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To be a pirate is to set yourself against society and its rules. To even the odds, pirates come together. They co-operate.

It might sound like an extreme claim, but there is a body of evidence of early mutuality and even democracy among some of the most successful seventeenth century Caribbean and Atlantic pirates.

I’ve been thriving in the past half a decade in an organization with radical transparency. So I’m not only witnessing the tectonic shifts in this domain of the evolution of capitalistic companies, I’m also experiencing almost every ripple.

The ballot for elections to the Phone Co-op has just opened and – as usual, since this is a co-operative which has traditionally had strong member democracy – the election is not a foregone conclusion.  No shoo-in here:  there are seven candidates for two places.

But despite the Phone Co-op’s traditional democratic traditions I think there are questions which this year the Phone Co-op’s members need to ask their board when the AGM takes place in early February.

Now in it’s 3rd year, Platform Coop 2017 brought together [1] a diverse group of technologist, entrepreneurs and cooperative veterans to challenge the status quo around platforms.

The trailer to a feature-length documentary currently in development. A film exploring the transformative possibilities of the cooperative model of business.

Cooperatives should be the foundation for bringing high-speed Internet service to rural America. Internet service from satellite, dial-up, and DSL is too slow and unreliable for modern applications. Small towns and farming communities need high-speed Internet service to support their local economies, educate themselves, and generally improve their quality of life. Cooperatives have quietly proved that they can build Fiber-to-the-Home networks that  are capable of speeds of more than 1 Gigabit per second (1,000 Mbps).

When calculating the likelihood of the current economic system protecting our bond with clean, accessible, and life-giving water, the situation seems impossible.

Canada’s Desjardins, the largest association of credit unions in North America, has decided to lift a moratorium on loans for energy and pipeline projects, noting that it will weigh its clients’ environmental, social and governance practices in all future lending decisions.

Cooperatives are an international movement, yet as we looked around the U.S. food co-op sector, most of the people we saw were white. We asked ourselves a simple and powerful question:  Why?