Co-op Governance - Rules & Culture

I think Bob's comment about the rules being ignored until there is an issue, and most co-op rules being "dry as dust alienating set of legalspeak rules" is the core issue with making co-ops as accessible and prevalent as Ltd Cos. How can we expect people, in today's busy world, to wade through and struggle with rules like that? Surely a better approach, to encourage more co-ops to form and members of existing co-ops to know, follow and derive value from their co-ops' rules, would be to have such a short and simple set of rules that any member could articulate them?

thank you emma for the eccoop rules. a lot of work went into that. i hope they do the job. still an awful lot of words to get through tho.

The difficulty with that is short simple Rules don't cover the ground. If you read through the Co-operatives UK models or the Radical Routes models which were written with a view to being easily understood, then you'll see that each clause covers a particular element of the running of an organisation - membership, meetings, distribution of surplus etc. and dispensing with it would cause trouble down the line. Whilst there no doubt remains a small opportunity to make these documents even more easy to read, I believe that most of the people who claim that they are unintelligible or obscure, have not actually read them.

The problem here is that governing documents and associated policies (and just about any strategic document) are put in the drawer with the dust, not that they in themselves are dry as dust.

Acknowledging that there is a cultural barrier and an issue around accessibility, I'm particularly interested in the work of Equal Care Co-operative in seeking to make such documents living, breathing elements of co-op democracy, drawing on the work people are doing to create "visual contracts" that are easy to understand and accessible.

the lite version is not too bad tho - i just read the whole thing in about 5 mins :) it is great work

We'll re-visit the original rules once we have a bigger membership - I think it's good to distinguish between 'clauses for a rainy day' and 'clauses for the day-to-day'. The latter is practical info, the former is there to manage the problems. I mean, who reads their organisations grievance and disciplinary policy in detail when they're not in trouble?! Who reads the maternity policy when there's no baby on the horizon?

A bit like having an operators manual and separate troubleshooting guide.

Simon - I could not agree with you more. Commons have always been with us but they are under full frontal assault again and co-operators and most resistance movements are working and fighting to save them on isolated fronts. When the machine breaks down every 40 years or so, a new pushback rediscovers the perennial vision of co-op commonwealth and work to bring the economic democracy fragments together. But between times the counter movement plot is lost by the allure of commodity fetishism. Human tragedy but the solidarity economy movement, the women's liberation movement, a renewed trade union movement, the re-emerging commons movement can and should find common cause if a social and ecological new economy can be forged. In the past a focus on economic democracy in four dimensions provided firm foundations - namely democracy at work, land reform to take land out of the market, common ownership struggles to covert spears into plough shares and struggles to replace debt based money with something like social credit (Owenites had their interest free labour notes, and Proudhon set up the Peoples Bank, Gesell developed negative interest co-op money to improve on where Labour notes and the Peoples Bank had defects). We should learn from and reclaim these co-op commonwealth making thinkers and practitioners. It is again breaking out now but not yet well interconnected.

which is why i now concentrate on communications and people talking to each other. its really that simple, back to basics, but in practice its more difficult getting members to talk to each other in an open and honest way than to get them to interact with legalspeak rules (and not really communicate with each other).defining the rules becomes a displacement activity to avoid talking!
ayayayayay! humans are complex.

I did actually send you an email last year Pat, July 23rd asking if you thought an alternative currency could perhaps be backed by community assets, in other words, commons. I guess it slipped through your net.

Our debt-based monetary system was entirely designed to drive as you describe it 'commodity fetishism'. Very intoxicating when going well & a large middle class is included. Again as you say, not so appealing when the 'machine' starts to break down, as it inevitably must, especially in the face of finite resources from one very small potentially already fatally damaged planet.
The tragedy is if this process is cyclical on a 40 year basis then we really are in trouble. There simply is no time for yet another failed or limited success push back. That's the very bad news. The good news is never have so many people understood this, with many more joining them every day

The challenge is how do enough of us get off the hamster's wheel. Isolated opt out eco-villages are not an answer, even for those who choose that route. We cannot run away from this one.
My business I like to think addresses a lot of these challenges. I'd love to discuss it with you, maybe by skype some time, especially if it involved an answer to my question. I'm sure the Bank of England will object, & very likely move to shut it down. If I ever get that far I'm hoping awareness will make it very difficult for them to justify themselves. Solidarity could stand up to them. At some point it must.