Trunk of My Car Cooperative is so much more than just a place to buy and sell books. We also have a forum for discussions, a place to offer book-related services (like cover design, editing, etc), and our unique system for book discovery (which uses information about genres, categories, character identities, and content warnings that authors supply, rather than often-inaccurate AI summaries that nobody asked for.)  

With all these features to keep track of, it’s important that we use a good project management system. We had been using Hive for a while, and it was working okay, but their values don’t align with ours.

For one, they use Amazon Web Services to store attachments (and Amazon likes to invest in union-busting and building surveillance tech for ICE and the IOF, as well as other things that aren’t great for the planet, like the aforementioned AI summaries.)

To make matters worse, Hive is now also investing in AI themselves. That’s bad for a lot of reasons.

AI data centers are driving up utility bills for everyday people as new power plants are built–and previously closed ones are reopened–to meet their astronomical energy demands. This increases pollution and accelerates climate change for the whole planet. In the towns where power companies choose to build these plants—many of which are rural and have mostly Black residents—people suffer worsened health. New evidence shows that an Amazon data center in Oregon is causing cancer and miscarriages. Then there’s the fact that a ton of AI “training sets” are just work that’s been stolen from artists and writers. And we shouldn’t ignore the fact that AI data centers use lithium, coltan, gold, copper, and other minerals found in countries that coincidentally (or not) are facing genocide and threats of invasion, including Congo, Sudan, and Venezuela.

We’re for cooperative empowerment, not exploitation, balance, not extraction, and healing, not war. So it became clear that we needed to find a new project management solution. We looked at some corporate alternatives to Hive, but most of them came with similar ethical issues. I found an open-source platform and believed I could get an instance of it set up relatively quickly. However, configuring everything correctly ended up being trickier than I expected. After spending about a week trying (and failing) to enable email notifications, we decided it was time to explore other options. We ended up finding an awesome WordPress plugin called Zephyr, which gives us all the tools we need to collaborate and track our various tasks. As an added bonus, it will be easy to give other workers access to the projects we’re working on once our team grows. I’m so excited to connect and build with others who believe in the power of books and cooperation in 2026!