The DisCO Manifesto is a deep dive into the world of Distributed Cooperative Organizations. Over …
Recommended by the editor of COMPOST magazine as a good introduction to Distributed Cooperative Organisations, an area I'm very interested in right now.
@fionnain i've read this manifesto and the stuff around DisCO because it seemed intriguing and... i've never really gotten the point? but this is coming from a predominantly engineering/tech pov, and it felt like the DisCO folx have a different background they are coming from than that
@cblgh hmm yeah. I've read a fair bit too, and I am still not convinced that there is any novelty. But I am certain that the DAO/DisCO model is a structural/management system, not a technical/engineering one. And it is an attempt at bringing a praxis of feminist philosophy into businesses or organisations, which I appreciate. So I am sceptically interested, for now.
The two things see that have some possible novelty are: 1) transparency: all members take joint ownership (like a coop) with decision-making transparently visible to all (like blockchain). And 2) documentation: the drafting and maintenance of all legal and reporting documents is shared and open.
I've run a lot of projects and have been involved with a lot of collectives, and I know when these things scale, the above can get pretty messy and costly (particularly admin work for accounting or reporting). So I'm happy to experiment a …
@cblgh hmm yeah. I've read a fair bit too, and I am still not convinced that there is any novelty. But I am certain that the DAO/DisCO model is a structural/management system, not a technical/engineering one. And it is an attempt at bringing a praxis of feminist philosophy into businesses or organisations, which I appreciate. So I am sceptically interested, for now.
The two things see that have some possible novelty are: 1) transparency: all members take joint ownership (like a coop) with decision-making transparently visible to all (like blockchain). And 2) documentation: the drafting and maintenance of all legal and reporting documents is shared and open.
I've run a lot of projects and have been involved with a lot of collectives, and I know when these things scale, the above can get pretty messy and costly (particularly admin work for accounting or reporting). So I'm happy to experiment a little with different models.
@cblgh oh, also this point, which I do find interesting if hard to trust or implement (from the manifesto, p 33):
Multi-constituent: DisCOs extend decision making and ownership to all contributors whether present in all value chains or affected by the coop’s actions. Beyond workers, this may include neighbouring communities, suppliers, clients, reproductive and affective labor, financial backers, etc. as constituents.
@fionnain nods i think there are valuable lessons people are gaining from the dao space even if the notion of tokenizing everything (and by extension a demonstration of extreme financialization) is imo not desirable in any way. one example of value coming from it (other than good people extremely accidentally gaining significant amounts of financial means): i've seen looots of governance models be experimented with in a way that seems very fresh and interesting, which can be plucked out of the grasping hands of the blockchain and into other spaces.
imo blockchain is only transparently visible "in letter". what i mean is it's really hard to understand any transactions without significant development effort going into user interfaces that distill what's going on. i've tried understanding the outcome of smart contracts by using a block explorer website and it's pretty impenetrable, despite being transparent in one sense. so a shared pad, …
@fionnain nods i think there are valuable lessons people are gaining from the dao space even if the notion of tokenizing everything (and by extension a demonstration of extreme financialization) is imo not desirable in any way. one example of value coming from it (other than good people extremely accidentally gaining significant amounts of financial means): i've seen looots of governance models be experimented with in a way that seems very fresh and interesting, which can be plucked out of the grasping hands of the blockchain and into other spaces.
imo blockchain is only transparently visible "in letter". what i mean is it's really hard to understand any transactions without significant development effort going into user interfaces that distill what's going on. i've tried understanding the outcome of smart contracts by using a block explorer website and it's pretty impenetrable, despite being transparent in one sense. so a shared pad, cryptpad sheet, or other simple tool would go a lot more towards something actually transparent and accessible than doing the equivalent with cryptocurrencies
@cblgh Agreed re blockchain's visibility 'in letter'. It's like a shibboleth, transparent only to those with the knowledge and ability to understand it. And following your train of thought, I see etherpads and online finance tools like Open Collective as being just as useful for the DAO model, if not more useful than blockchain.
I also like the experimentation, even if some of it has questionable ethics (and some is downright arrogant waste). It's no harm to imagine other structural models that go beyond the long-tried models of, for example, 'capitalist oligarchy' or 'anarchist collective'. Even if every experiment fails, some lessons will be learned, I hope.
