The Cooperative Potential
July 19, 2003 | Cooperatives
The Happy Tutor has an inspiring essay over at Wealth Bondage. it started me thinking about how important Coops could be to The Change. It's an existing business structure and relatively easy to set up.
Many people assume that Coops are just small-time natural food stores, but there are also producer coops (like Land-O-Lakes and Cabot). Even in the food sector, my Coop has five locations, 350 employees, and does $46MM a year in sales - this in a population density of ~50K. I'm currently researching how a producer coop would work for software engineers and software products. (Pointers welcome!) Coops are locally-owned, democratic (one member/one vote) and community-oriented.
Comments
Would you do me a favor? Think about how you would set up Omidyar.net Commons LLC as a coop, if you had the chance, or how it should be established to make it a real commons? We may have a chance to participate in a constitutional convention on that topic, through Tom Munnecke, whom you may have met at the Giving Conference. Here is the page; you will probably have to sign up in the process of getting there and leaving a comment. (I am suggesting an LLC as the structure, but owned by a private or public operating foundation. On possible disadvantage to that is that the trustees of the Commons might someday sell it out from the Foundation, and then you would be back to an LLC that might be bought and sold by opportunists.)
http://www.omidyar.net/group/constitution/news/0/
Posted by: Phil at August 29, 2004 10:07 AM
