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Cooperating with Fairmondo

Go Free Range is a member of the CoTech network of cooperatives. One of the aims of the network is to foster cooperation among its members and in doing so embody the 6th “Rochdale Principle”.

We recently attended Open 2017 and had chance to meet with Felix Weth from Fairmondo Germany and Jack and Bob Thorpe from Fairmondo UK. Fairmondo is a successful, ethically run marketplace for sellers in Germany and Fairmondo UK are replicating that model for sellers in the UK.

Fairmondo UK is currently based on the Sharetribe open-source marketplace software but they have some ideas of how to improve their marketplace that are difficult to achieve with Sharetribe out-of-the-box.

Fairmondo UK wondered if it would be possible to extend the Sharetribe code with the features they need or whether they would be better served by adopting the Fairmondo Germany code to power their marketplace. As both applications are written in Ruby on Rails - a technology we have a lot of experience of here at Go Free Range - we offered to help Fairmondo UK by taking a look at both applications and giving them some advice.

We also took a step back to consider what Fairmondo UK were trying to achieve and whether there would be some alternatives that they hadn’t considered.

We can’t talk too much at this stage about what we recommended, as Fairmondo UK are thinking about their next steps - but they were very pleased with the advice we gave them. We also learnt a lot by looking at a couple of different, large Rails apps including how translation and internationalisation works in Rails.