sharing this here as a follow on to the recent discussions of worker coops, to get more input: https://twitter.com/heartpunkk/status/1449077274225958915

I've been interested in the concept, but AFAICT whether I would want to join in real life would depend very strongly on the details/execution. I didn't put a ton of time into researching it, but my impression was there's not a lot you can actually conclude about an organization just from it calling itself a "coop".

yea, that's necessary with small groups based on value alignment, quite fundamentally. i think the question is less "would you participate in a particular one" and "could you imagine a sort you could work in", because, like, we can have a fucking lot of these entitities if we want?

Gotcha. In my ideal scenario, I would work as part of a group that simultaneously provides the sort of economies of scale a large organization can get (notably related to healthcare but maybe accounting, equipment and such, too), and also provide a social support system and companionship, without impacting my autonomy to any significant degree. I don't know how reasonable that is all at once. :) Brb, reading more about coops.

that sounds like it could work in a certain model of a workers coop for consulting or some service! you'd need much more specificity in a lot of ways, and learning which specific kinds of options can exist reasonably based on what the world has learned about how to do coops etc will inform being able to do that. but those conversations and considerations are themselves fundamentally what grows such an organization in the first place.

Yeah, after a bit more reading I guess I'm imagining more of a freelancer's/consultant's type of group than a conventional worker's cooperative. I'm not sure what you mean by specificity; do you mean in terms of the goals of the coop? (I would have to agree with that, my previous comment was basically just a fantasy)

I think @David Brooks wanted to share some perspective on coops from first hand experience

DAO people scare me re coops: they're fundamentally using trustless technology to build trustful orgs. it's a curious value misalignment. why so much zero trust tech if we're gonna work together?

@Andrew F that's right, "coop" just means that the company is not owned by a single individual, or "majority shareholders" or anything like that. The company is owned by the people that work there. A coop company is also operated / governed by the people that work there. My coop, for instance, began its life as a fairly loose-knit freelancer's group that has now grown into a full software development / consultant agency. But we've been a worker-owned coop the entire time. That said, you can usually make a few assumptions about a cooperative workplace. You can usually safely assume that coop members are open-minded, generally progressive, and can cooperate with others. In my experience, you can also usually assume a member of a worker-owned coop doesn't care much for bosses or corporate structure in general. Being a good communicator is almost a prerequisite for worker coop participation. And as far as I'm concerned, being a member of a cooperative automatically puts one on a path of anti-capitalism. It really opens one's eyes to the flaws inherent in capitalism, and the potential opportunity for improvement with cooperativism.

@heartpunk the wording is now changing and there are interesting experiments about how to capture/transfer knowledge