Peer2Politics

Thinking about ways of mainstreaming the co-op model, the idea that keeps coming up is something like a co-op layer on top of a site like Meetup.

With over a trillion dollars in assets and more than 100 million members, it is clear that credit unions must play a pivotal part of any effective strategy aimed at bringing the co-op model to full scale in the American economy. At first glance, one would assume that their obvious role would be as the financial backbone of the co-op movement, providing financial services and loans to existing co-ops, while offering incubation and start-up capital to new ones.

Welcome to “perhaps the geekiest of all cooperative organizations on the planet!” The Data Commons Co-op . The co-op not only serves these communities, it is owned by them. The Data Commons Co-op, like a food or housing co-op, is owned by its members. The members have some fundamental differences, and many differences of emphasis and priorities. But like the Judean People's Front, the Judean Popular People's Front, the Campaign for a Free Galilee, and the Popular Front of Judea, they have a lot in common. This co-op is a way to share the cost of tending a commons of overlapping data, and realizing the benefits that brings to all.

Article and image cross-posted from the Sustainable Economies Law Center. Authored by Sara Stephens.  We want to create a worker cooperative. What legal entity should we form?

Photo courtesy of Co-operatives UK: Debbie Harley, a worker and director of Delta-T Devices, a thriving environmental science instruments worker co-operative, checks in on an installation. Worker co-operatives tend to be smaller than conventional businesses and struggle to find investment, right? Well, not necessarily, according to new research into worker co-ops.c

Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Trebor Scholz, Associate Professor for Culture & Media at the New School and author of the book Uber-Worked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy (Polity, 2016). He is currently touring European cities to talk about platform cooperativism.  Platform cooperativism, as he puts it, is "a way of joining the peer-to-peer and co-op movements with online labor markets while insisting on communal ownership and democratic governance." I talked to him about this young movement, its rise, and the steps ahead.

I’ve been trying to think about ways of mainstreaming the co-op model, and the idea keeps coming up of something like a co-op layer on top of a site like Meetup, kind of akin to Stripe’…

Photo credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg via Foter.com / CC BY. Article cross-posted from Bollier.org.

So far, the Internet has been very good at helping people do things together. But once it involves money, there is no good solution…

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmrGqzl96L8 I recommend this lecture by the famous Yochai Benkler (Harvard). This is spot on since it shows that P2P Cooperatives must have a SHARED CORE ( a Commons) from the start that is not centrally power-controlled (state) or commercialy exploited by selfish greed (market focus). It should be stressed that this does not mean…

video interview Jeremy Rifkin, President Foundation on Economic Trends, ETUC/ETUI conference 'Shaping the new world of work', 27-29 June 2016

by the Resonate team The last few months since we presented Resonate at the Platform Coop conference in NYC has seen a flurry of activity. We’ve recruited half a dozen new labels, hundreds of…

A European Cooperative Society(SCE) that creates toolkits for self-management, self-employment, economic autonomy and financial disobedience for individuals and groups striving for fairer social and economic relationships.