Co-ops trade fair

The time: first thing on Monday morning this week (Groan! Ed.). The place: outside the Watershed by Bristol’s historic docks, where Rich Higgs and yer ‘umble scribe found ourselves unloading a car full of stuff – a refurbished £30 computer, the Bristol Wireless banner, blank CDs, literature, etc. – to haul inside for the South West Trade Fair for co-operatives and social enterprises. On my back I also had my rucksack with laptop (for burning CDs), live CDs (Ubuntu and Mepis) and even more literature.

Once inside, we quickly installed ourselves in our exhibition space, sharing a table with our old friend MJ Ray, who was there promoting the services of Turo Technology LLP – a creative computing cooperative also offering services using free software and GNU/Linux.

In addition to MJ, it was good to see some other familiar faces there, such as Julie from Cosmic and Phil from Essential Trading. Moreover, it was wonderful to be at an event where the co-operative/social enterprise model was the norm rather than the exception.

What did we get out of it? Plenty of interest in free and open source software (lots of literature and live CDs given away), plus we joined Co-operatives South West (it’s free 🙂 ), the umbrella organisation for co-ops and mutual societies in this part of the world