i+i = ii.coop
If 'i' is a focus on one person, an individual, then 'ii' is a focus on helping each other. Single-player mode may get you somewhere fast, but coop-mode allows you to create consensus and sustainable community along the way. Our mission is to create cooperative spaces and environments across neighborhoods and nations globally, similar to Media Labs in academia, but inclubate inclusive innovation focused on local neighborhood needs.
ii.coop establishes Physical & Digital environments in which humans can contribute to their communities. The word ‘cooperations’ doesn’t exist… yet. For over a century the ‘corporation’ has become the dominant way of organizing people, often for the good of a few. A cooperation organizes people and resources for the good of all.
In 2023 Hippie returned to Colorado, settling with his family in the Longmont area. ii is Hippie’s cooperation, ii is two or more people working together for the good of all. There are people working with ii in Colorado, New Zealand, South Africa, France & Cambodia.
Whilst it’s the ‘how’ that is most important, some of the ‘what’s currently in the ii media labs are:
Cooperative Community Storytelling
AI assisted interviews for quickly providing data driven summaries across multiple interviews. Being used at College of Engineering this fall for Designing for Defense. Roughly 300 interviews in 7 weeks, across 4 initiatives. This might easily pivot to use in Longmont to understand our community needs quickly and provide the data driven feedback we need to serve our community well.
Cooperation for Elderly Connection and Support
Connecting elderly and other at risk groups to immediate tech support from family / friends or community service providers. As technology advances at an unprecedented rate, an ageing population is at risk of finding themselves isolated by simple issues with their devices. Using nothing but a web browser (and some clever new technology behind the scenes), Hippie & his team have prototyped a truly accessible solution.
Cooperative Educational Environments
When the Cloud Native Compute Foundation runs their Kids Day events all over the world, they face the challenge of providing localized curriculum and software environments to teach Sonic Pi, AI, Robotics they turned to ii to assist in creating a multiple solutions from bootable USB sticks, to web based environments to go along with printed books developed by students.
Cooperative Services Router for DoD (and Longmont!)
The DoD needs our service humans to connect securely to services provided by the different branches of our military. They are asking for an open source solution that can be re-used in the public sphere. As Hippie monitors the 2024-2025 cohort, the end goal is a solution and business that can provide high available distributed secure services not only to US defence forces, but also to the citizens of Longmont.
Location Location Location
Part off moving back to the US was to establish connections with Colorado University (College of Engineering and ATLAS), Boulder County (Area Agency on Aging), and the wider technology and startup community.
Longmont has several community hubs we are looking to cooperate with, but are actively looking for a space and place to incubate and connect. If you have room for a Hippie Hacker and can see the vision, please consider providing room for an initial broadcast studio, fiber connections, and a rack. ii will start interviewing our neighborhood to gain an understanding of what our needs our, and what kind of cooperative community programs might serve our, and other neighborhoods, with meaningful expressions of care.