Food co-op / buying club enthusiast wanted
June 2014
Do you know your way around the food co-op and buying club scene? Would you be interested in helping moderate perhaps the longest-lived online cooperative directory around? If so, drop us a note telling us a little bit about yourself and any food co-ops or buying clubs you participate in. No special skills needed, just the ability to edit an online spreadsheet.
Some background: From 1999 through 2011, the Cooperating Directory Service, a Minnesota non-profit initially funded from the estate of Kris Olsen, operated a directory of natural food co-ops at coopdirectory.org. When the CDS non-profit closed in 2011, Stuart Reid of the Food Co-op Initiative was asked to take it on. He, in turn, checked in with the nascent Data Commons (of which the Food Co-op Initiative is a founding member) to see what it could do to help. A Data Commons volunteer did some basic triage on the site, cleaning it up, structuring the listings, and saving submissions and corrections made via the site from falling into a black hole. At the end of triaging, the website was living and breathing again. It turns out to be a popular website, well-ranked in search engines, with a healthy number of updates coming in every month. It just isn’t in anyone’s business plan or monetization strategy! We’d like to keep it that way. Can you help?
Along with moderators, we’d be super-excited if any web design guru wants to freshen the look of the site a little bit, but for now we’re keeping its old-timey look, right down to the milometer-style visitor counter!
This is an all-volunteer effort right now, with the Data Commons Co-op guaranteeing continued hosting and attention. Financial assistance would be very welcome!