What we want to create is livelihood through work
What we want to create is bigger than that? That is a core principle and a site of major constraint, as distinct from an eventual purpose. The purpose of meet.coop is layered and systemic, being achieved through contributions of work of more than one kind, not just livelihood work and not just immediate tech and financial operations. This is how radical social and economic change works; organisation development too.
As a movement of change, meet.coop operates in the mutual sector too, where contributions always have been made mostly with sweat equity rather than paid work. This is a truly hard balance to make - this is plain right now, in the bootstrapping phase, where some meet.coop contributors are way over-committed in sweat equity within a precarious economic existence. Regarding this balance, the contribution accounting practice and governance practice of meet.coop needs to go somewhere new, not falling back into one pole of the old tension between worker and consumer coops, and the old ‘solution’ of workers becoming their own bosses in an unchanged economy, still stuck in wage labour and commodity exchange. The early coop movement was organised that way, as mutualist production over and above and beyond livelihood work. The sweat equity is essential for the bootstrapping of a changed economy and society, and has to be carefully accounted for. Different folks make different contributions in this regard, over time.
A working draft under The purpose of each circle proposes a systemic description of the purposes of meet.coop in terms of production of and in commons. To summarise . .
- The Organisational circle has the work of creating and stewarding a commons of organisational capability (the combined capability of the coop’s operational and user members) to make better-organised social and economic contributions to a transformed, commons-cooperative economy. This commons is constituted through work under careful accounting of members’ contributions, designed to enable fair and transparent payment for services and for work, as well as other kinds of recognition of contribution such as ‘good standing’, a voice in the coop’s assemblies, social justice and reparation, weighted votes, etc etc.
- The Product circle has the work of creating and stewarding a commons of digital roomspace, mobilised sector-by-sector across coops and movement organisations in an evolving commons-cooperative economy, and collaboratively steered by users. This is an open and collaborative, evolving, use-oriented working relationship between the real-world users of a distributed technology/tools infrastructure (who make financial contributions to the infrastructure) and the teams who maintain operational access to the infrastructure and oversee its development - typically thro paid work as a contribution to their own livelihood.
- The Technology operations circle has the work of creating and stewarding a commons of running code, across the coop’s devices and the users’ devices, according to principles of high quality, highly non-geek-useable, secure, privacy-oriented digital means including free-libre code, configured to enable enhanced cultural and economic capability at the distributed roots.
Fair and transparent payment for work - and other kinds of recognition - in all three intersecting areas of purpose, is a principle, to be overseen through the practice of task management in circles, and contribution accounting across all kinds of membership.