Since 2022, V6A Labs has conducted applied research and development in partnership with communities and organizations to facilitate ecosystem-driven projects and advance concepts of the digital/physical commons. The following is the first in a series of accompanying research which first began in Fall 2023 that explores the changing nature of work, taking a wider lens to identify the challenges and supporting infrastructure needed for new labour configurations to take shape.
Research Team
Andi Argast (Researcher), Nick Houde (Researcher), Dana Salama, (Researcher & Designer), Samuel Young (Network Mapping), Rithikha Rajamohan (Research Lead).
How do novel technologies and organisational structures allow cooperative networks to proliferate and reinforce each other? How can these new configurations of labour overcome collective action problems and precarious market dynamics?
The nature of work is changing. Remote working and the casualization of labour are becoming ever more commonplace in nearly all parts of the world.1 With the rise of internet-based work and freelancing/fractional labour, the advent of a number of digital platforms have made novel work configurations more seamless. Because of this, a strange menagerie of working conditions are emerging in which people create value, sell services, and perform labour in wholly new configurations. These emerging working conditions have proven to take on both extractive and mutualistic forms, resulting in worker precarity as well as giving rise to labour networks with the potential to serve as viable alternatives to extractive, typically hierarchical actors.
Remarkable energy by activists, unions, and policy makers has gone into mitigating the most egregious effects of these changes as they fight for equitable and stable working conditions via regulatory frameworks or baseline provisions.2 3 Many, particularly high wage workers whose work is not tied to place, have embraced these changes, which they see as more flexible, allowing them to travel or to rid themselves of office life with its labourious commutes or incompatible work cultures; a sentiment both elevated and accelerated in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Either way, the scale and scope of the changes already borne out are likely to remain, meaning that compelling ways for shaping the trajectory of the future of work is essential.
It’s from this vantage that we began asking ourselves what type of work ecosystems might provide the necessary guardrails to mitigate problems with precarious and monopolized labour, while simultaneously illustrating the benefits these new configurations of work afford.
Taking a nod from the mutualist movement 4 5 6 7 , we have identified a number of emergent networked organizations responding to these conditions, referred to here as “ecosystem enablers.“ In many ways, they either operate as cooperatives or, at the very least, match the function of cooperatives, such as guilds or unions, in leveraging collective power and labour in order to provide social and economic benefits in their respective ecosystems. They enable more seamless legal compliance or even use novel mechanisms to alleviate the power laws that typically pit workers against one another in traditional labour configurations.
Similarly, ecosystem enablers also offer a new form of experiment with respect to how value flows could be altered in various ecosystems. Rather than typically extractive business models where intermediaries reap profits from the work of subordinates, or where open source, common resources are left unremunerated, ecosystem enablers experimentally retool flows of value, encouraging active reinvestment towards the workers and infrastructures they comprise of – contributing to their health and longevity.
The research began with a broad scan of workers cooperatives which we saw as a particular type of ecosystem poised to counter some of the worst implications of precarious work. Because worker cooperatives are so firmly grounded in mutualist principles of patient investment, equitable compensation, and democratic decision-making, we imagined that focusing on how they operate could offer a number of insights into alternative trajectories for the nature of work more broadly. At the same time, worker cooperatives were interesting to us insofar as they themselves have often struggled with funding, regulation, and inflexibility, demonstrating that alternative organizational forms present additional considerations and complexities. Even the best developed mutualist organizations are constrained by legal and financial infrastructure built for more traditional forms of business.8 9
From our initial scan it became increasingly clear that while there exists a wealth of research about cooperative ecosystems, there remains a number of open questions, particularly as cooperatives move online, morph into other organizing structures, and become increasingly cross-jurisdictional. Key questions emerged around the ‘glue’ that enables ecosystems to exist at certain scales as well as the nature of the interstitial space and infrastructure found within networked ecosystems:
1. How are people or organizations pooling economic and regulatory risk?
2. How are ecosystem enablers managing collective action problems?
3. What scale and scopes are best suited for addressing various compliance issues?
4. How can ecosystem enablers leverage collective power?
Through this initial research we were also able to identify a number of patterns that defined cooperative ecosystems in the Global South and North: structure, size, financing, membership, communication channels, tools, objectives, and regulatory frameworks. In particular, this work drew on the 2015 The Cooperative Growth Ecosystem report, which presents worker cooperatives as a response to the social and economic inequity in the United States.10 Taking a systems approach to how to incubate and scale cooperatives within a defined geographic area, the report presents a framework of essential building blocks, system accelerators and environmental elements required to foster worker cooperatives. The necessary elements of these ecosystems include financial and human capital, business supports, as well as best practices for creating effective cultural containers.11
Two key points should be emphasized here in relation to our broader inquiry: the first, the Ecosystem report, is only interested in cooperatives as a “place-based community economic development strategy,”12 complicating the narrative that worker cooperatives, as defined here, can respond to the digital platform-based work that is becoming increasingly prevalent. Secondly, the report finds that one of the key indicators of cooperative ecosystem health is the density of worker co-ops in a given area, noting that this has “a powerful multiplier effect.”13 In other words, co-ops beget co-ops; a finding that points to the importance of strong networks both within an individual ecosystem and between many of them, especially for those cooperatives, collectives, and other organizational forms that have no strong ties to a particular geography or place.
The importance of place is still worth considering as many networks operate within specific local regulatory environments and in the context of social investment institutions that are amenable to supporting cooperatives in particular locations. Jason Spicer and Michelle Zhong’s comprehensive analysis of this issue entitled Multiple entrepreneurial ecosystems? Worker cooperative development in Toronto and Montréal, demonstrates this point by comparing the shape of entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) in the Canadian cities of Toronto and Montreal. Drawing on the broader EE literature and applying it to “more-than-capitalist” worker cooperatives, the authors find that these ecosystems are held together by the interplay of cultural, social and physical aspects: “entrepreneurial norms, historical examples of successful entrepreneurship, existence of investment capital and networks, and the physical presence of co-working spaces, supportive services and incubators, open markets, and supportive policy.”14
Examining worker cooperative ecosystems in the two cities reveals that Toronto has a fundamentally weak EE owing to a lack of formal structures and policies at all three levels of government (federal, provincial and municipal). Comparatively, coops in Montreal are thriving, drawing on support from provincial and municipal supports and bolstered by a history of an engaged labour and cooperative movement.15 Cooperative structures and norms are embedded in the social fabric of Quebec, while these roots are entirely absent in the Toronto example.16 The fact of the area being a linguistic minority within the broader landscape of English-speaking Canada likely also helps the Montreal cooperative ecosystem flourish due to stronger ties within the region.
Zooming out, there are several well-known and often cited examples of place-based and thriving cooperative ecosystems outside of Quebec; namely, the Emilia Romagna region of Italy, and the Basque region’s ubiquitous constellation of Mondragon cooperatives. In Morocco, where one of our case studies—The Anou Cooperative— operates, there are over 27,262 cooperatives (as of 2019).17 This high concentration of cooperative-aligned endeavours is linked to the formalization of the Jmaa, an Indigenous structure for social and economic solidarity prevalent in Amazigh communities and across the Muslim world. Meanwhile, in the US, there are more nascent cooperative ecosystems such as Boston Ujima and the Evergreen Cooperatives’ Cleveland Model; each of which are responding to regional socioeconomic inequality and involve multiple levels of government along with a variety of private and public actors.
Each of the selected case studies included here leverage digital tools to various extents, creating novel ecosystems for work. In lieu of defining the strength of an “ecosystem enabler” by the local networks to which it is attached, we sought to understand how each of the case studies promoted networks between workers or groups of workers internally. In other words, by trying to understand the collaborative and organizational strategies within each ecosystem, we could both define the edges of a particular ecosystem and assess whether it is successfully enacting its own social, economic, and political visions. Our ambition for this work is to encourage workers to appropriate and build upon these strategies in a manner that is situated in their needs and contexts.
Platform or digital cooperatives provide another useful avenue of exploration for our initial research, particularly as they represent a relatively placeless approach to cooperativism, demonstrating the viability of translocalism. According to a recent post by the Platform Cooperative Consortium, this ecosystem of digitally-born cooperatives and collectives counts just over 600 projects across 53 countries.18 Several incubators and support organisations exist to foster these hybrid organisations; typically worker-owned but not necessarily grounded in a particular place or space. Platform cooperatives, which are worker-owned entities that use digital tooling as the centre of their operations, arose as an initial counter-measure to the sharing economy discourse that became prevalent in the mid-2010s.19 In theory, platform cooperatives present a neat antidote to many of the issues of precarity transforming work today, while also providing a number of novel pathways for alternatives in that they are digitally entangled, can operate from anywhere, and are worker-owned. In practice, the reality is somewhat complex as the sociotechnical character of platform cooperatives requires unending engagement with traditional business structures, inviting judgements of success or failure when compared to their non-cooperative alternative. As an example, the worker-owned Drivers Cooperative in New York has not successfully replicated its model in the same way that VC-backed Uber or Lyft have.20
If platform cooperatives are an evolutionary step ahead from traditional cooperatives, then it’s worthwhile to cast the net wider and see what other related organising structures are being put into practice to creatively make and remake the “future of work”.
Numerous organisational design experiments that go beyond place or jurisdictional constraints are well underway, many of them encouraged by shifts in our digital landscape. Decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) are blockchain-based organisations that allow for collective ownership via tokens and open, place-independent membership. While providing much flexibility in governance and ability to form treasuries from issuing tokens, they have also emerged as an unfolding if frequently problematic structure. Data coops are another structure that muddies traditional roles of provider and consumer by allowing individuals to have a greater say in the use and financial upside of their digital data. Elsewhere, services like Pando Pooling have experimented with pooling income from ecosystems with volatile or winner-take-all structures like Minor League Baseball in the US. By pooling resources, they create incentives for collaboration, mitigating the individualist dynamics of being drafted by letting the entire cohort profit and evenly share the risk incurred in striving for the majors. In these notable examples, we see a number of early experiments in redirecting competitive dynamics amongst workers within different ecosystems by incentivizing collaboration and network effects so that the whole of an ecosystem is strengthened by individual success and that individuals themselves are alleviated by some of the risk they incur in these high stakes fields. We see in these emergent experiments and many others, the seeds of new forms of ecosystem enablers.
Overall, what became apparent in Spicer and Zhong’s inquiry and our initial exploratory research is the robust analysis that can result from examining ecosystemic and networked factors within the context of mutualism. For that reason we have accommodated this type of comparative analysis for our own work, which extends beyond traditional cooperatives and also aims to include better definitions of the contextual factors behind non-place-based ecosystems. To do this, we looked to three entities that presented varying degrees of attachment to “a physical place.”
After an extensive scan of various online and offline ecosystems that formed the backbone of a number of cooperative ecosystems, we identified three distinct networked organizations that exemplify particular aspects of this “enabler” role. Using a mixture of desk research and ethnographic interviews, we worked to understand how each of these organizations offered some critical connection to a broader ecosystem, maintained connections within their own network, and thereby played a larger systemic role than traditional organizations in similar domains.
In our view and selection of “ecosystem enablers,” we saw the basic principle of supermodularity at play. As outlined by the Collective Intelligence Project, this principle underlies services or “Goods which are more easily provided at scale than on an individual basis [...] the way they tend to bind discrete units together into larger wholes.”21 In this way, “Supermodular goods encompass everything under the familiar umbrella of “public goods”, but also include private or excludable systems that become more effective when provided to more people.”22 It is through this principle that we see these types of organizations addressing our key research questions by creatively engaging with ways to leverage the strength of collective power equitably and at-scale.
As part of our exploration, we conducted a network analysis to map relationships, communication channels, and more broadly, flows of power within these ecosystems via edges and nodes.
