guild:

1. an organization of persons (PEERS) with related interests, goals, etc., especially one formed for mutual aid or protection.
2. any of various medieval associations, as of merchants or artisans, organized to maintain standards and to protect the interests of its members…

more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild

The main point on which I think guilds differ with David de Ugarte’s characteristics of phyles above is “1. In Phyles, Community precedes Enterprise”. In the case of guilds, community and enterprise are two sides of one coin. I think this fits well with p2p culture.

Dear Samer,

Lasindias.net, consider themselves a phyle, and so do I.

Here is how they describe their activities in relation to coops:

“”the main question is that the phyle is a distributed network of people formed from transnational deliberative process who develop an identity alternative to national identity and then build up an Economy for themselves.

So, Indiano’s phyle have coops (where we work), have associations, it takes part in foundations, have shares in limited companies and even in corporations… The only subject of property is the phyle as itself.

We could close tomorrow every company and invest the money in shares, and the phyle will still exist and be healthy. Coops, companies, associations, etc. are indeed different economic tools for us. Is the transnational community what is important.

For understanding the phyle is easy to imagine us as a «micro-country without territory» without the concept of «abroad» but with a kind of local economy.

The workers coop movement is international (national clusters, local identity etc.) but some few big coop groups (Mondragon) are becoming increasingly transnational (suffering a lot of ideological problems in the process btw).

Even we took part these year in the «National» Worker Cooperative Conference 2010 in USA [2] and we are members of both Spanish and Basque worker coop’s federation and we will associate to Uruguayian coop federation this year too, the fact is that the kind of problems of these territorial coops federations have is not very close to ours (the majority of them legal and state-centered, linked to a certain dependance of subsidies and public contracts, etc.)

We share more worries with Mondragon (intelligence, travel security, visas, need for transnational infraestructures, need for coordinating commercial and local development investments…).

So, we have very good relations with the intl coop movement in Spanish, Basque, Aymara and Portuguese languages. We have funded coops in four countries, from los Andes to the Cantabric Sea, and we work now with Mondragon in the development of the first transnational platform of intelligence and diplomacy services for cooperatives (but not only cooperatives). It will be officially funded in three weeks in Arrasate (the town known before as Mondragon.”
(p2presearch mailing list November 2010)

They also cite the Murides, a Sufi brotherhood of the Wolof people in Senegal, who you see selling “prada” bags and luxury watches on European beaches, as an example of an ethnic phyle, see http://p2pfoundation.net/Murides

More at http://p2pfoundation.net/Phyles

It’s a highly interesting discussion that includes much history of how international trade was established in the middle ages and how this might well be relevant to today’s business environment.

I find my own business is running in a way much more closely related to what de Ugarte calls a Phyle, rather than the traditional command-and-control structure most businesses follow today…

One important realization contained in the book: “We have to learn how not to grow”. The remark was made in response to the falling-apart of the Mondragon co-operatives after they were converted to businesses with a more “traditional” style of management.