Co-ops, DAOs, and the way forward for collectives

Crypto, Culture, & Society hosted Austin Robey to talk about both the opportunities and challenges inherent to building better collectively-owned-and-operated organizations

Trebor Schulz coined the term “platform cooperativism” in 2014 (perhaps not coincidentally, a year before Ethereum launched). As a movement, platform cooperativism is exploring ways we can shift the structures of the Internet so that all participants are fairly rewarded for their labor. It is in some ways a reaction to the rise of the gig economy, ... See more

While new models for collective organizing will continue to emerge and evolve, it’s likely that the most successful among them will include some combination of the following: one-member one-vote governance, tokens as ownership, community investment, liquidity for contributors, and bootstrapping through on-chain contributions.

The ownership economy doesn’t always mean a literal distribution of tokens, stock options, or equity. Rather, it means that ownership — which may manifest in the form of novel economic rewards, platform governance, or new forms of social capital — can be a new keystone of user experiences, with plenty of design space to explore. - Jesse Walden

Cooperatives exist within the larger context of The Solidarity Economy, a global movement to build a just and sustainable economy that prioritizes people and planet over profit and growth.

Cooperative culture was largely formed as a way to help oppressed or financially disadvantaged people meet each other's basic needs. This is worth noting because there’s a disconnect between the historical roots of the cooperative movement and the way it’s showing up in the tech world at the moment, with whimsical projects like Constitution DAO get... See more

One reason to be optimistic about the potential for co-ops to proliferate is that the mechanics of the internet make the knowledge required to build and operate them more accessible, and for their benefits to more easily spread and evangelized.