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In Web3, there is a lot of excitement about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs, which are an interesting analog to cooperatives. DAOs hold potential as an organizing framework for decentralized networks that promote ownership in terms of economics and governance (see . See this Ownership Economy essay from the Variant fund which invests in DAOs):
As the role of the individual in value creation becomes more commonplace, the next evolutionary step is towards software that is not only built, operated, and funded by individual users—but owned by users too.
Ownership, via employee stock option plans, has been a powerful tool for incentivizing talented people to dedicate their skills to building startups in Silicon Valley. While this model has been extremely successful, it hasn’t been accessible to all, constrained by geography and legacy financial infrastructure, among other factors. One result is that the economic interests of the biggest internet platforms are concentrated and often poorly aligned with their most valuable contributors, their users. Now, new technologies are shifting work and value distribution to be accessible online, resulting in a new generation of platforms that thrive on contributions from a permissionless and global talent pool.
Ownership is a powerful motivator for users to contribute to products in deeper ways, be it with ideas, computing resources, code, or community building. This more cooperative economic model helps ensure better alignment with users over time, resulting in platforms that can be larger, more resilient, and more innovative. This is the Ownership Economy, and beyond being a positive social endeavor, the platforms building it are able to leverage the strongest form of market incentives to grow network effects.
This is a interesting essay that charts this history of cooperatives til DAOs: Pre-History of DAOs:
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There is a related concept, “platform cooperativism” which puts forth a vision for worker owned online platforms like an Uber owned by its drivers rather than an extractive intermediary (see Drivers Cooperative).
Another flavor of this concept is a DisCO or Distributed Cooperative Organizations (examples here)
This is an accessible approach to people working together to create value in ways that are cooperative, commons-oriented and rooted in feminist economics. These values are nourished in small, federated communities. DisCOs harness the utility of tech without being completely tech-centric, emphasizing mutual trust and the need to have not only reliable but also enjoyable collaborative relationships. Distributed Ledger/ Blockchain technologies are only put to use when these values and their resulting human relationships have become strongly rooted.
One of the risks that is especially acute with crypto based communities is how are economic and governance rights established. Blindly relying on tokens financializes transactions and creates risk that users with more capital can dominate a network. We want a model where farmers who contribute content to the network are able to maintain their agency and providers of financial capital or developers cannot hijack the agenda at the detriment of farmers.
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