Ben's Manifesto
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## Introduction

I think about my personal interest in taking part in this worker cooperative as a self-serving desire to do work on things that are important to me, and that feel right to me... so I can spend less time fighting problems that just happen to have landed on me, or building things with consequences I am not completely comfortable with. Obviously one way to have this sort of autonomy is to work independently, but independent work through grants or contracts come with resiliency challenges and in the end I am still forced to participate in work incentivized largely through market forces. Worker cooperative as a mechanism to build resilency and solidarity through a sustainable institution, that has capacity to take on significant intiatives and participate in a larger social movement to create new ecosystems of livelihood, prioritizing personal growth rather than capital growth, that is the type of organizing I'd like to commit my time to.

## Mission & Vision

>Who do you think the co-op should serve?

I think the cooperative should serve its members, and through that the people who formally or informally align with our values.

>What exactly does the co-op serve?

The cooperative is the aggregate of its people and their specializations. The role of the institution is simply to provide opportunities to its membership.

It recognizes diverse talents, creates space for skill development, facilitates opportunities for commons-based peer production, serves as a legal entity to interface with external parties, and offers mutual solidarity in times of hardship.

>How do you think the co-op should serve them?

I will share a quote from the readings: "The whole structure of co-operative enterprise is designed around the concept of capital being in service of people and labour, not labour and people being in servitude to capital."

Starting with "people" over "capital", and not treating people as a mean to a capital end, the cooperative will offer opportunities for people to self-identify and contribute to tasks, rather than have an employment process that slots people into the market demand at the time. The cooperative should experiment with this type of commons-based peer production as a mechanism to produce meaningful products while prioritizing personal growth of its membership.

>What does successful cooperation mean to you?

Members are actively engaged in informed democracy that tries to establish consense rather than simply settling on a voted majority. We can employ many new technologies to facilitate this process, in various stages of decision making. Members need to be committed and have effective processes to ensure delivery of whatever we decided to cooperate on.

>Why does the establishment of the cooperative matter to you?

Basically what I said in the beginning, plus personal hopes and dreams that the larger social movement will lead us towards sustainable societies of the future.

>What might a collaborative ecosystem (perhaps a network of solidarity) look like?

Participants of the collaborative ecosystem need to be aware of dependencies and move towards fulfilling such needs from our commons-based solidarity networks. Therefore, we must evolve internal processes to meaningfully support important initiatives, within or outside of our cooperative. Starting with establishing shared ethos, and building processes to enable near-zero cost copy products... this will enable infrastructural sovereignty at the edges.

## Values

### Self-agency / Self-determination / Interdependent abundance

- Do meaningful work, don't do meaningless work

### Solidarity

- Network solidarity to enable personal balance
- Organizational resiliency and sustainability through solidarity networks

### Knowledge

- Multi-faceted: Learning, teaching, decentralizing, tinkering, etc.
- Biases: Am I biased in the development of this knowledge and how can I mitigate that?
- Responsibility to share: Document extensively, ensure this other person is aware, plan capacity to teach, etc.

### Justice

- Aware of who we are extracting from and avoid exploitative practices
- Have open discussions about topics relating to justice in our work

### Structured Chaos

- Ability to embrace and progress through chaos... I think that is fundamental
- Opportunities to explore and create spontaneous disasters in a containerized way
- Must be controlled and overall productive

## Conclusion

I want to emphasize that we are embedded in an environment that disproportionately prioritizes capital over people. In addition to being a participant to that ecosystem, I hope we recognize cooperatives and commons-based economies is tightly coupled with the larger social movement, and that we have aspirations to create new economies from this.