More about my past attempts to join or start a worker cooperative.
Most of my job searches over the last fifteen years have included at least a few polite emails to tech co-ops, all with equally polite refusals. I understand how it must feel to do all the work of a founder, and then have some dude show up looking for an easy route in, which he has not earned.
In the history of intentional communities, one major cause of failure has been poor screening of new people.
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@mpotter I am a founder of a worker co-op, and in apparent contradiction to the trend, I'm fairly eager to bring in new members. However, the other current member do not share this eagerness, and our growth has been slow.
In the case of tech, I've seen a lot of people posting right here about being laid off and in need of a job. If all these folks got in touch with each other, I strongly suspect they could agree to form a platform co-op.
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@Steve This is part of the reason I've started posting in the open like this. I doubt I'm the only person who has considered a co-op in the past, only to find no takers in a secure job market. But now, this obstacle may be less of a problem.
I get why people resist expansion, a flood of new people can destabilize a small direct democracy.
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@mpotter The kinds of things that @spritely is doing to build out distributed tech seem like a natural fit for platform co-ops. Each co-op could have its own server, with its own extensions that are specific to its inner workings, and the network to reach clients, supporters, and colleagues is already there and waiting. In other words, the barriers to entry will soon be lower than ever.
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@Steve @spritely I like Spritely and I've had my eye on them. I think platform cooperatives sound good in theory, but they are still trying to answer the question, "Who's going to pay for that?"
I had something more agile in mind, which could simply be bootstrapped. I also want direct democracy. An organization that grows to a hundred-plus becomes more top-down in nature.
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@mpotter @spritely Well, the platform itself is the most expensive thing about a platform co-op. I know this from both direct and indirect evidence. And that's exactly what's so interesting about fediverse servers -- the bulk of the work is done, and the rest is simplified, at least compared to starting from scratch. So, the costs are reduced pretty significantly.
This is as close to an off-the-shelf solution as we'll ever get to -- or want.
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