COCO

About Coco

No great thing is created suddenly.

Epictetus AD 50-135 Stoic Philosopher

Coco is a new concept in connecting communities for better lives. Read our vision acoco.org/vision

We are just getting started but we hope to impact hundreds of millions and maybe even billions of people over the next decade.

We aim to help the global mobile & underserved communities –

  • Expatriates and Diaspora
  • Digital Nomads
  • Travellers
  • Backpackers
  • Startup Founders
  • Global Entrepreneur Teams
  • Developing Nation Citizens
  • Refugees

Our main focus areas are around making lives easier and better –

  • Proactive personal quality of life starting
  • Helping families, friends and communities help themselves live better
  • Helping service providers serve better

For example, how many times have you had to reenter the same information (such as contact details, allergies and service preferences) many times when going to a service provider or having to learn lots of booking services that don’t work with your personal calendar.

And it gets harder if you are caring for a partner, children or elderly.

It is not just about time, it is also about quality and risk, poor or reactive information especially in the medical arena leads to delay, cost, risk, complication and even death.

How does it work?

At the core of the coco platform are two ‘doors’ –

  • one ‘door’ for individual people, their family and friends to track and selectively share personal information such as self profiling, self journalling, proactive medical information and service provider history
  • individuals who run community groups, service providers or commercial businesses can also run those businesses

These two doors ‘share’ information selectively based on what YOU decide. If you need to share with a new service provider (eg emergency doctor) it can be done in just seconds with a QR code and our unique visual summary view.

Coco is a broader concept, a set of projects and an evolving family of apps for health focused on retailers self help, discovery of other (mainly free) apps and free health records.

A little more Coco

Long form versions of –

Is Coco really free?

Our model is a little like the original Robin Hood legend, take from the rich and give to the poor.

If you can afford it we encourage you to subscribe (because of our for-purpose not for-profit model and because of our large scale coco is better value than most other personal or business systems, combined it is unbeatable impact and value.

So consider it free but if you can subscribe it is more like a donation, your fees will cover your advanced features and subsidise us to help others on the free plans.

For most people (and hopefully all individuals, their families and most individual community based professionals and carers we are designing carefully to make it free.

This means free for life for everyone focused on citizens and patients and their carers in developing countries. Basic services and some advanced services are free, some additional advanced services may require a fee.

Only those with exceptionally high use personally or businesses operating mainly for-profit (eg large private practices, elective surgery, cosmetic surgery, developed nations, services for expats or VIPs and the wealthy – all of whom can afford to pay and don’t have concerns about basic care) will be asked to make an optional donation or asked to subscribe to commercial services.

For small community clinics and most solo professional practitioners it will also be free for typical use, larger or high volume practices will pay a small charge around 40% to 60% of a typical current third party commercial alternative system.

Vision for Coco

We are designing Coco carefully help bring better health to many more people, initially for the most needy but our very long term vision is to fix some of the more structural challenges globally.

Coco aims to be a world class service for individuals and professionals from community to commercial clinics and hospitals. Coco uses the latest technology and designs to compete directly with traditional legacy providers.

For heavy commercial business users e.g. private hospitals, expat premium services, elective / cosmetic surgery etc there will be a small fee to subsidise the other users which will hopefully be offset by the productivity benefits they get from their population of customers being online and using self service channels.

Advanced features (especially those which are expensive for us to operate at large scale for thousands or millions of concurrent users) will not be available to all users initially after first release to users, but longer term our intention is to tune, optimise, scale, ride macro cost reduction trends, use local devices and other techniques and gradually and eventually provide equally to all.

It may be a journey of decades but we have started and are making progress each day.

Where we will help

You can read more about the needs in some of our initial markets (For example Myanmar is ranked 190th out of 190 countries for health systems) here. We think the bottom 40-60% of countries can benefit substantially.

How can I stay in touch?

You can read the latest news on the public news channel using the securely encrypted telegram app here.

What else?

You can read more about the family/ecosystems of apps we are developing here (editors note: this is now old but we will refresh after 2022/23 workshops).

Because we are aiming globally app naming will probably vary from country to country and culture to culture.

We are also trying to move fast to help as many people as possible as fast as possible so there are parallel streams of work being done by volunteers in different places.

We are known by a series of similar names becuase of the various apps we have experimented with over time (CoKo, GoCo, Koko, Ako, Coco, AllKo, etc) as there are multiple streams of work with different interconnected apps serving individuals, clinics, hospitals, independent health professionals, doctors, nurses, specialists, advisors, tele-health, education, messaging, talk, video, webRTC, eHealth, health records, electronic medical records etc.

Please don’t use our materials or logos without asking first. The only exception is for community local projects in one small town or village, they are welcome to reproduce for local use without modification.

Please do volunteer and download and share 🙂 Coco initially is a simple project but the future is a diverse community of global open source technology and health professionals.

You can read the original 2019 announcement here.

All the good are friends of one another.

Zeno 334-262 BC Founder of the Stoic School on Philosophy in Athens around 300 BC.