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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.