FairCoop ecosystem open cooperative work

This module was intended more for people already experienced in the FairCoop ecosystem, and had as its goal the refinement and development of the already existing FairCoop protocols and ways of organising, plus some new additions to these.

The workshop welcomed to Mont Soleil people from Switzerland, France, Austria, Catalonia/Spain, Argentina, Greece, Italy, South Africa, Philippines… and we were particularly happy to have some people from Bakur in Kurdistan (Turkish state), who had come to learn about merging their own style of self-organised cooperativism with our own.

The focus of this summer camp was to develop five areas of open cooperative work. This areas are: welcome, communication, common management, circular economy and tech. In each one of the areas an assembly was created that is now taking care of the priorities of the area, and defining tasks to be done and paid for in a fair and open way – simplifing the way in which any participant of the ecosystem has the opportunity to be rewarded based on the time spent in doing useful tasks.

A common budget was proposed (and approved later on in the September FairCoop assembly), in order to begin this innovative and inclusive method of collaboration. Most of the areas also activated roles of facilitators who will help the development of the assemblies and tasks, and some subareas were also introduced, looking forward to an even more decentralized open coop structure. We also learnt about dynamising assemblies and scrum/agile techniques, and applying these to the newly formed Areas of FairCoop.

We concentrated quite heavily on the new Circular Economy Area, intended to increase participation in FairCoop at a local level, and this does seem to have been successful, judging by the number of new Local Nodes which have been formed since the Summer Camp. We also worked a lot on the Welcome Area, Media and Communication, and Tech areas.

We couldn’t have left Jura without paying for beers in Faircoin at the fantastic Espace Noir bar, and the walk down from Mont Soleil to St. Imier was as much of a highlight as getting the cable car back up!

We really feel that the Summer Camp was a massive injection of energy into the project, and we unblocked some longstanding issues which allowed us to move the whole thing up to another level. This process is ongoing since then and we will be seeing the results soon. It was also great fun to meet everyone who we may up until then have only known ‘virtually’. FairCoop is all about building trust and community, unlike many other ‘crypto’ projects which are focused on individualism, so it was vital to be able to interact face-to-face and in person with the other people building the project. There was a lot of cooking and cleaning, and also a Fair bit of dancing and laughing!

Developing a model of glocal governance

Beyond just the immediate steps of developing the organizational structure of the FairCoop projects for the next phase of the next months and years, we looked at ways to scale a governance culture to society at large. A governance culture that embraces autonomy and gives authoritative answers to what we collectively want to consent to doing.

People from Switzerland, Finland, Spain, South Africa, Austria and Greece were involved in this part of the summer camp. We focused on collecting various governance best practices such as the Constellation Model, Sociocracy 3.0 and Occupy-Style Open Assemblies.

The governance structure that resulted from these workshops is one that aims to be parallel to other governance structures. It does not aim to replace them. It is complementary to them. It has, however, the inherent power to transform them or to bring about new structures that make old ones obsolete. It is glocal, translocal in nature. It is decentralised, powered through the interdependent participation of local and translocal random groups of people.

This governance culture does not make decisions. Its function is to facilitate awareness of current consensus in society. Once collective realization arises, there should be no need for making “decisions”. However, where decisions are made in other parallel governance structures, this collective realization is taken into account as part of agreeing on the chosen path forward. We defined ways to implement such a glocal governance culture that can be taken into account as we move forward.