MEDLab is stepping up our support for community ownership
Thanks to a $1 million grant from the Colorado Health Foundation, MEDLab will have a chance to radically advance our support of community ownership—employee-owned businesses, resident-owned communities, and democratic tech.
This support will enable faculty across the college and campus to get involved in this work, while putting students at the heart of it. By creating storytelling campaigns across different media channels, our students will shape the story of community ownership in ways that help Coloradans understand its potential benefits.
In addition to the support from the Colorado Health Foundation, our college and the university have contributed an additional $568,000 to the effort, which is intended to create a new research center.
More on that soon!
Learn more about this transformative opportunity for our work in CMDI Now.
Photo: MEDLab associate director Júlia Martins Rodrigues and director Nathan Schneider, who are co-leading the effort.
What if users co-governed AI?
The MEDLab team has led the effort to build a pioneering effort to explore the possibilities for self-governance in the context of AI technology: the Inference Cooperative.
After two months, the co-op has over 100 members and is developing its democratic culture, sharing access to private and renewable-energy AI services, and exploring ways to run its own models.
Members can pay on a sliding scale for access to a chatbot and APIs, and they can participate in steering the governance and operations of the project.
Explore the co-op at docs.inference.coop.
Magic Mountain Talks: the federal bureaucracy and African-American co-ops
MEDLab co-sponsors Magic Mountain Talks, an event series at Boulder's worker-owned bookstore and cafe, Trident. Our upcoming events include a leading media scholar on the fate of the US Census in an anti-bureaucracy political climate, and the history of cooperative enterprise in Black communities.
Podcast: How do we organize across borders?
MEDLab's radio show, Looks Like New, comes out the fourth Thursday of every month on KGNU, 88.5 FM, or online as a podcast. Last month's episode is now available:
Stephanie Abdalla talks to Raza Gillani in a conversation about the not-always-obvious relationship between journalism and organizing and how it can connect issues across borders. He talks about the duality between neighborhood and transnational activism within the immigrants’ rights agenda and reflects on the role of social media and other communication technologies in negotiating the relationship between micro and macro activist contexts.
Raza Gillani is a journalist and organizer from Pakistan with a robust trajectory leading social movements in favor of students, worker, and immigrants’ rights both in his home country and in New York City. In Lahore, where he grew up, Gillani co-founded the Progressive Students Collective and the Haqooq-e-Khalq movement, which advocated for the rights of the masses. He is currently a member of the Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) collective in NYC, where he serves as an organizer of South Asian working-class communities, leveraging power through electoral and movement work. More recently, Raza started Muhadjireen NYC, a social media activist community that connects South Asian immigrants in New York City with local politics through journalistic reporting. This project emerged as a response to the underrepresentation of South Asian demands in the mainstream media, and it aims to promote in-depth coverage of how immigrant areas operate on a social, political, and economic level.
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