Juniperus
Cheers! Thanks for the idea. It's over there with a few upvotes, and they both have all day to cook
Hmmm fair enough I just posted it there. I leave it up to the mods here. I think it deserves some visibility, and the other community is rather small by comparison
Hah, fair enough! Hopefully we can get rid of the crappy jobs without throwing people out on the street
Hmm lets talk about the executive compensation first, since I can understand how that might be a point of contention.
First off, it's not meant to imply that the President and CEO are the only officers to get a bonus, it's just that those bonuses are key to keeping the company in balance.
There's not really any point to giving everyone at the company a bonus because they get dividends from the surplus, so they would get that same money anyhow.
Also, the Board of Directors may have an incentive bonus based on health and safety metrics. The CEO can share a portion of their bonus with the management in their organization. Same thing with the President's office (basicaly HR). It will all be configurable with payroll rules, so you can set up bonuses in your co-op however you like (or not).
The two main leadership roles, the President and the CEO, are actually likely to be extremely stressful in my opinion. The President is basically HR and the software will have a system where members can submit "Issues" and tag a person for resolution. It then becomes the President's problem to mediate the issue and find a solution.
For the CEO, the success of the entire organization hinges on their decision-making ability and their project management skills. They also have to do things like negotiate contracts with other businesses. None of those things are easy when there dozens or perhaps hundreds of people's livelihoods on the line.
The key here is that the President and the CEO are adversarial roles. The CEO will try to increase the surplus and the President will try to direct that into payroll, resulting in a back and forth power struggle of growth vs social equity.
I guess my goal in sculpting the model the way I did was to make the leadership roles into a "prize" so that there would be a significant incentive for talented people to try out for the role.
A lot of people just want to work on the assembly line, get a paycheck, and go home to their families at night. Others are ambitious and want to lead. There is room for both types of people in this setup (and everyone in between).
Anyway we are definitely in agreement that startup funding is a huge issue. I do think it is solvable with the staffing agreements, even if people have to be patient an put in the work.
Hi! Thanks for your feedback.
The original idea for the shares was to only have an "Equal Ownership Share" but I had to change that to 1000 shares of common stock to fit it into the legal definition of a C-corporation. The software will still report the shares collectively as an EOS.
For buying in, I had to reconcile a few things. If you just have "membership" as your mechanism, then what happens if I join the co-op today and tomorrow the whole company gets sold off? Do I get an equal share of the cash? Because that doesn't seem very fair. Also seems kind of off that someone coming into a company would have full voting rights on day one, it just doesn't make sense to me that they could change the direction of the company so fast. So IMO you have to have a reasonable system for establishing ownership and trust with the person.
The hard limit of 1000 shares coupled with the fact that they are fixed at "book value" means that nobody can gain control of the company in a hostile takeover, and makes it a lot easier to buy in since the share price doesn't float on speculation.
New members will buy and/or be awarded their shares over a "provisional period" as part of their compensation package. The length of the provisional period is set by vote, so it's up to the members how fast they want to onboard new people. If new people aren't seeing their shares go up, it's a problem.
I haven't written the Bylaws yet but they will establish term limits for all officers, so it's not like somebody could sit on the CEO position for 30 years.
I'd be interested in hearing what cooperatives you know about, as I'm always looking for success stories.
My favorite co-op so far is Mondragon Assembly, which is led by a CEO named Peter Szepanski. They make advanced equipment for manufacturing lines (solar panels and batteries), so they are the best example I've seen of a high-tech global co-op. I don't know what the rest of their management structure is like, but I would imagine they have managers and project leads, at least.
It's important to note though, that although they make that specialized equipment, as far as I know they do not operate any of those manufacturing lines themselves. Having an entire factory is quite a complicated endeavor, especially when you end up with with many different jobs around the facility that need to interact. This type of business is what I'm targeting.
As far as the hierarchical management, I included them based on some research that was done into a wind farm installation firm. The short take is that the hierarchy allows structured information sharing and delegation of authority to "subject matter experts" in a way that is far more effective than a flat structure or a council. I will also point out that my model includes a Board of Directors who are the elected council and a union President, so it's not just a top-down model.
You might be considering smaller co-ops, small co-ops and non-profits wouldn't necessarily benefit from a hierarchy as much so I do concede that point, the hierarchy is not for all use cases.
I wanted to limit the length of the post for readability but the details really are in the attached documents. I would suggest spending time with the philosophy document if you want to get into more details. I promise I wrote it myself and not with AI.
Anyway, it's a collaborative effort so feel free to add your ideas or take my ideas as an influence to make something new, make your councils happen! Now is the time to try new ways to cooperate with each other, and the repository has an MIT license so go nuts.
Thanks for chiming in!
Haha all good I have fun with it.
You do make a great point, we proletariat are clearly chattel to these people, and where my thoughts go is the incredible things we could accomplish as a society if we weren't so busy building nonsense vanity projects and yachts for the ultra-weathly.
Whew what a mysterious comment! Well done riddle man!
Are you saying people who have too many kids don't know which way the wind blows? Because I would agree with that, but I would point out that education is extremely effective at helping kids grow up to be sensible people, so the problem is solvable.
Thanks David, I appreciate the feedback. It's quite a rabbit hole so it's encouraging that you took some time with it. I'll be sure to check back often in case you or anyone else has questions.
These are MKUltra-style techniques. The basic idea is to track the persons habits and movements then put suggestive messages or even meme-type information in their path in order to fuck with the person.
They aren't designed to "inject thoughts" into someone's head or anything silly like that. The goal is to confuse the person to the point of panic, so that they become paranoid and irrational over time.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02352235.pdf
Well that's not my goal, my goal was to show that the community is a front set up by reddit, which I think it is. The stated purpose of the community is "Presenting information about organized stalking and targeted individuals, to organize, spread awareness, and educate." so if that's off topic I'm not sure what on topic means.
Anyway fair enough I will leave them alone.