hankish

Lol, yes you're right I do. Don't have it yet though. :)

Awesome, I'm definitely down to talk. Sending you an email now. Also my LinkedIn is: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hankholiday

I think you're absolutely right that not everyone is equally employable right off the bat (though most folks can, with time and effort, become super valuable team members). It's very important to be up-front with that somewhat harsh reality and to bake that directly into your organizational design. When done correctly it becomes a benefit rather than a weakness.

Our group is 18 months in and going strong. However, the structure is based on a decade of thought work from some of the founding folks, so we've been very intentional with the design.

Some of the keys to our approach have been:

1. Our main focus is on "professional empowerment" (learning, networking, experience building, etc) not getting people paid work. We do happen to get people paid work, but we set the expectation up front that it's a network first and a consultancy second. We can guarantee professional growth but not necessarily immediate employment. Of course, the bigger the network grows & the more brand awareness we build, the easier it gets to staff people quickly.

2. We use gamified incentivization mechanics to recognize and reward anything that benefits the collective with actual cash and longterm passive income: mentoring/coaching, bringing in business, building internal tools, working on products we're incubating, etc.

3. We're very focused on membership diversity in terms of role type, career stage and interest. We've got members with full time roles who are only in the group to coach & mentor, long term consultants looking to staff juniors on projects, juniors looking to get their first experience, entrepreneurs looking to exchange mentorship for help with their startups, etc. There's a network effect that starts to kick in when there's enough different sorts of folks involved. That is absolutely critical to longterm success. But it also requires a lot of patience.

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As you say, this is definitely an extremely hard nut to crack. That's part of the reason why we're putting a lot of effort into developing the model and offering it to other community-centric organizations to incorporate into their own orgs. The more orgs which adopt these sorts of models, the more data we'll have on what works and what doesn't.

+1 for using marketplace dynamics, particularly when you want groups to be able to grow to be quite large. (For small groups they are overkill and potentially harmful.)

This can be done without involving anything crypto related too. A great design principle to incorporate is Stigmergy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy

To be clear though: Just because folks talk about using "markets" doesn't mean those marketplaces have to be built around "currencies" as we typically imagine them (crypto currencies included). They can be built around anything that can be counted or conceptualized numerically. For instance, HN / reddit votes are a type of stigmergic marketplace.

When designed effectively, markets can be massively scalable engines for human consensus.

This is admittedly a complex subject to boil down into HN replies. And I do not claim to have all of the answers. But here's an attempt to share some parts of the vision.

There's nothing wrong with voting as a concept.

But most organizations implement voting such that it happens fairly infrequently on somewhat complex proposals which are fully understood by few and have been heavily guided by leadership. Those proposals tend to be necessarily high-level since voting on all of the little details is impractical. As such, the overall "choice bandwidth" of these traditional voting paradigms are quite low. Also the level of thoughtfulness, engagement, and participation are often low as well (ask anyone who's been involved in an old school coop and they'll confirm this). Also these paradigms are not very agile and do not adapt well to projects which evolve and change over time.

There are lots of potential solutions, but the high level guiding principle is to design structures which are able to support and incentivize more choices being made more thoughtfully by more people more frequently.

So, governance which functions more like a (well-designed) video game and less like a city council meeting.

At Quorum1 we focus very heavily on using stigmergy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy) as a design principle. The idea is to use internal marketplace structures to (a) gamify the process of building consensus and (b) break what could be large/episodic/top-down/waterfall/boolean decision making processes into smaller more spectrum-based decisions. So instead of voting Yes/No on a big proposal and going with whatever got 51%, you run a participatory budgeting process to simultaneously fund multiple potential solutions which then evolve and cross-pollinate until consensus emerges over time.

The strategy is to encourage ongoing experimentation and continuous decision-making able to adapt and evolve as new information comes in over time.

If laid off folks are looking for work or side projects, we've got a collective you can join. Based in SF but with members from all around the world.

More info here: https://wiki.quorum.one/join

What a brilliant idea! Me and a bunch of other folks have been working for the last 18 months to create just such a professional collective, with the goal of expanding it massively. Lots of laid off workers are joining and everything is cooperatively-managed, self-organizing and transparent.

It's a combination of a professional network, a full service consultancy, a skills academy, and a startup incubator. We've got 105 members at the moment and are growing every day.

We've got more info here if you're interested >> https://wiki.quorum.one/blog/what-is-quorum1

Yep, this is definitely happening, I'm part of one such group. There's a whole community of decentralized worker collectives working on doing the hard work of getting these models to function.

It's not a pipe dream! We've got a collective structured in exactly this manner with over 100 people, growing by ~1 person per day and things are going great! Join us and see, if you're interested. :)

My org is starting with B2B SaaS products. If you can move these into a cooperatively managed framework you drive long term value while also building networks with successful businesses. It's a major opportunity because so many B2B SaaS platforms are super overpriced. The client companies are basically overpaying in order to pay back the VC investors. If you start out without any of that overhead you can offer a completely different funding model.

Loomio is a great tool. It works great for certain types of things but I've struggled to really build an effective worker community with it multiple times. At the end of the day, voting on proposals is not a terribly effective nor scalable form of democratic governance.

We're actually doing it right now at Quorum1, fwiw. It has been hard, but it's working. Maybe join us and help make it work even better? >> https://wiki.quorum.one/blog/what-is-quorum1

The coop that I'm a part of (Quorum1) has been using game theory to play out just those scenarios. We've been at it for two years and you're right it's been like 10x as difficult as starting a normal company (I'm a serial entrepreneur and have started lots of traditional companies too). But we think the payoff is worth it, plus doing things differently is just straight up more fun, so there's that.

What we're finding is that if you start with the right culture and balance the incentives very carefully you can basically create a magnet-like mechanism where the more people join the network/coop, the greater the value derived for all members and the greater the opportunity cost for the remaining hold outs to not join.

I'm one of the current participants.

If you have questions on the application process you can send me an email at [email protected]

I was very skeptical as well and applied almost as a lark. When we were accepted I was completely shocked. As others have said, they do NOT take any equity and they ask very very little of you while you're down here. Plus you are given tons of free resources to help you meet your goals. The "catch" is that you have to pick up your life and move to Chile for 6 months. For some this is very easy, but for most (myself included) it is more logistically challenging than one would assume.

The important thing to remember is that the Chilean government is not doing this for job creation or direct financial return (their economy is strong), they are doing it to build out an international network and to encourage their own entrepreneurs to think more globally and take bigger risks. If you look at what they're spending ($10M to $50M USD) versus what they're getting, it starts to make more sense.

That's interesting... I am one of the participants in the program and I can tell you that you definitely do not have to incorporate in Chile OR hire any Chileans. They're doing this to build an international network, not to produce jobs directly (their economy is doing quite well at the moment). They do want you to go to events, but the events are very valuable. We are treated as guests of the government... it's an amazing opportunity. Feel free to email me if you have any questions. - Hank, [email protected]