Shaun Fensom has spent more than three decades at the intersection of the Internet and the cooperative movement. In the 1980s he co-founded Poptel, one of the UK’s first Internet Service Providers and a worker co-operative that helped connect NGOs and human-rights organisations worldwide. Poptel went on to create the .coop Internet domain in partnership with the US National Cooperative Business Association—now used by cooperatives across the globe.

Shaun is a co-founder of Cooperative Network Infrastructure (CNI), which enables public, private and community members to share fibre and data-centre assets through a cooperative “neutral host” model.

He also helped create innovation.coop, a shared framework for collaboration in launching new ventures—mainly but not exclusively in technology. Its projects include mail.coop, a privacy-respecting, cooperative email service recommended by Ethical Consumer, and llm.coop, a proof-of-concept for a sovereign large-language-model inference engine. Running on CNI infrastructure, llm.coop uses a zero-trust design and immersion-cooling for heat reuse, aiming to offer a cooperative alternative to Big Tech platforms—particularly for public-sector organisations where data sovereignty and local control are essential.

Shaun believes that cooperation can transform technology—and that technology, in turn, can transform cooperation.