Cooperatives is a web application designed for food cooperatives, CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture), and collaborative buying groups. The project structures joint purchasing around iterative demand rounds: a coordinator opens a round, members declare their needed quantities, the system aggregates collective demand, and the supplier receives a transparent demand summary to respond with a delivery offer.
The application is not an e-commerce shop or commercial marketplace. It does not feature shopping carts, payments, invoices, or binding commercial contracts. Its explicit purpose is to replace messy spreadsheets, chat threads, and chaotic offline calculations with a single, clear procedural flow.
What has been built
The system supports user roles (coordinator, member, supplier, administrator), demand rounds, declaration entries, quantity aggregation, decision logs, data retention policies, sandboxed demonstration data isolated from production use, and a public landing page clarifying pilot parameters and privacy policies (GDPR). Demo accounts operate in read-only mode.
What the project demonstrates
Cooperatives demonstrates domain modeling for collective workflows: avoiding superfluous commercialization, avoiding faux-storefront patterns, and maintaining explicit role boundaries and accountability.
What the project is not
- It is not an e-commerce store or marketplace platform.
- It does not process shopping carts, payments, invoices, or legal order contracts.
- It is not a commercial retail or sales platform.