Session: Cooperatives

Sculpture building

  • building sculptures cooperatively
  • went from structure to sun dial

Collective interpretation

  • moon cycles
  • timed life
  • togetherness unity
  • staged movement
  • collaborative fun
  • dissentegratuin if man’s creation
  • journey towards ma
  • slowing time

WALK
Cooperative-ism

  • rudimentary tech → how to proceed

  • coop is where I buy grain, chemicals

  • examples

  • come together when members create market power

  • collectivizing to get stuff cheaper

  • health sector, allows people to own data contribute to commons

  • enabling farmers to have own dignity twin datat store, use data collectively for landscape outcomes

  • data elevator/silo

  • what’s the catalyst - frustration, shared need, market failure

  • a collective goal, maybe not makret driven

  • get legs when developing a market segment, eg farm, producers, restaurants, make brand around this in Montana

  • traditional commodity

  • data coop

  • market coop

BREAK
Can this apply to top down corporation?

  • apartment housing coop, all held accountable, but one/few people that make final decisions

  • decocratic (?) decision making, governance

  • doesn’t maximize profit because members get benefits first. It will graduate to making profit

  • cooperatives can think much longer term

Structures

  • should we expand/franchise?
  • led to knowledge cooperative, developed a model, others could start their own cooperative with support from initial coop
  • Single company for marketing/branding/accounting, but separate coops use that
  • membership, workers co-op, vs providing service
  • members often provide services that others don’t want to do (raise family on land, not worry about where cow/crop goes, accounting, etc), farmer can’t have every skill!!

Tradeoff market vs co-op

  • allowing you to choose what you are best at
  • ? - does the traditional market allow us to do this? BUT coop let’s us have a voice/vote/opinion
  • coop could minimize profit at parts of the market (not distribution)
  • pace maker, bring down margins in carbon market
  • market exchange is often just $$ dollars or commodity, but in a coop you are voting with …

Commons

  • community layer in a market
  • ostrum ellenor principles align
  • commons are not open access
  • relationships

WALK

  • Pain points in ag tech space

  • coops converting back to llcs

  • how data is managed

  • templating for daos

  • few examples - platform coop

  • incredibly helpful to create & use a template

  • can GOAT have a coop working group?

  • RFM being open, easy because they serve their members

Greg data entry

  • cooperative for data entry?
  • assemble functions into similar person types
  • program to support data acquisition
  • just call and get data, transpose
  • data bookkeeping, like accounting, agronomist
  • in service to land stewards

BREAK
Takeaways

  • startups, extraction is key, but love coops, how can we align
  • multi stakeholders? Are they all data entry? Do same thing? Umbrella coop or federated?
  • privacy and rights in data
  • templates
  • DAOs and Regen groups module
  • RFM has 50 farms on, lived experience, some of the roles/resources may already exist
  • existing things join the coop
  • non currency based ways to allocate attention. Is there a nearest term option
  • governance, DAO, silicone valley discovered coop??
  • coop migrating to corporate model, interesting, lots of work going into flexibility of structure, excitement around DAOs

DEBATE/conversation about what these different models

  • Debate isn’t productive! Let’s map out of the features of all this

Let’s do a functional map of different cooperative structures and functions. In a table that allows space to describe each intersection and a separate table to add examples and how they map

  • Kyler, Greg, Sam, ned, Rohan, Michael, Mo, Jamie
  • Sculpting coops 8pm @ cafe
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See: Cooperative resources

For all those interested in the Coops conversation there was an after hours session which can be found here: