Jonny Gordon-Farleigh: Stocksy United is a stock photography multistakeholder co-operative launched in 2013. This was a return to the sector after having been part of iStock, another stock photography provider. You initially considered setting up a trust, but opted for the co-operative model instead. Could you explain the decision to set up a co-operative?

Brianna Wettlaufer: After coming back into the sector, our goal was to put power back into the hands of artists. It was about giving people the control over their careers that had been lost at companies who were bullying them, where they had no rights over how their images were being sold, and were seeing their revenues clawed back. It was about the whole question of artistic integrity, which is an offshoot of the health of the community. Our goal was to bring that back into the fold, which existed in the early days of iStock but, as it scaled and was bought by Getty Images, was lost as priorities changed.

So knowing that we wanted to do that, we looked at nonprofits and a series of other business models. But at the end of the day, the co-operative model answered all of the questions. And with the legal background to ensure that we made these things happen, it wasn’t a long period of time for us to realise that it was the solution for our organisation. I think as Canadians we are more culturally aware of the model and Canadian laws are a bit easier to adapt for an online tech company.

JGF: Your co-operative has three membership classes: founders, staff and artists. What rights do these individual classes have within a multistakeholder co-op?

BW:  Class A is founders, and also our advisors. This class is a maximum of five people, and right now we have three people. Their purpose is high-level business operations. Class B is staff, capped at 20 presently, with all positions filled.

JGF: Why are they capped?

Nuno Silva: It was determined by the original by-laws. When we were deciding on how many shares to issue for each class, we had to put a number to it. So when we first started, 20 seemed like a reasonable number.

BW: Honestly, there is not much difference between the rights of each class, basically the class indicates the level at which they are giving guidance to the organisation. 90% of the dividends is awarded to Class C, and 5% goes to Class A and Class B. Currently, it is divided equally. It is pretty simple. Overall, it is pretty simple in terms of our governance.

Class A, currently, is Bruce Livingstone, a co-founder, Brent Nelson, another co-founder. Many of us have worked together as experts in our domain for a really long time. In terms of governance for the company, it is a very close collaboration. There are not many gaps or surprises, where people are having to do resolutions to correct the course that we’re on. We want to make sure everyone is being heard in the company, so everyone feels good about the decisions we’re making, having additional governance laws or different laws about participation, doesn’t make any sense as it just creates more bureaucracy, which we are working really hard to avoid as we scale.

JGF: Multistakeholder models are becoming more popular, but more stakeholders means more governance costs, potential delays, and difficulties. How do you manage stakeholder participation so that it is both meaningful and also allows you to remain competitive?

BW: It has definitely been a process, and we’re still trying to find the right balance. We take the ethos of being a co-operative very seriously—empowering everyone from the inside out and ensuring that we’re being transparent and collaborative. But when you take that to too much of an extreme, not only is not functional, it is not enjoyable for the people in the organisation. We’ve found that it is one thing to empower people in what they’re doing, and another thing to expect everyone to operate at an executive level and carry around the stress that comes with that position—to be expected to come up with ideas and solutions, when it is not what they are particularly interested in doing.

There is nothing wrong with people focusing on their jobs, or particular areas. So our goal is that those within the organisation can provide enough research and information to justify the decisions we make for the business, so we’re transparent as possible, identifying why and what we’re doing, and the reasons for the solutions we propose.

So moving forward that’s the platform we want, constantly asking the membership if there is anything we missed, then integrating their feedback. Our priority is maintaining an open conversation, but not so democratic that it is not functional across the different skillsets of how we lead the company, or being blocked by a vote-by-committee approach We keep everyone involved, and by doing that, if there is a difference of opinion, it builds this constant trust between those involved. As we scale, we’re trying to figure out how to make these conversations more meaningful again, trying to segment the groups we’re engaging, the process of how we bring out new features on our website, and how we bring people into the testing process to support its refinement and adaptation.

