews and ratings that will establish high trustworthiness. The ability to filter products and accounts based on their certificates, such as the common good rating makes it simpler to match individual actors with similar goals and increase their cooperation.
Tokens bound to a locality or used by holders of certain certificates can increase networking effects.

I know it is a lot to develop but by making it easily accessible and safe to own shares of production of your own demand as well as increasing overall transparency of our production chain I think we can increase the life quality for everyone. If a quick and seamless setup of cooperations becomes possible many things can be produced locally again which will benefit the quality of the products and services, and reduce the negative impacts of a barely traceable production chain.
In my explanation I talk a lot about food production because it is my personal passion after growing up with junkfood but obviously if a platform like this can be created it can and should be used for any industry.
My research around the fediverse also made me realize an already existing platform can be modified to include this kind of ecosystem.

Thank you for taking the time to read. I’m excited to hear of your existing knowledge and ideas and answer any upcoming questions.

Hannes

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Welcome to the forum @Hannes1 - your use cases sound like this existing Ethereum based project, which I have been trying to follow to see how similar goals could be better achieved on Cardano:

The main advantage of Cardano over Ethereum in this case, I believe, is that “native tokens” can exist independently of contracts. That allows a finer breakdown in a DAO based token economy between any number of tokens and the object or action they each represent: for all the things you talk about above.

Here’s an overview of native tokens in case you haven’t investigated them on Cardano:

I’ve bookmarked this thread & will look forward to others chiming in about your idea. :sunglasses:

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p.s. and if more interested in the supply chain than the governance aspect, you can start with this documented example, from where it probably branches out to others:

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Amazing, I will look into that!

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Hey, I’m working on a similar project and in similar position. My project is Cannabis related…

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Awesome. What’s the name of your project?