The past five years have seen the rise of Platform Cooperativism, a movement aiming to create a new breed of platforms that are owned and governed by their users. I’ve been involved in this movement since its infancy. In the discussion groups of platform cooperativists, its relationship to open-source has been an important theme.
Josh speaks with Jack Lamon of Come As You Are. Come As You Are is Canada’s only worker co-operative sex-toy shop. Based in Toronto their online sales serve all of Canada. Topics include the development of sexual attitudes over the past 20 years, philosophies behind sexual health, the economic transition happening on Queen Street, and the decision to switch from brick and mortar to digital storefront.
Harnessing the potential of the blockchain while addressing its deficits, DiSCOs prototype and permit tailoring of the Distributed Cooperative Organization (DisCO) Governance Model originally developed for Guerrilla Translation, a radical translation collective/cooperative and the first pilot project for DisCOs.
A forty-one year-old firm in the City of Guelph, Canada, has transitioned to a worker co-operative business.
Arise Architects Co-operative – formerly known as J. David McAuley Architect Inc – is the oldest architectural firm in the city. Founder David McAuley has designed churches in over 200 municipalities across Ontario, as well as other projects Cornwall, Kenora, Windsor and Rock Falls.
After decades of neglect, antitrust is once again a topic of public debate. Proponents of reviving antitrust have called for abandoning the narrow consumer welfare objective and embracing a broader set of objectives. One essential element that has been overlooked thus far is the ownership structure of the firm itself. The dominant model of investor-owned business and associated philosophy of shareholder wealth maximization exacerbate the pernicious effects of market power.
[T]he core concepts of DAOs and crypto-economic mechanism design — incentives, penalties and secrecy — are not a natural starting point for most people forming new ventures together. Neither, funnily enough, is money. So what are DisCOs and why do we need them? DisCOs are an approach to forming Distributed Open Cooperatives. Let’s take this one track at a time.
Frustrated with wildfires and intentional blackouts caused by Pacific Gas & Electric, more than two dozen California mayors and county leaders are calling for a customer-owned power company to replace the giant utility.
In a letter delivered Tuesday to the California Public Utilities Commission, the local officials embraced a proposal by Mayor Sam Liccardo of San Jose to create a cooperative that would use their collective resources to take over the utility.
SELC started working with Berkeley’s Loan Administration Board to make the necessary changes to the small business loan fund, which city council unanimously approved in September.
“We took this strategy rather than asking the city to set up a whole new revolving loan fund just for cooperatives, just build on what’s already there,” says Sara Stephens, housing and cooperatives attorney at SELC. “It’s just so hard to ask cities for money. If there’s already a pot of money here, how can we make this work better for cooperatives?”
The biggest threat to journalism today is not “technology.” Journalists can innovate ways to use technology to produce excellent new work, and even to get people to pay for it. The big problem is ownership: The journalists don’t own the companies.
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In October, Oxbow Design Build Cooperative successfully converted their partnership to a worker co-operative. The shift in structure will have members democratically own and control the business to sustain their mission for the long-term benefit of their community and customers. Oxbow provides full service design and construction to the western Massachusetts area.
The Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB) grew out of the self-help housing movement. The exhibition features the families and people who fought to turn vacant or neglected buildings into vibrant co-ops, as told through the photographs, newsletters, oral histories, and training manuals found in UHAB’s archive. Their stories illuminate the origins of New York City’s affordable housing cooperatives, and the work that residents put into saving and preserving the city’s housing stock, one building at a time.
Stacco Troncoso teaches and writes on the Commons, P2P politics and economics, open culture, post-growth futures, Platform and Open Cooperativism, decentralized governance, blockchain and more as part of the P2P Foundation, Commons Transition, and Guerrilla Media Collective.
As members of cooperatives we work for 40 hours a week, of which at least 18 hours must be physical labor and the rest is organizing work in specialized smaller groups responsible for different areas of activity (programming, marketing, logistics, finance, bureaucracy and all the things that we need in order to keep the cooperative running). We all attend weekly assemblies and monthly meetings dedicated to strategic planning and team-building.