NS: One advantage of having artists as co-owners means we can be really transparent. We don’t have to hide information from our members, we can release financial data, we can talk about confidential contract negotiations, we can get them involved from very early stages, open the books to them so they can have educated and informed responses. Whereas, if were a private company we would be much more guarded about the information we share with the artists. Thankfully we don’t have to do this.

Illustration by Nick Taylor

JGF: A private company’s executives have the right to sell the company. Within your co-op, what control and rights does Class C have over a possible future sale?

BW: For us to move forward with a sale, it would have to go through a resolution process and be agreed on by the members. Full Stop.

You spoke about your background in the private sector. How much has it informed and enabled the business development of your co-op?

BW:  We are really lucky with the team that started Stocksy, bringing around 15 years experience in specialised areas. We had the developer who originally built iStock, we have marketing experience, and business development. All of us share the experience of knowing how to grow companies in the private sector into profitable companies, but all of us want to do that with about being horrible, or evil, and selling people out. I think that’s a big reason why we’ve been able to get traction so far, is that experience, but using it to support people.

JGF: You’ve said that being a co-op is a secondary, if not tertiary, reason why photographers apply to become members of Stocksy. This obviously means that Stocksy has developed a financially rewarding business model. But beyond better remuneration, what other advantages are there to being a member of the co-op for your photographers?

BW: I think as a whole, people want to work with companies that they can believe in, and feel good about working with. So that’s being able to trust the company we’re working with, its having access to ownership and opportunities for collaboration, knowing how the business runs. For artists it is knowing that they will also be treated as people, as individuals, that is really important. Second to that, the health of our community, and the inspiration and mentorship that follows from it. It is that we are always looking to create the best work we possibly can, which can sometimes be demotivating: ‘I can’t hit this bar, it is too high’, but when you hit it, you are really happy and you are doing it with a group of people who are likeminded and wanting to do great things. Basically, all the healthy things you look for in a career.

JGF: Do you think the quality of the community within the co-operative has enhanced the business?

BW: Definitely. I’ve been working with companies for the last 15 years where the underpinning of the product is the community. But 15 years ago, as Friendster and Facebook were just getting traction, there wasn’t value in communities, there was value in address books. But the approach or attitude towards communities was that they were just a lot to manage, an annoyance almost.

I came out of the community to work at iStock, so I’ve been on the other side. If you don’t have a healthy community working with you, you don’t have a product. And you have a PR nightmare!

JGF: Voting rights are an important part of workplace democracy, and you’ve developed your own platform for members to discuss and vote on proposals. With Loomio now being used by city governments and other institutions, tools that enable distributed group voting are obviously becoming more important. What is your experience of working with a distributed virtual membership and how might it inform others working on these scales?

BW: I don’t think we’ve nailed it yet, and there is still a long way to go. Our platform is still the same as the day we launched, it is very basic but following that, I wouldn’t worry too much about the quality of the tools you are using, as long as they do the things you need: a place for people to talk, a place for your co-op to distribute information, to participate and vote on the direction of the business. Overall, we’ve relied less on the resolution and voting features, despite taking the time to custom build one, because we spend a lot of time in the forums talking to people. Since we’re having a constant conversation with members and doing our best, any business move we suggest that affects them financially or the direction of the business, we ensure we educate members about why we’re proposing it. The resolution and voting tool doesn’t actually need to be there if you’re listening to members on a daily basis and integrating it into your decisions.

You can spend way too much time and money trying to make the perfect tool, when it is really about the quality of conversation on whatever platform you decide to use.

NS: We explored lots of third-party software, like Loomio, and while it is a great product, it had a lot of features that we just didn’t need. In our baked-in product, the product we developed, coupled with our forums, it was good enough for the immediate problems we were trying to solve. If we decide to make it more complicated, we might look elsewhere, but as Brianna said, having open conversations on a simple platform has been the most effective.

JGF: What have been the most challenging proposals?

