maybe it could help us to reflect about ‘labour’ and compensations? We have started with a model where ops member staff commits to certain roles and/or tasks with a certain expectation to be compensated with the net monetary contributions, while also assuming that the invested time is a form of ‘sweat equity’, that maybe compensated somehow in the future. At the same time we have non-ops members who contribute or express interest in doing so, who may not necessarily expect monetary compensation. Questions arise:
- can we have paid and non-paid members in our circles of work?
- what activities could be taken up by non-ops members?
- what levels of access to information are reasonable for effective work and at the same time guarantee privacy of member personal data
- what models of combining paid work and p2p contributions are meaningful to us? and how does meet.coop establish a meaningful reference for its own sake?
Note that I consider our work voluntary, as we do it out of free will and not because we have a contract that says we are obliged to do so. But ops members are paid a compensation for (some of) their work.
In our Five Pillar model, the Production pillar is the one where we define the working relationships, compensations and co-production methodologies. We have developed this at Free Knowledge Institute and femProcomuns, see here and some 50 projects and so many workshops have used this model over the last 5 years.
The challenge IMHO is in particular that: to define very clear rules, document processes and working methodologies, so that people with different relations, capacities and commitments can engage and contribute in a meaningful way to the collective.