Nodes are visualized as circles and hexagons representing members of an organisation, and external actors collaborating with the organisation, respectively. Edges are represented by solid lines connecting nodes together, and represent frequent communication channels between two nodes or ecosystem components. These edges say nothing about the type of communication or tools used for communication- simply that one node is frequently in contact with the other. The diagrams rendered represent an instantaneous snapshot of the network’s nodes and communication edges.
Our three case studies are intentionally quite varied from one another, which afforded us the chance to look at how disparate ecosystems might be more amenable to different solutions. Not all case studies are cooperatives per se, nor do we see the cooperative model as the ultimate example of what we are hoping to understand. Rather, we find in cooperatives, and in mutualist projects more broadly, a motivating impetus that is amenable to the problems we are investigating. The network diagrams serve as simplified representations of the dynamics found internal and external to each ecosystem enabler.
The first of these examples is a commons funding mechanism called Protocol Guild.. It operates as an ecosystem enabler within the Ethereum ecosystem that addresses the challenge of sustainable funding for open source contributors to core technology. They operate through a collective, membership-based model that allocates donated funds for crucial development work of the Ethereum protocol. Protocol Guild provides a mechanism for collective action, while demonstrating the potential for equitable approaches to public goods funding in the rapidly evolving open-source domain. Secondly, Anou Cooperative is a Moroccan cooperative driven by a geographically dispersed community of over six-hundred artisans. It uses digital and IRL platforms to eliminate middlemen—connecting artisans to consumers directly, and leveraging its collective power to create a more reliable, safe, and sustainable supply chain for the artisan community. Our third example mixes place-based cooperatives with a digital network of connections. Smart Coop is a European-based constellation featuring cooperatives in seven countries with over 90,000 members. Smart got its start in Belgium in the late 1990s as an effort to address worker precarity in the arts and cultural sector, and to alleviate issues with being freelance or self-employed in the European context.
Below are more detailed accounts of the three examples and how they have employed unique approaches to enabling their ecosystems to overcome collective action problems and precarious labour dynamics.
Protocol Guild (PG) is a novel mechanism that aims to address the challenge of sustainable funding for core contributors in the Ethereum ecosystem. By creating a collective mechanism for public goods funding, PG functions as an ecosystem enabler by ensuring that crucial development work on the core infrastructure of the Ethereum protocol continues without being entirely dependent on commercial entities and proprietary code bases. In this sense, it operates as a funding template for how to sustainably and fairly pay the work that goes into open source infrastructure upon which many new technological systems depend upon. We interviewed two of Protocol Guild's core contributors who oversee all operations and fundraising, Trenton van Epps and anonymous contributor, Cheeky Gorilla, to understand the inner workings of PG while trying to grasp the animus of the project as a whole.
The primary goal of PG is to provide financial stability and incentives for core developers and researchers working in the Ethereum ecosystem. This is achieved through a simple membership-based model, where individuals who contribute significantly to the base infrastructure of the ecosystem in a technical or operations-based capacity, are nominated and verified by their peers. Membership is merit-based insofar as peers indicate what work has been important, but it otherwise sees the type of work, be that core code development, fundraising, or research, as qualitatively the same. This allows the mechanism to focus incentive distribution on members’ duration of engagement through time-weighted metrics which determine each members’ share of the funds.
One of the key aspects of PG is its ability to leverage collective power and network effects. By representing the efforts of a diverse group of contributors as a single funding mechanism, PG makes it easier for the Ethereum ecosystem to support the development of its core infrastructure. This is particularly important given that many individual projects and organizations directly supporting this core infrastructure, which as is has no direct fee capturing revenue model. Additionally these projects may not have the resources or bandwidth to participate in multiple funding rounds or compete against each other for limited pools of resources, especially when the core functionality of these resources is shared by all of those within the ecosystem.
