5 ms·

Can you share more info/insight on the fourth way you've been playing around with?

ChuckMcM 10y ago
Its something along the lines of a collective. Trying to capture the feeling/environment of PARC. At its simplest everyone pitches in to cover facilities costs and shared healthcare under enough legal cover that it can be considered a "business" but entirely employee owned. Oddly the challenge can be where do excess profits go. (I have to presume that some of the projects the group or subgroups work on would achieve a modicum of income or value) trying to have a plan for that.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  This collective style has been particularly popular amongst independent coffee roasters in recent years. See, for example, The Pulley Collective in Brooklyn [1]. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/dining/a-collective-lets-small-coffee-shops-roast-their-own.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/dining/a-collective-lets-s...
  - qntty 10y ago
    See also: the original vision of Leland Stanford. At the University, Stanford’s vision of an education to support worker cooperatives never became established. To a large degree, this might be due to Stanford’s death two years after the University opened. [...] Leland Stanford’s vision was not only forgone, but over time was entirely forgotten by the Stanford University community. This forgetting appears to have been fairly rapid, occurring within the first decade of the University. Undoubtedly most of the faculty and administrators knew of Stanford’s wishes, but they ceased to speak and write of them, and thus the knowledge was not transmitted. http://dynamics.org/Altenberg/PAPERS/BCLSFV/ http://dynamics.org/Altenberg/PAPERS/BCLSFV/
    - bradyo 10y ago
      This is very cool information. It's too bad his vision never came to fruition. On the contrary, Stanford grads seems really bought into the capitalistic system.
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    Thank you for that link. The idea that I and some other folks have been bouncing around is more along the lines of a shared R&D facility where members have a place to work, common areas to chat, facilities providing (and hosting) resources, with high speed access to the Internet. Badged 24 hour access and reasonable security. That is in some ways like a maker space where paying your dues not only gave you membership it also gave you an office, shared access to expensive equipment, and medical/dental benefits. The stuff a "real" job gives you but without the (now unnecessary) salary. The presumption is that the work would yield economic returns and if so, those returns would go back into the organization to offset the cost of membership. Of course if the cost of membership became negative then you'd effectively have an entirely employee owned corporation and that is where things get different. Some of the people I've talked to about this concept have created very valuable things in the past and they expect to again, if they did that in the collective's space how does that work? Does all that value flow to everyone, even people who didn't participate? How about to people who did but were only tangentially influential in the outcome. That is the "success disaster" that one has to create plans for so that what happens at that point has already been agreed to by everyone and we don't start suing each other. There are other models, places like law offices which share expenses. Things like movie studios which essentially do a vfork(2) to create an entity to "own" a production and the results of that production, groups like the Royal Society (although I've been cautioned against creating something along those lines), and alternate forms of venture incubating[1]. There are interesting examples to look at like Willow Garage to see what worked and what didn't. [1] One thought was to have this group of seasoned engineers get a project off the ground and proven then hire in a team to be the company, transition it to the team and move on to the next thing.
    - blacksmythe 10y ago
      An interesting PARC-like collective would be about 50 people working on ~10 projects, about 5 people per project. As a project becomes successful, it grows to about 20 people, then spins out into a for-profit commercial enterprise.

Its something along the lines of a collective. Trying to capture the feeling/environment of PARC. At its simplest everyone pitches in to cover facilities costs and shared healthcare under enough legal cover that it can be considered a "business" but entirely employee owned. Oddly the challenge can be where do excess profits go. (I have to presume that some of the projects the group or subgroups work on would achieve a modicum of income or value) trying to have a plan for that.

tedmiston 10y ago
This collective style has been particularly popular amongst independent coffee roasters in recent years. See, for example, The Pulley Collective in Brooklyn [1]. [1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/dining/a-collective-lets-small-coffee-shops-roast-their-own.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/dining/a-collective-lets-s...
- qntty 10y ago
  See also: the original vision of Leland Stanford. At the University, Stanford’s vision of an education to support worker cooperatives never became established. To a large degree, this might be due to Stanford’s death two years after the University opened. [...] Leland Stanford’s vision was not only forgone, but over time was entirely forgotten by the Stanford University community. This forgetting appears to have been fairly rapid, occurring within the first decade of the University. Undoubtedly most of the faculty and administrators knew of Stanford’s wishes, but they ceased to speak and write of them, and thus the knowledge was not transmitted. http://dynamics.org/Altenberg/PAPERS/BCLSFV/ http://dynamics.org/Altenberg/PAPERS/BCLSFV/
  - bradyo 10y ago
    This is very cool information. It's too bad his vision never came to fruition. On the contrary, Stanford grads seems really bought into the capitalistic system.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Thank you for that link. The idea that I and some other folks have been bouncing around is more along the lines of a shared R&D facility where members have a place to work, common areas to chat, facilities providing (and hosting) resources, with high speed access to the Internet. Badged 24 hour access and reasonable security. That is in some ways like a maker space where paying your dues not only gave you membership it also gave you an office, shared access to expensive equipment, and medical/dental benefits. The stuff a "real" job gives you but without the (now unnecessary) salary. The presumption is that the work would yield economic returns and if so, those returns would go back into the organization to offset the cost of membership. Of course if the cost of membership became negative then you'd effectively have an entirely employee owned corporation and that is where things get different. Some of the people I've talked to about this concept have created very valuable things in the past and they expect to again, if they did that in the collective's space how does that work? Does all that value flow to everyone, even people who didn't participate? How about to people who did but were only tangentially influential in the outcome. That is the "success disaster" that one has to create plans for so that what happens at that point has already been agreed to by everyone and we don't start suing each other. There are other models, places like law offices which share expenses. Things like movie studios which essentially do a vfork(2) to create an entity to "own" a production and the results of that production, groups like the Royal Society (although I've been cautioned against creating something along those lines), and alternate forms of venture incubating[1]. There are interesting examples to look at like Willow Garage to see what worked and what didn't. [1] One thought was to have this group of seasoned engineers get a project off the ground and proven then hire in a team to be the company, transition it to the team and move on to the next thing.
  - blacksmythe 10y ago
    An interesting PARC-like collective would be about 50 people working on ~10 projects, about 5 people per project. As a project becomes successful, it grows to about 20 people, then spins out into a for-profit commercial enterprise.