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Understanding co-ops through analogies – Draft

Living in a Group House

The experience of a house or community can change very quickly when people move out or move in, especially when the house or community uses consent-based decision-making or cooperative governance processes. This makes sense, as the idea of a cooperative is that it is driven and owned by its members, and it exists to serve its members; it should adapt when its membership changes to reflect the changing needs of the members.

Source: Am I online? or in a housing co-op?

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FWD: Choices on money: entrepreneurship and youth aspirations in Tanzania

“The general framework that informs youth entrepreneurship programs posits that the lack of capital, skills, business knowledge and poor policy framework explains, to a larger extent, why business ventures are not successful among youth living in poverty. However, this research indicates that family dynamics, youth aspirations, belief systems, and nature of interventions programs are factors that influence youth engagements with entrepreneurship and the outcome of their business ventures.”

Source: Choices on money: entrepreneurship and youth aspirations in Tanzania

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Local Economy Preservation Funds: A Plan to Save Local Businesses and Create Broad Prosperity – Next City

Interesting concept – wondering how this could be part of the toolkit to introduce more competitive local alternatives back into our monopolized market of internet platforms.

“…there may be a way to save local businesses at scale, while also creating a more equitable and democratic economy out of the ashes of the old. States and cities could establish public holding companies that invest and acquire an ownership interest in distressed businesses. These Local Economy Preservation Funds (#LEPF), as we have dubbed them, could then exit their investments in ways that build a more democratic economy when the recovery begins.”

#publicinterest #mutualfunds #neweconomy #stakeholdercapitalism #datasovereignty #cooperatives #peopleoverprofit #smallbusiness #publicprivatepartnerships #localeconomy #platformeconomy https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/local-economy-preservation-funds-plan-local-businesses-create-prosperity

Source: Local Economy Preservation Funds: A Plan to Save Local Businesses and Create Broad Prosperity – Next City

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The labor market doesn’t have a ‘skills gap’—it has an opportunity gap

“Instead of focusing on the skills gap, we argue that it’s time to focus on closing the opportunity gap—not only for the benefit of individuals who have been shut out of the labor market, but for society as a whole. Cultivating and investing in diverse talent can unleash regional innovation, economic growth, and community well-being.”

Source: The labor market doesn’t have a ‘skills gap’—it has an opportunity gap

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Cooperative Design: How Co-ops Center Their Members to Build Better Products, Faster

https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/2020/07/15/cooperative-design-how-co-ops-center-their-members-build-better-products-faster

“As we can see with Stocksy and Loomio, their future is enabled by embracing a more functional role for members as leaders. Members can propose new ways to be served if leadership can trust the process, and members can advance the overall business if leadership includes them in strategy conversations that might feel risky or uncertain.

To get started, credit union and co-op leaders can leverage their existing democratic structure by adding capacity for deeper engagement. This might include a trial program to invite and cultivate proposals from members for special projects, centering them in co-designing products they care about, and partnering with community organizations and industry associations to bring them to market, and the broader movement.”

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Delaware Electric Cooperative’s Performance Portal Brings System Awareness

https://www.cooperative.com/remagazine/articles/pages/co-op-tech-delaware-electric-data-performance-portal.aspx

“Advanced metering infrastructure and other smart systems have dramatically increased the data available to cooperative managers, but without the structure that allows them to make sense of that data, to see what it reveals about their system, it has little value.” #dataviz #coopdev #bizdev #gocoop #systemsdesign

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The economy is falling apart but Wall Street had its best quarter in decades – CNN

“It has been a rough quarter for the US economy, with the country plunging into a pandemic-fueled recession. Yet the stock market is alive and kicking — in fact, it’s having its best quarter in more than 20 years.”

Source: The economy is falling apart but Wall Street had its best quarter in decades – CNN

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Don Goodman-Wilson “Open Source is Broken”

https://don.goodman-wilson.com/posts/open-source-is-broken/

“What does a people-centric collaborative software development model look like? I’d like to explore some basic properties that such a model ought to have, as a starting place for building new institutions to support productive, non-exploitative software development.”

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Ten Companies Unite to Launch “The Platform of Independents”

Ten Companies Unite to Launch “The Platform of Independents”

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