Since its inception as a pilot project, PG has grown substantially. Starting with 111 members in May 2022, it has now expanded to 181 members as of October 2024. The organization has also successfully raised $92 million USD (value at time of donation) for its members, demonstrating its ability to attract support for core contributors. Their funding model is donation based. It relies on other actors in the Ethereum ecosystem recognizing the value of what they build and adding to the coffers in due course. Naturally this reliance on altruism does produce some challenges for long term viability which is why PG is now advocating for a set of new norms in the space where protocols who use this core infrastructure pledge 1% of their yields to PG as a base level contribution to their treasury. Over time, the hope is that more consistent cultural norms of funding core infrastructure can be established within the ecosystem. The end goal is that the protocol itself can expand while also increasing compensation to its members, thereby incentivizing more concentrated effort on building and maintaining core infrastructure.
Membership in PG is defined by a list of open-source software projects and research areas centred on the Ethereum protocol. Individual members must contribute a minimum of 20 hours per week to the Ethereum L1 (core) protocol for at least six months before being added and must maintain ongoing contributions. This ensures that it remains focused on supporting the core development of the Ethereum ecosystem.
On the day-to-day, they use a combination of communication tools, such as Google Groups and Discord which supplement biweekly All Core Devs calls, a weekly meeting held by the Ethereum development community to discuss technical issues and coordinate work on the Ethereum protocol. With these deliberative processes, they hope to keep administrative burden extremely low, paying more focus to the mechanism design, which includes custom-built digital tools like the Splits protocol and Splits Vest to handle the arbitration of membership and the allocation of funds. These tools help to allocate funds to members and manage the mechanisms of governance through a list of valid memberships. The lists themselves are self-curated by members and rely on a high trust environment wherein the cohort is aware of one another’s work, allowing them to operate the membership list in a rather informal manner but still verify member contributions. Should members end their engagement, there is a strong reliance on self reporting, be that with respect to taking long breaks (of multiple months or years) or more generally moving on from core protocol contributions.
As PG continues to scale, it faces challenges when it comes to building awareness of its mechanism and therefore maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of the community and supporters. The organisation also strives to encourage members to self-curate and actively participate in the mechanism's operation.
“It's a really high trust environment working in the core development. And once you reach the threshold to be eligible, I think people defer a lot of [the trust] or they afford a lot of trust to the people that are actually making the nominations again, because you're working in the immediate context of a team—a client team.” In this way PG demonstrates the importance of trade-offs between over-calculation and free riders when valuing contribution, erring more on good faith that the work is broadly valuable. Their potential to scale further by maintaining high-quality curation and this good faith among peers could serve as a model for other open-source ecosystems with foundational common goods that rely on the collaborative efforts of a diverse contributor set. - Trenton Van Epps, Protocol Guild Core Contributor
By creating a collective funding mechanism for core contributors in the Ethereum ecosystem, PG is enacting equitable visions of peer solidarity and collective action. The model can be replicated for other open-source software ecosystems with foundational common goods that depend on the collaborative effort of a diverse contributor set. Ultimately Protocol Guild is working towards a future of "commoning" in the Ethereum ecosystem. Its success in providing financial stability and incentives for crucial development work on Ethereum demonstrates the potential for equitable approaches to “public goods” funding in the rapidly evolving open source spheres, with potential to be applied to domains beyond blockchain or technology.
The Anou Cooperative works to address worker precarity in Morocco’s textile industry and is an artisan-run ecosystem enabler. Artisans in Morocco’s prevalent craft economies typically retain only four percent of rug sales23, with the remaining profits kept by middlemen selling rugs to tourists in souks, open-air marketplaces or commercial areas. Middlemen market themselves in this ecosystem as bridges between rural artisan communities and tourists due to their language skills and retail presence, while alternative models such asFair Trade increase artisan profit margins to around twenty percent, a significant increase but far from equitable compensation.24 Registered as a U.S. non-profit and a Moroccan cooperative, Anou presents an antidote to models that rely on middlemen, using technology to connect artisans directly to consumers.
