Open Cooperatives

Characteristics

Criteria as Proposed by Michel Bauwens

1. That coops need to be statutorily (internally) oriented towards the common good
2. That coops need to have governance models including all stakeholders
3. That coops need to actively co-produce the creation of immaterial and material commons
4. That coops need to be organized socially and politically on a global basis, even as they produce locally.

Example: The Cooperative Integral Catalana as a living model of open cooperativism

Criteria as Proposed by Josef Davies-Coates

"Co-ops that combine best practices from the international co-operative movement with best practices from the open source software and hardware communities are now possible. Soon anyone will be able to set up an Open Co-op and invite all their stakeholders to help finance, govern and organise the co-op online." (http://stirtoaction.com/open-co-ops-inspiration-legal-structures-and-tools/)

History

Josef Davies-Coates has developed a concept of open cooperatives which focuses on open and transparent non-hierarchical distributed governance and ownership. See: Open Co-ops: Inspiration, Legal Structures and Tools

Michel Bauwens developed a concept of open cooperatives that stresses the co-production of open commons. See: Why We Need a New Kind of Open Cooperativism for the P2P Age

Antecedents and Inspirations

Josef Davies-Coates:

• "The Open Organisations Project emerged. Their goal was “to explain how to set up and maintain transparent, accountable and truly participative communities” and they came up with a useful set of six process and eight functional rules together with some basic guidelines for how to implement them."

• The Viable System Model (VSM): "Stafford Beer used the term ‘viable system’ to describe the same thing and outlined some of their properties in the VSM.

In short, the model says that in order to be viable (i.e., able to autonomously adapt and survive in response to a changing environment) a system must have the following five sub-systems:

1. System 1: Interacting operational units. Think organs in a body, or players in a team.
2. System 2: Responsible for stability and conflict resolution between operational units.
3. System 3: An ‘Internal Eye’ optimising and generating synergies between operational units.
4. System 4: An ‘External Eye’ allows strategies and plans to adapt to a changing environment.
5. System 5: Where ultimate authority lies and is responsible developing policy.

• Bettermeans and The Open Enterprise Manifesto: In April 2010 a project called Bettermeans “formed to promote the values of openness, transparency, autonomy, contribution-based-rewards (meritocracy), democracy, integrity, and values-oriented, purpose-driven work” released The Open Enterprise Manifesto. It was a familiar story: replace “the command and control hierarchy” with “collaboration and open participation;” create organisations “more like living dynamic networks, and less like pyramids;” plus the standard mentions of Linux, Wikipedia, Mondragón and Visa to demonstrate how aspects of the model had already been shown to work at scale. Bettermeans were trying to bring these various aspects together in a single cohesive model, and they made a pretty good stab at building the necessary tools to make such a model widely available and adoptable."

(http://stirtoaction.com/open-co-ops-inspiration-legal-structures-and-tools/)

More Information

• why we need Open Cooperatives: Why We Need a New Kind of Open Cooperativism for the P2P Age

• in-depth rationale: From the Communism of Capital to a Capital for the Commons

Bibliography

Josef Davies-Coates:

"Two books, A New Way to Govern: Organisations and Society after Enron by Shann Turnbull (2002), and Gaian Democracies: Redefining Globalisation and People-Power by John Jopling and Roy Madron (2003) were both very influential on our thinking. They introduced us to the principles behind Spain’s huge co-operative network Mondragon, and other large scale business with innovative organisational structures such VISA International and Semco in Brazil.

In A New Way to Govern Turnbull summarised the terminal flaws of command and control hierarchies: the tendency of centralised power to corrupt; the difficulty of managing complexity; and the suppression of “natural” — human —checks and balances. In their place he proposed organisations which are able to “break complexity down into manageable units, and decompose organisational decision-making into a network of independent control centres.” In short, his thesis argued that command and control hierarchies must be replaced by “network governance” and that where this includes stakeholders — not merely staff but customers, communities, suppliers or distributors — a whole new dimension of economic, social and political benefit opens up." (http://stirtoaction.com/open-co-ops-inspiration-legal-structures-and-tools/)