Cooperatives need secure, collaborative infrastructure but the dominant solutions often require trusting a centralized corporate provider with sensitive data and organizational relationships.

FOKS (Federated Open Key Service) is an open-source, self-hostable alternative built by the team behind Keybase. It provides end-to-end encrypted Git hosting, a key-value secret store, and federated team management, all structured so that servers never see unencrypted data, and teams can span multiple independently-operated servers without losing the ability to collaborate.

This session explores how FOKS can fit into the broader cooperative ecosystem and specifically how cooperative organizations can use it to own their infrastructure and coordinate with one another. We'll discuss real deployment scenarios, the protocol's key hierarchy and signature chain design.