I want to publicly announce a change in my thinking.

Tofticles

@jwildeboer Background: I was part of the crew that made Coding Pirates in Denmark - a non-profit teaching kids IT, broadly.

Which structure you should choose very much depends on what you want to achieve imo - for us, creating a foundation created a disconnect between the foundation and the volunteers - since much of the work in the foundation was fund-raising.. to pay their own salary.

I think, I see where you are going, but very interested in hearing your thoughts on coops.

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@tofticles Nailed it That is one of my biggest problems with foundations. The disconnect due to the structural demands.

icaria36 🎶

@jwildeboer Interesting. Still the question is how the money arrives to finance the development. There are workers cooperatives, where workers must provide a service and/or apply for grants, crowdfunding, donations... There are consumers cooperatives where members must arrive to a critical mass to make the activity sustainable. And many hybrids. You can have a cooperative essentially running the same not-for-profit business model than a foundation, internally organized as a cooperative.

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@icaria36 Absolutely. That is the interesting part, IMHO. Coops allow a much broader scale from non-profit to for-profit implementations with various levels of member participation and influence compared to the foundation approach.

Michael Potter

@jwildeboer I recently had a thread where I talked about spinning up worker co-ops with all the laid-off tech labor out there, and it was an interesting thread, but I'm finding myself a bit overwhelmed at the logistics of it all.

Many problems must be solved, and you touched on the biggest, that non-profits are often more enmeshed with the dysfunctional status quo than the solutions the future needs. Another is the dissipating or deflective energy that threads like this often encounter.

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@mpotter Please feel free to add a link to that thread here!

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@tomjennings And when Cygnus was successful, the CEO proposed to take 10% of the total equity and buy a small company in the research triangle that tried to also make money with Open Source. He failed to convince his board. A few years later that company in the research triangle took 10% of its equity and bought Cygnus. That company was Red Hat Source: founder and CEO of Cygnus, Michael Tiemann, personal conversations

Stefan Kremer

@jwildeboer so why not chose the eG?

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@stk The correct choice is a complex, not a binary decision. My decision to use an eG might be wrong for your requirements and the other way round.

Michael Potter

@jwildeboer I know it sounds like I'm really down on nonprofits, but some of the coolest organizations I know of are nonprofits, and even worker co-ops themselves will sometimes opt to incorporate as 501c3 .

There's also the incoming administrations' intent to demonize nonprofits, which means some of them must be effective, although I suspect at least 90% of the nonprofits hate is about Greenpeace and other climate-advocacy organizations.

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

@mpotter Do notice that I live in Europe and not the US, so our definitions of coops and non-profits are not the same and we don't have to deal with Trump directly