Cultivate.Coop talk:About
From Cultivate.Coop
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| Thread title | Replies | Last modified |
|---|---|---|
| Affiliation and Ownership for Cultivate.coop | 2 | 05:20, 22 December 2010 |
Affiliation and Ownership for Cultivate.coop
Hi there,
I'm glad to see the new initiative, and I'm glad to make a small contribution today and also hope to make more in the future, but that will depend on you, the owners.
There are lots of projects like this out there, and I really don't understand why I should contribute to this asset when it is not clear that I will be given credit or become a stakeholder in the project.
Can you please clarify why your affiliation section doesn't credit the contributors to the wiki?
Do you intend to have a membership-owner share class for this cooperative project? I recommend you do. I would be willing to help cover costs of the project, as well as contributing assets and creativity.
Thank you for your consideration. --Alex Rollin ([http://alexrollin.com home]:[http://alexrollin.com/contact contact]) 20:15, 21 December 2010 (EST)
Hi Alex,
Thanks for bringing this question up. We are indeed considering a worker-consumer-organization hybrid stakeholder model for the near future, as well as some other potential structures. The reason that this is currently not the case - we are run by an emerging worker co-op and directed by an advisory board of co-ops and co-op organizations - is that we had to get the project off the ground before a lot of folks would give it any attention or expressed interest in contributing to it, not to mention becoming member-owners. Thanks a lot for bringing this up. We are very interested in making this transition and want to have a conversation about what this could look like and how we would go about making this happen. If you have any thoughts or ideas, please feel free to share them!
We will clarify shortly in our about section that Cultivate.Coop is written and built by it's contributors. Thank you for pointing this out.
Also, thank you for your contribution to Cultivate.Coop today!
Thanks for the reply Administrator. I invite you to check out the conversation in the Commoning Federation addressing these types of issues. Specifically the Partnership Network where many folks are working to understand how to build ethics and standards for a Knowledge Commons that can value and account for both personal contributions and patronage as well as collective benefits. These are, in my opinion, the cornerstones of a "complete" cooperative approach.
As an example, if I create 10,000 pages on this wiki and they get 150,000 views a month you will probably be paying $100/month in costs to maintain the wiki. Who benefits? Who can/should/ought to pay the cost?
The license for your site, CCBYSA, allows for commercial re-use and derivative works. What if I am hosting the pages with you and making money from the enterprise in some way, effectively outsourcing my costs to you? How does that change things? What if I get some non-monetary benefit from it? Is that so different?
In addition to these cases it is important for your organization, whatever it is, to acknowledge and disclose all benefit that your organization derives from the site. Simply naming who owns it isn't really an adequate response. Some examples of benefits include notoriety, top billing for your links back to your organization as the sponsor, as well as the claim that you steward a valuable asset.
This isn't all about money; really it isn't. It's about equity and fairness. Anyone can setup a wiki these days. What will set your wiki apart? What form of social charter will be setup to make it stand apart?