BW: The membership cap. And we still don’t have a solution here. We proposed creating a non-membership class, but even though it had a majority vote, after going to many co-operative events, we were told it was a very frequent mistake being made by co-ops, as you’re introducing classes for how to treat people, and is the antithesis of being a co-operative. So we had to go back to the membership and say, we thought this might be the answer, but this is often what seems like an easy solution, it is not, and we don’t think we should move forward with this proposal. And it is not sure what we should do next.

NS It was hotly debated within the community, from both sides. And we did have a majority vote as Brianna says, but it wasn’t unanimous, and there were many people who were very vocal against the proposal, so it gave us pause to consider that there might be a better way to approach the issue and a new vote to be considered.

JGF: How many proposal come from each class? Is there a good mix?

BW: No! No resolutions have come out of Class A. With Class B there have been some exploratory things of crossover in multiple classes, that they’ve had to put to a proposal. But in terms of direction of the company, they’re coming from Class C. Last year, I think we had about 20 proposals.

We’ve tried to make the resolution process work for us, too. At one point we brought in some external advisors who were trained in Italy. They reviewed all of the resolutions and rejected them all—these aren’t resolutions. That was horrible for the community. So if all of our resolutions are not meeting a resolution expectation, then we need to adapt how we’re receiving this feedback, so we’ve created three classes of resolutions. One is site suggestions and improvements to what we’re doing—this doesn’t require a resolution, just consultation with our product owner.  Two is an idea for discussion. One thing we observed with many resolutions were that they mainly solutions without identifying what they were trying to solve. Great idea, but we need to know why we’re doing it. Three is an actual resolution, the biggest one coming from the membership is video and that being approved.

JGF: Stocksy is one of the success stories of the Platform Co-op movement—you’ve been able to raise significant finance, and are now profitable. What do you think is needed within the sector for co-operatives to increase their market presence in the digital economy?

NS: A great product! One thing I took away from Open 2017 is that most organisations were co-ops first, and products or businesses second. I think we are fortunate for having a very strong product vision from the very beginning, and that the co-op structure worked for our business model. So someone looking to start a co-op needs to have a really good product or business plan first, then make sure that the co-operative model fits that secondarily. If you have no product, then it just becomes ideological and you lack a viable product.

Speaking to Nathan Schneider or Trebor Scholz, you learn that there are companies doing some amazing things, like Green Taxis in Denver, Colorado, who found a need and a business model that fit.

JGF: There are many well-known artist co-operatives, such as Magnum Photos and Pentagram, though they are not actively part of the movement. Is supporting new creative digital agencies to set up as co-operatives part of Stocky’s strategy for the future? And supporting the broader platform co-op movement?

BW: I don’t think our goal is to support competitors! We definitely get a lot of reach outs from other organisations about how to do profit sharing with people they are working with. Anything we can do to share knowledge, tell people about the stumbles and mistakes we’ve made, exploring the assumptions of being a platform co-op, since there are not many examples out there, it’s an incredibly important part of what we’re doing, supporting the platform community. At the end of the day, coming back to the previous question, I think it is about making it more easily understandable and accessible, I think there are many false assumptions that make people think co-ops are more complex and challenging than they actually are, when really it is only a way to approach business. It is not like it is some crazy, different way of doing business, it is just a commitment to investing in your people upfront, instead of having lots of resources to respond to an angry community that is misaligned with your product—which is what private business end up doing.

Brianna Wettlaufer is the co-founder and CEO and Nuno Silva is Vice President of Product at Stocksy United, an artist-owned, multistakeholder co-operative in Victoria, BC (Canada). With its stable of hand-picked photographers, Stocksy produces high-end and beautiful imagery.

Reposted from STIR Magazine

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The ELC develops affordable, residential smallholdings to new entrants to ecological agriculture. Their approach aims to overcome two key barriers: high land prices and planning permission.

The ELC is a membership organisation: on joining, members become part of the group of people who collectively own the Co-operative and decide how it should be run.