The value retention problems faced by Moroccan artisans point to wider systemic issues in Morocco’s rural communities. These areas, where many artisans reside, often exist on both geographical and political peripheries. Rural communities are also underdeveloped and in recent times, depopulating due to a number of social, economic, and environmental factors, with approximately 152,000 people migrating from rural to urban areas annually.25 This creates gaps in the intergenerational transfer of artisan knowledge. Additionally, low economic yields in the craft industry, which employs twenty percent of Morocco’s workforce26, further exacerbates this loss of cultural heritage and rural economic power. The decline of Morocco’s artisan workforce can also be partially attributed to the legacies of French colonialism27 which disneyfied Moroccan craft while weakening its institutions—including Indigenous guilds and apprenticeship structures. Anou recognizes the hundreds of craft cooperatives in Morocco as critical socioeconomic drivers for rural communities, succeeding Indigenous self-organisations. As an ecosystem enabler, their role is to improve value retention amongst these existing groups. Improving craft economies in Morocco ensures that rural areas, and their artisan workforce, gain economic power and the ability to reinvest in their own futures. This is critical in Morocco where the unemployment rate is 13.7%,28 and economic precarity is on the rise.
Anou has grown to over six-hundred artisans in ninety member cooperatives or nonprofits, representing artisans already engaged in the industry. As part of their intake process, Anou ensures its basic socioeconomic tenets are well-understood:
Artisans in the ecosystem must produce products directly (not become middlemen themselves);
Members set their own prices based on general product pricing guides provided by Anou. They must not undermine rug price standards in order to ensure that compensation across the ecosystem remains adequate;
A minimum wage of $10/day USD is enforced. This is ten times the average artisan salary in Morocco;
Artisans must understand the required motivation it will take to build their sales at Anou, including a commitment towards financial transparency.
This agreement is made in good faith. No contracts exist between the cooperative and its members in an effort to dissolve any hierarchies within the organisation, and out of an understanding that many artisans have had negative experiences with the legal system in Morocco.
As part of their commitment to capacity-building, Anou facilitates business skill education in artisan communities, an opportunity that is typically taken from them through the Fair Trade model—which concentrates administrative functions outside of communities. Building resiliency, in Anou’s view, means that artisans develop skills incrementally and collaboratively—as both artisans and entrepreneurs. As Anou’s founder Dan Driscoll notes, Anou provides live environments where artisans can make mistakes, experiment, etc. as a form of empowerment; offering a deeper experience than government or foundationally-funded training exercises. Artisans begin with small orders and work their way up to custom and wholesale orders, as well as larger responsibilities at retail stores, etc.
Anou’s main innovation is its bespoke digital application that automates and replaces the middleman, developed through participatory and iterative consultations with artisans. The simple digital interface is designed to connect artisans directly to consumers. Precise profit shares are displayed on each product page—breaking down percentages received by the artisan, shipping costs, and Anou’s cost share. On the administrative panel visible to artisans, pictograms with distinct colours and shapes allow artisans to upload their work, track their inventory, and manage their sales, accommodating a range of literacy levels. The digital marketplace also allows for the automation of translation and story-telling by including information on the cooperative, artisan, rug typology, etc. Artisans receive mentorship on product photography and how to market their products through the app. According to Anou, this “marketability” doesn’t just improve sales, it increases the likelihood that younger generations will build an interest in craft industries. The app also automates administrative tasks such as the creation of tax documents to formalise artisan labour—improving access to workers’ rights and benefits in Morocco. The app’s absorption and systematisation of administrative tasks reduces Anou’s operational costs, allowing artisans to retain eighty percent of the value of their product, on average.29 Recently, some Anou artisans have also expanded their digital toolset to include AI-based applications which allow for more breadth in their communication with consumers.
Financial transparency is a vital aspect of Anou’s operations and success. According to Hamza Cherif Douezzan, managing director at Anou, this has been critical in fighting corruption in the industry and building relationships of trust and accountability. Anou’s digital platform facilitates this by automatically sending multiple text messages once a sale has been made to confirm and ensure that the funds are received by the maker of the product, not an intermediary.
Anou is managed by a Board of Directors, composed of “artisan leaders,” representatives from a variety of crafts and regions where Anou operates. Artisan leaders are experienced in their craft and well-versed in Anou’s philosophies and operational mechanisms. They mentor peers in their own villages and become trusted representatives within the ecosystem. Artisan leaders are involved in knowledge exchanges with other Anou artisans in order to build financial skills, digital literacy, etc. As an alternative to formal training in a municipal centre, peer-to-peer incremental training reduces time burdens on Anou’s (largely) female members who have additional responsibilities at home and in their communities.
