This is a new initiative. The original idea behind it is to gather volunteers to create blueprints for different aspects of organizing, establishing and running online cooperatives.
Online cooperatives can be Consumer Cooperatives, where people get together for example to negotiate better deals for items they all need to purchase or Producer Cooperatives, where producers organize to sell their products or services under a common umbrella, sharing resources for sales, marketing etc, or just about any Cooperative that can benefit from being organized as one.
We will utilize the principles laid down by the philosopher P.R. Sarkar in writing up these blueprints, like for instance that in a for-profit cooperative, only people actively involved in the cooperative should have the right to own shares. Cooperatives constitute an important aspect of Sarkar’s theory PROUT – the PRogressive Utilization Theory – and we have found these to be sound principles for organizing and running cooperatives,
Is this then a political initiative? Not in the sense of party politics. Maybe in the sense that the world needs new ideas and technologies for organizing political and economic activities in a globalized, internet fueled real time era – and most political and economic theories were drafted in the 17- and 18 hundreds. Although these “steam engines” may have been great at the time, we cannot expect them to have foreseen the development of the microchip and the internet. So instead of polishing these antiquities, we have decided to go for new technologies, suitable for the present digital, online times.
This is a beginning. Much may change as we start working on guidelines and practical advice for the different aspects of organizing and running a cooperative. In a next phase we could for example provide web hosting, legal services, web site development etc. for online cooperatives. Or whatever needs will come to the surface as we most probably test our advice on our own little start-up cooperative – like e.g. this web site may develop into.