Posts

In recent years, I have struggled to call myself an advocate for those with cerebral palsy. I’ve struggled to understand what that means both online and offline in the disability community. What do I advocate for? Whom do I advocate for? While attempting to answer these questions, I’ve come to...

Part of the appeal in being a worker on new gig-economy platforms like Uber or Taskrabbit is the apparent autonomy, the feeling of not having a boss. Sure, an app on your phone is your new boss, and through it a large, transnational corporation whose investors want nothing more than...

The following is a lightly edited email exchange I had with Bimo Ario Suryandaru, CEO of KOSAKTI, a cooperative in Indonesia. He and his team are developing an interesting approach that I was grateful to learn about, and I thought others might be, too. See their slide deck here ...

I frequently encounter a notion, among those drawn to cooperatives, that a cooperative should be an amorphous, faceless collective in which old-world skills and norms of leadership can be discarded. How does this work out for them? Not well. Usually one of two entirely predictable things happens as a result—and...

The law, perhaps by definition, lags behind people working for social change. I certainly found this over and over in the next-generation cooperative projects I profiled in Everything for Everyone . One co-op in Catalonia was, legally, a mishmash of entities that presented themselves as if they were a coherent...

Those of us looking to shape our enterprises with methods for collective governance and shared ownership are led to ask: What can collective governance look like? What shape does that take? What are some of the challenges and freedoms presented in this model? We spoke with several cooperative-minded experts who...

I work in a startup town, the rare kind of place where you can trip over veteran founders, with multiple exits behind then, on the sidewalk. By “exits,” I mean the end-goal of most tech-oriented startups—the moment when the startup is sold, either to a bigger company or, more rarely,...