It is a multi-stakeholder co-operative with three types of membership each of which share a proportion of voting rights:

• Investor Members have invested money in the Co-operative, share 25% of voting rights and receive returns on their investment.
• Worker Members are those people that work for the Co-operative. Like Investor Members, they also share 25% of voting rights. Worker Members are employees and volunteers that work at least 15 days each year.
• Steward Members are ecological land managers and share the remaining 50% of voting rights. Voting rights were awarded primarily to Steward Members as they are the principal beneficiaries but often do not have the time to both run their smallholding and serve on the Board of Directors. This category of membership was designed principally for the Co-operative’s smallholders but can be applied for by qualified ecological land users who do not farm one of our smallholdings.

We hear from some of the ELC’s members on what they think of the multi-stakeholder model.

Stewards (Paul Antonelli)

On the basis that the more sustainable something is the better, evaluating the multi-stakeholder co-ops against Permaculture principles gives some idea of its benefits over other models.

Good ones to start with are ‘Integrate rather than segregate’ and ‘Use and Value Diversity’ as they are obvious features of the multi-stakeholder model. ‘Apply Self-regulation and Accept Feedback’ comes out of these as there is a built-in value to co-operation where stakeholders can negotiate between themselves for mutual benefit. Stakeholder’s different perspectives also helps the group apply with the principle of ‘Observe and Interact’ with a broader perspective of internal and external patterns of activity and tending towards ‘Design from Patterns to Details’ around co-operative activities.

In terms of social networks ‘Use Edges and Value the Marginal’ is improved by the diversity of stakeholder group’s edges and connections to other networks and especially within social activist settings with those in the margins and edges of mainstream culture.

At a practical level ‘Use Small and Slow Solutions’ may emerge as a natural approach to problem solving in a large long-term group. Where 3/6 R thinking about waste is applied, again the diversity and extended edge of the multi-stakeholder group helps towards ‘Produce no waste’ and similarly ‘Catch and Store Energy’, in the sense that energy and resources can be circulate around stakeholders before leaving the co-op.

That leaves ‘Obtain a Yield’, ‘Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services’ and ‘Creatively Use and Respond to Change’.

Investors (Paul Lovatt Smith and Helen Webster)

We have been lucky enough to be able to afford to buy our own smallholding which we have owned and run for 15 years. We wanted to support other people, particularly young people, to do the same. This is partly for selfish reasons – we would like more smallholding neighbours – and partly because we think that smallholdings are environmentally, socially and economically beneficial. We know and have met many would-be smallholders who cannot afford to buy a residential smallholding. The affordability gap is particularly large in our area (southeast England) and the default solution has been to purchase land, set up and apply for planning permission retrospectively – a stressful, risky, and very lengthy process. The ELC’s model provides a great solution to this problem by getting planning permission first, in exchange for environmental and financial commitments. It also brings to the table the apparently growing number of people like us who want to invest in such projects. The other part of the equation is the fact that the people who run ELC are committed and trustworthy and a great deal of thought and effort has gone into making the procedures and policies fair and transparent for both investors and smallholders. The model works – as proven by Greenham Reach – and we are looking forward to similar success in Arlington and other projects.

Investors (Jessie Marcham)

I’m really proud to be an investor member of the ELC. I know that I’m helping to make land available to small-scale ecological farmers and growers in a really new and radical way. But I’m also aware that investor members like me are only part of the picture. None of this would be happening at all without the vision and hard work of the staff team at ELC, or, indeed, the courage and determination of the tenant farmers themselves. So it seems appropriate, and in fact, absolutely essential, that all these different perspectives and interests are fully represented through the organisation. I couldn’t profess to fully understand the complexities of voting shares and rights of the different stakeholders, but it feels reassuring to know that decisions are informed by the knowledge, insights and concerns of individuals with different experiences and differing relationships to the co-operative. It’s good to know that this vital project can’t be taken over by any one particular interest, isn’t about being a generous benefactor or a distant shareholder.  Rather, we are working collaboratively to create a new version of land ownership and sustainable agriculture which serves us all.

