Patterns for Cooperative Networks and Associations

Summary

Recently, we teamed up with CoLab Cooperative, a worker-owned digital agency building online infrastructure for the democratic economy (including thenextsystem.org!) for a research project to explore the many options for how cooperatives can grow and scale without letting go of key values around democratic participation and shared culture. As a rapidly growing distributed digital worker cooperative spanning three continents, CoLab felt  they were in uncharted territory, and reached out to our team to help create a map that could guide their future path towards bigger scale and bigger impact. In the spirit of movement generosity, they agreed to structure this project in a way that would allow much of the research to be contributed back to the commons—the result is below. [-john]