Cooperatives and Collectives
How Do We Do It?
Presentation by: Michele (Micky) Metts
Agaric 2015
Freelancer: You do everything yourself. You find the clients and
you make all the decisions.
Employee: You share work and sometimes, skills with other
people. Someone else is ultimately in charge.
Worker-Owner: Work and decision-making are shared with your
co-workers.
Traditional Choices:
Worker cooperatives are businesses owned and controlled by the
people who work in them, the cooperative members.
They are a time-tested way to create quality jobs, and are
gaining momentum as a strategy to build and anchor wealth in
communities. . .
What is a Worker Cooperative:
The Agaric Cooperative Model
As a worker-owned cooperative, Agaric's members are all workers
and owners, and we work on projects collectively. We are members of
the USFWC (United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives) in
solidarity to support others in self-determination in their
work.
As worker-owners, we each get a monthly salary and we vote on
what to do with the surplus.
What is Agaric?
Agaric primarily uses Drupal as a Content Management System to
build websites for clients.
We build and or customize existing free software components and
we share the code with the developer community.
What Agaric Does
Leadership, Democracy, Accountability, Teaming
One Worker = One Vote
Consensus voting on issues that require financial or excessive
time investments.
Agaric Governance
One great benefit of being part of a cooperative is being able
to devote time to internal projects.
We all enjoy bringing projects to the group that are beneficial
to humanity.
Agaric is registered in Massachusetts as an LLC., and operates
as a cooperative. All members are partners in the Limited Liability
Corporation.
Laws are different in each State and there are some States that
acknowledge Cooperatives and some that do not.
We maintain a flat structure without hierarchy no CEO or
officers, we are all equal partners in Agaric even though we have
different responsibilities.
Business Structure
As a cooperative, Agaric is using Free software and working with
other developers to build a platform to be used as a service -
http://powertoconnect.org - supports people connecting on events
and topical issues that are deeper than a tweet, such as meetings
or events that may have member voting, shared documents or media
attached that needs to be accessible on multiple devices.
The system can also be used by the 5.6 billion people on Earth,
without smart phones.
Projects
Agaric is building a dispatch system and logging tool to be used
by truck drivers at CERO, a waste management cooperative in the
Boston area.
Networking is extremely important to cooperatives and we share
our client leads as well as any free technology we build, with
other developers.
Without free tools, the cost and barriers to entry for a small
cooperative business is prohibitive.
Projects
Adding new worker-owners and deciding to grow will be different
for each cooperative, and you will vote on how it works for yours.
This is what Agaric does. We calculated a valuation of our company
based on years in operation, our client base, and assets, along
with the level of skills each member brings to the coop. This
number became the 'buy-in' cost.To eliminate the problem of a new
memebr paying a large fee up front, we take a monthly deduction
from our salaries for 5 years.
Adding New Members
If anyone decides to leave the Agaric cooperative, they may
withdraw the amount that they have in the 'buy-in' pool. Again this
is the Agaric method, in your cooperative you may vote on this and
determine your own process!
Leaving the Cooperative
What does it mean to be dependent on the proprietary tools and
platforms of a competitive society vs. having FULL access to the
FREE tools and platforms of a cooperative society?
We are already the owners of high end, professional, FREE
software, some of the FREE software we collectively own, is the
very same software that most of the Internet runs on.
Free Software = Free SocietyFSF.org The Free Software
Foundation
Why Free Software?
News and Resources
Articles about cooperatives
http://www.thenews.coop/The Guardian - http://bit.ly/1s83iyEThe
ecologist -
http://bit.ly/1oaxYythttp://shareable.net/blog/how-to-start-a-worker-co-op
Video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpg4PjGtbu0 - The Sharing
Economy Janelle Orsi
Worth a listen: "Tech Cooperatives: A Better Way to Make a
Living" http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP9313 with
Jack Aponte of http://palantetech.com
Starting a cooperative
http://banyanproject.coop/[email protected]
-the best tech-worker-coop-related mailing list that i know
ofhttp://npogroups.org/lists/info/tech-coophttp://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/workercoop/infohttp://www.techworker.coop/
My Projects and
Interests:LibreBoston.orgAgaric.comPowerToConnect.orgVoipDrupal.org
Some related links below that are not specific to cooperatives,
but are very relevant to change in a society where coops can
flourish.
Other Links of Interest
http://satifice.com/octofice/2013/07/02/tyranny-of-open -
Tyranny of Open - critique of free software's worsening of many
inequalities (particularly gender and
race)http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community
- The Ethics of Unpaid Labor and the OSS Community - by Ashe
Dryden.http://open.bufferapp.com/introducing-open-salaries-at-buffer-including-our-transparent-formula-and-all-individual-salaries
Thank You!
These slides are available:
Contact: [email protected]
Presented at Platform Cooperativism NYC, November 2015
http://platformcoop.net
http://www.slideshare.net/DrupalConnection/cooperative-development-how-do-we-do-it
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