Directors (Alex Lawrie)

My interest in multi-stakeholder co-operatives began with the realisation that the people who could invest in a co-operative enterprise might not be the same people it was set up to benefit – in fact, if the co-op wanted to empower the poorest in our society they would almost always be different people. Shares are a popular vehicle for investment for a good reason; they are ‘full risk’, with shareholders protecting their investment by being able to vote down rules changes that would defeat the original intent behind the investment. But shares are also the right mechanism to empower the users and beneficiaries of co-ops: the answer had to involve distinctly different types of shares that gave investors a veto on major changes, but left to day-to-day control firmly in the hands of the ‘user members’.

That led to us writing the ‘Somerset Rules’ which were adopted first by GO-OP and the Ecological Land Co-op, but later by over thirty co-ops providing housing, food, IT solutions, and energy. They are developing in diverse ways, but some interesting things are becoming clear: there is little conflict between stakeholder groups, as the clear boundaries and allocations send a clear message about what they can reasonably expect. There is strong support from social investors, who are reassured that people whose interests are well aligned with the business have effective control of it. And empowering roles are often created for potential co-operators who have not even heard of the co-op, ready for them to inhabit when the time is right.

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John Restakis

John Restakis: Historically, cooperatives have been primarily focused around providing support and service to the members. Cooperatives, which are basically a democratic and collective form of enterprise where members have control rights and democratically direct the operations of the co-op, have been the primary stakeholders in any given co-op – whether it’s a consumer co-op, or a credit union, or a worker co-op. That has been the traditional form of cooperatives for a long time now. Primarily, the co-op is in the service of its immediate members. That has changed over the last 15 years or so, particularly in the field of the provision of social care.

Social co-ops emerged in the late 70s in Italy as a response to a market failure within public services in Italy. Groups of families or users of social services, primarily originally from within a community of people with disabilities, decided to organize cooperatives as a better way of designing and providing services to themselves. This is a very different model from the state-delivered services to these people. What was really fascinating about the social co-ops was that, although they had members, their mission was not only to serve the members but also to provide service to the broader community. And so, they were communitarian, community service organizations that had a membership base of primary users of that service, whether it was healthcare, or help for people with drug addictions, or whatever.

These social co-ops have now exploded in Italy. I think they have taken over, in a sense, the provision of social care services in many communities under contracts to local municipalities. In the city of Bologna, for example, over 87% of the social services provided in that city are provided through contract with social co-ops. These are democratically run organizations, which is a very different model, much more participatory, and a much more engaged model of designing social care than the traditional state delivered services. The idea of co-ops as being primarily of interest in serving their own immediate membership has been expanded to include a mandate for the provision of service to the community as a whole.

This is an expansion of this notion of cooperatives into a more commons-based kind of mission, which overlaps with the philosophy and values of commons movement. The difference, however, is that the structure of social co-ops is still very much around control rights, in other words, members have rights of control and decision-making within how that organization operates. And it is an incorporated legal structure that has formal recognition by the legislation of government of the state, and it has the power, through this incorporated power, to negotiate with and contract with government for the provision of these public services. One of the real strengths of the cooperative form is that it not only provides a democratic structure for the enterprise – be it a commercial or social enterprise – but it also has a legal form that allows it to enter into contract and negotiate legal agreements with the state for the provision of public services. This model of co-op for social care has been growing in Europe. In Québec they’re called Solidarity co-ops, and they are generating an increasing portion of market share for the provision of services like home care and healthcare, and it’s also growing in Europe.

