What community impact can our website hosting co-op have?

By collaborating as a co-operative we bring our collective expertise to each of our client's projects. That means we share website development capabilities as well as web hosting responsibilities. Since most of our clients are community-focused organizations operating on limited budgets this means our service allows them to get better websites at reduced cost and locally hosted.

Saving money is just the most obvious impact; the impact our clients can see on their balance sheets. This is just the tip of the iceberg, we believe operating as a co-op has many more lasting and subtle impacts you may not have considered. Our clients are investing and building capacity in their local community while supporting an organization that operates democratically, is accountable for its actions, and is guided by ethical principles. We believe our co-operative has the capability to contribute positively to the wider co-operative and social economy sectors.

• Through building social networking websites we can add value and structure to the sectors.
• Through providing secure and affordable websites as well as user-maintainable websites we can provide options and solutions.
• By providing online community websites we can help connect rural communities and provide them with an online presence to help support economic development.

Member-owners of CanTrust Hosting Co-operative
at Vancity getting our business account.

Our priority is to create a co-operative that can grow to meet the needs of a wide variety of organizations and provide these organizations with long-term, easy-to-use, Canadian-based, sustainable technology infrastructure.  Each new organization that hosts with us brings more strength to our community.

We are also dedicated to the ideals of the co-operative movement and seek to share our work with others so we can all benifit.  We will be creating detailed documentation of the business process and staff training materials of our co-op.  It is our hope that this documentation will serve as a complete guide to allow other co-operatives to deploy the infrastructure.  As no one geographic location can provide local country hosting to all locales, we see this as an essential step in proliferating the savings of Open Source web solutions and our goverance model to co-operatives everywhere.

Member-owners of CanTrust Hosting Co-operative at 2009 AGM.

Okay, now back to that Saving Money impact...

Our lengthy experience as web consultants has led us to work with a vast range of website content management systems; both Open Source and closed source (proprietary) software systems. Our experience has led us to focus on offering Open Source solutions to our clients because of the reduced development and maintenance costs for our clients. Since, 2005, Drupal has been our client’s Open Source website management system of choice and the choice of thousands of other organizations including: United Nations, Warner Brothers, U.S. Government (recovery.gov).

For more information on Drupal, please visit:

• Introduction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal and http://drupal.org
• Why Drupal? http://drupaltutorials.com/books/why-drupal
• More groups using Drupal: http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites
• Drupal Development Community Site: http://groups.drupal.org

In the past year, Robin Puga and Mack Hardy (two of our core members) have been collaborating on Drupal-based website deployment systems which allow the deployment and managing of  template-based Drupal websites for clients. Our ability to utilize template-driven Drupal website deployment is best illustrated in the work we have done with our recent clients. Below, shows a series of websites Robin Puga built for the British Columbia Co-operative Association at a greatly reduced cost to the organization; the Ag Network and UCCC sites were each built for 1/5 the price of original BCCA website.

Website of the BC Co-op Association; includes: events calendar, job postings, news/announcements.
http://www.bcca.coop

The Agricultural Co-op Network website, linking rural agricultural co-ops to share experiences and knowledge; includes: events calendar, news/announcements, discussion forum for members.
http://agnetwork.bcca.coop

The website for the Upper Columbia Co-operative Council, a regional council for local co-ops; includes: events calendar, news/announcements and other information.
http://www.uccc.coop

It used to be that community organizations had some choices for website hosting: Cheap, Fast, Local -- choose any two. Through our worker co-operative we are able to give our community organizations the ability to say, "All of the above!"