What if we could provide a ‘cooperative by default’ environment for these projects, non-intrusively, through systems and services used by these projects? My initial point of interest is the innovative opencollective.com 14 (OC) platform, used by hundreds of open source projects to enable supporters to give them money without them having to incorporate or even set up a bank account. I’m very interested in OC’s approach, and feel that as well as finance, it could potentially help with governance. And if the governance services it offered were by default of a cooperative nature, then perhaps some of the hundreds of projects OC facilitates might in time mature into successful cooperative organisations. I’m interested in this because I think that cooperatives provide a range of benefits that other models don’t or can’t offer, and because I’m interested in defending and extending an open internet. Cooperative ownership and control aligns with a decentralised web, whilst investor-driven business models align with a centralising approach.
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