So, the social economy, meaning organizations that have a mutual aim in their purpose, based on the principles of reciprocity, collective benefit, social benefit, is emerging as an important player for the design and delivery of public services. This, too, is in reaction to the failure of the public market for provision of services like affordable housing or health care or education services. This is a crisis in the role of the state as a provider of public services. So the question has emerged: what happens when the state fails to provide or fulfill its mandate as a provider or steward of public goods and services, and what’s the role of civil society and the social economy in response? Social co-ops have been part of this tide of reaction and reinvention, in terms of civic solutions to what were previously state-designed and delivered public goods and services. So I’ll leave it at that for the moment, but it’s just an indicator of the very interesting ways in which the co-op form is being reimagined and reinvented to respond to this crisis of public services and the changing role of the state.

Read the full trialogue here

Photo by OiMax

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Launched last December, AnyShare is a complete cooperative in that it allows multiple stakeholder groups to become members, vote, participate in decision-making processes, and receive profits. The stakeholders in the AnyShare Cooperative are founders, investors, employees, and community members. All receive dividends and a vote in the annual general meeting. A fifth stakeholder — the environment — receives dividends and a board position.

We talked to Eric Doriean, co-founder and operations chief, about AnyShare’s journey to become a FairShares platform cooperative.

Darren Sharp: How was AnyShare set up?

Eric Dorien: AnyShare was formed after a multi-year collaboration between its co-founders, Rob Jameson, Alison Gianotto, David Linnard, and myself, to find ways to unlock the abundant value that exists in our communities.

Our journey began with building an online platform called Mass Mosaic. The idea behind Mass Mosaic was to gather the needs and resources of as many people as possible and to create matches between them. The site grew to 15,000 users, but never had the critical mass to make diverse matches possible and truly unlock the abundance around us. We did find, however, that the groups on Mass Mosaic did work, as critical mass wasn’t needed for their success. It was with this knowledge that we refocused our efforts to build software to empower groups and communities. Late last year, AnyShare was launched and you can now start a free trial of the software on our website.

Long before meeting my beloved co-founders, I was fortunate enough to be an early employee of an internet start-up. In my time there, the business grew, and we listed through an IPO. It was then when my eyes started to open to the problems with unfettered growth and profits for shareholders being the only goal.

As time went on, I continued to learn about the extractive nature of business as usual and was attracted to the cooperative model. There were issues with cooperatives, in raising capital and not sharing the decision-making and value created with all the stakeholders that a technology-oriented business would impact. I began to imagine a hybrid cooperative that would create a business structure that would appease what had become a long list of requirements for me.

This is when I came across the FairShares Multi-Stakeholder Cooperative model. The FairShares model has four default stakeholder groups: founders, investors, labor, and customers. For our cooperative, the labor stakeholder group became the employee class and the customer stakeholder group, became the community class. It took a lot of time and effort from both our team and the FairShares team, but we are now very proud to be the first U.S.-based and technology focused FairShares enterprise.

What are the steps you went through to set up your organizational structure?

The first step in our transition to becoming a cooperative was for the co-founders to agree it was the right action to take. I had discussed the possibility of a multi-stakeholder cooperative with my co-founders at different occasions and educated them on what I had learned over many years for why they were necessary.

This was before Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider coined the phrase Platform Cooperative and sparked the movement behind it. So it did take time for the others to understand the need for it, as it was a foreign concept to traditional start-ups.

When I came across FairShares, from one line in the Commons Transition ebook from Michel Bauwens and co., it was the final piece of the puzzle for the co-founders to agree it was the right move forward. FairShares being an external third party with a highly evolved model, legitimized the idea. Then came the work to make it happen.

FairShares has default bylaws, which needed to be updated to include what we knew was necessary from our experiences in growing high tech businesses. As this was the first time being done in the U.S., we also had to investigate that everything within the bylaws was able to be done legally. It took as nearly a year to get these pieces in place. It all took much longer because we were the first to do it.

Our existing bylaws as a Delaware C Corp, required director approval to enact the new bylaws. A board meeting was called and after the affirmative vote to change them, I have to admit I felt a real sense of achievement. This was an important milestone, but then the real work began to build a business that achieved our mission and become a beacon of light of how to run fairer companies in the future.

