The Co-operative Movement

My worker coop, Round Sky Solutions, is offering this free webinar: Embracing Uncertainty through Participation. Come learn meeting frameworks to support your team and your facilitation to embrace the unexpected WITH your team (you don't need to have all the answers!).

Register here!

https://github.com/resonatecoop

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/81992

Resonate is a really cool co-op and they could really use some volunteers & users.

I've been looking for a more ethical music streaming service since I discovered Spotify and other streaming platforms are terrible for small artists. Only the top 3% of artists make $1000/yr and only the top 1% make more than $5000/yr. You'd have to be in the top 0.2% to actually earn a living of $50,000/yr on Spotify.

Resonate is the only platform I've found that's doing something radically different. They have a stream to own model in which listeners pay artists directly about 1/4 of one cent for their first stream then the price increases exponentially with each stream until the 9th stream at which point the listener has paid ~$1.50usd. At that point the user can download the song for offline listening and never has to pay to stream that song again.

Perhaps the coolest part is they are a co-op, 45% of governance weight is reserved for artist shares, 35% for listener shares, and only 20% for staff.

Resonate is a small project that could use all the help it can get. If anyone knows of any other cool music platforms, I'd love to know about them, too!

Mixed use development is the technical term for a building with residences and store fronts and/or office spaces combined. For example, an apartment with the first floor being shops and restaurants. While co-ops consisting of these buildings are more rare, as far as I know there are some.

What are your thoughts? Is the idea of a housing co-op compatible with a commercial building that rents spaces to traditional capitalist businesses? Do you think the businesses should also have stakes in the co-op or should that be reserved for residents?

What would you thinking of a co-op mixed use building only allowing other co-ops to rent the commercial spaces? Would that work?

Going a step further, do you think a full commercial office building can ever be cooperatively owned by different businesses?

In which we are joined by Gemma and Alex from Common Knowledge, a cooperative "designing digital tools that make radical change possible".

"The most important aspect of the democratic ownership agenda is the battle against the class tyranny of property"

The long tradition of African American cooperation is not well known, and in her book Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, Jessica Gordon Nemhard sets out to remedy that gap in our knowledge.

The DisCO Project is a friendly and carefully planned approach for organizations that want to create and share value in ways that are cooperative, commons-oriented and rooted in feminist economics.

Non-ownership housing co-ops are simple enough to imagine: basically you're renting the house, but instead of paying a for-profit land lord, you pay a nonprofit designed to benefit everyone who lives in the apartment complex. But how would ownership housing co-ops work? Does the initial price of buying the house go to the co-op and then they collect monthly fees from you and anyone you sell to like a homeowner's association? Are there mixed ownership and non-ownership housing co-ops where you can either rent or own?

Finally, do you personally prefer housing co-ops to be ownership or non-ownership?

A worker-owned bicycle courier service. The software they use is open source, under an interesting licence that only allows use by co-operatives.