Why did you choose the FairShares multi-stakeholder co-operative model?

My personal experience in business had taught me the need for raising capital. Traditional cooperatives are usually limited to members founding capital or finances raised through a loan of some sort. Unfortunately, there are too many stories of cooperatives being under capitalized, especially in their early days and failing before they get to a stage where the benefits of a Cooperative help them thrive. This is solved by the investor stakeholder group within FairShares, which allows raising capital through investment, whilst still embracing the cooperative principles.

Most cooperatives members are either workers or customers. We wanted both of these groups in our business to be part of the cooperative. The employee and community stakeholder classes in our cooperative allow us to do just that.

One of the principles of the FairShares model is to license intellectual property under a Creative Commons license. We added a clause that allowed us to release software under the open-source license of our choosing. This allows us to contribute to the global commons, whilst building a profitable business. It is something we hope to see become the gold standard for profit-making ventures.

The experience FairShares Association has brought to the table and built into the model, is second to none. This combined with the fact that FairShares is an external body to ourselves, was a big factor in choosing the FairShares model for our cooperative.

How did you develop your model rules and constitution?

The FairShares bylaws can be modified as needed beyond the founder, investor, labor, and customer stakeholder groups and the requirement of Creative Commons or open intellectual property. We had to decide details around areas such as percentages for dividends and voting for the stakeholder groups had to be decided. It was also necessary for us to modify a range of clauses to enable us to help us develop as a high-tech business.

Perhaps the biggest deviation from the default FairShares bylaws, was our decision to add a fifth stakeholder group. We added the environment as a stakeholder group. After we reach 500 cooperative members, there will be a board position whose role is solely focused on the business’s environmental impact. Also, two percent of the dividends are payable to environmental and nature causes before the other stakeholder groups are paid their dividend.

As the first U.S.-based FairShares enterprise, there was a considerable amount of effort put into making sure that everything in our bylaws was legal in the U.S.

A big part of this effort focused on the Blue Sky laws in the U.S., which had impacts on the employee and community classes being able to purchase investor stock up to a percentage of their contribution.

Can you share worksheets, templates, and policy documents?

Our current bylaws can be downloaded from our support website. They are Creative Commons licensed and can be modified and shared as per the terms of that license.

To date, most of our focus internally has been to develop our software and build our business. As time goes by, we will put resources into documenting processes and what we learn for others to learn from.

Are you really the first business in the U.S. where all people can have a voice and stake in the collective outcome? There are many multi-stakeholder co-ops in the U.S. already.

We believe that we are the first “complete” cooperative in the U.S. Beyond giving a voice and a stake in the collective outcome of the cooperative; we’ve added the environment and nature stakeholder class as well. Every business has an impact on the environment, and it was important to us that our environmental impact is a positive one.

The research we undertook before publicly stating [that] we are the first U.S. “complete” cooperative was extensive. We communicated with the National Cooperative Business Association, the Cooperation Works listserv, the Library of Congress, and other academic and development bodies. We asked if there is record of any other cooperative in the U.S. including all stakeholder groups. So far, there has been none presented, so [we] are comfortable saying we’re the first.

If anybody can think of another stakeholder class we haven’t included, we’d love to hear from you.

Header photo: Screenshot of AnyShare website

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(13 mins) Josef Davies-Coates – Josef will be speaking about recent exciting platform and digital co-operative activity in the UK, and why the legal framework that exists there could serve platform co-ops particularly well. This will include details on “Community Shares,” a form of democratic (one member, one vote) equity crowdfunding for co-operatives that has existed in the UK since the mid 1800s, but that has been growing exponentially post the 2008 crash (from £2.5m in 2009 to over £20m in 2014). He’ll also update us on the Enspiral-inspired plans to create a UK-wide Co-op of Digital Co-ops being led by London based co-op Outlandish. Finally, he’ll share details of his work with the FairShares Association to help new and existing tech start-ups to become multi-stakeholder co-operatives.

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