Also acting as Anou’s “mentors”— Driscoll and Cherif Douezzan work for the artisan-led Board of Directors–managing technological updates, training, external private investment (from European donors), government relations, and additional opportunities such as wholesale orders. They also manage two retail locations in Morocco’s largest and most touristic medinas - Fez and Marrakech. The stores are housed in ryads (vernacular Moroccan courtyard houses) at prime locations. Anou’s ryads contain accommodation for artisans, allowing them to visit and work at a retail store, interact with other artisans, receive in-depth training, as well as offer private workshops to tourists and locals alike. These opportunities, in addition to others, allow Anou artisans to develop their skill-sets and incomes beyond craft production, building resiliency. Retail stores allow for Anou to educate and connect with consumers while diversifying its artisan-owned asset portfolio.
All orders (with the exception of wholesale inquiries) are currently managed through Anou’s app. Whatsapp is the primary tool used for communication between the artisan leaders, artisans, and mentors–reducing the frequency of lengthy and expensive in-person visits across Morocco’s wide geographies. Emails, online meetings, and in-person meetings are used for external communications with government agencies, international wholesalers, and international investors.
Anou’s financial strategy emphasises slowness and capacity-building over receiving large grants from International NGOs. This ensures that the organisation does not build a reliance on external foundations and promotes a self-sustaining ecosystem. There have been a few exceptions to this rule including support from Office Chérifien des Phosphates (Moroccan Phosphate Foundation), and the Drosos Foundation.
“Anou must not be dependent on INGOs, because [per their requirements] INGOs would turn Anou into a grant implementation organisation (which do nothing), not an entity capable of driving systemic change. Therefore diversified and strategic investments across different markets that bolster Anou's core mission is necessary to develop core independence so we can realise our true vision because the frank reality is that no one is going to help artisans.” - Dan Driscoll, Anou Mentor & Founder
Anou also uses platforms and events with luxury hotels and restaurants, as well as international entities such as The World Bank to raise awareness of labour exploitation faced by Moroccan artisans, and to connect with other groups facing similar struggles across the globe.
Cherif Douezzan notes, even the twenty percent value retained by Anou is reinvested back into artisan communities through capacity-building initiatives. Anou’s for-profit sister organisation, Atlas Wool Supply Co., aims to further bolster the economic resiliency of Anou’s ecosystem by rebuilding sustainable artisan supply chains. Atlas Wool Supply Co. is partially owned and run by The Anou Cooperative. Anou artisans are given priority to buy shares from current private investors, and will have access to more affordable material supplies—with the objective of increasing their competitiveness against middlemen. Atlas’ recently-opened wool factory produces Africa’s first carbon-negative yarn, saves Morocco’s yarn from being treated as a waste product, and improves worker safety by using safe colour dyes.
“[Communities need to] struggle their way into figuring out solutions. We are more than happy to share and assist; to share the expertise that we’ve developed. But it’s really important [that it comes from] communities themselves.”
Anou has grown from a small organisation to a cooperative that is six-hundred artisans strong. Although this is a small percentage of the artisan workforce in Morocco30, Anou has successfully leveraged the collective power of its ecosystem on several occasions. First, they have been able to attract private investment and commercial partnerships that allow them to strengthen the economic power of their network, and to put Anou artisans on the map. This influx of income has allowed for initiatives such as Atlas Wool Supply Co. to take off. Second, Anou has lobbied the Moroccan government on several occasions; Anou successfully changed a law which mandated that a Moroccan government official stamp all cultural exports, breeding corruption in the artisan market. Anou has also been raising awareness (primarily through its blog) that what is presented to tourists as cactus silk (sabra) is actually rayon thread, and have noted the ways in which this exacerbates artisan exploitation by middlemen and wholesalers.31 Anecdotal evidence from the market reveals that sabra sales have dropped as a consequence of Anou’s advocacy.32
Anou notes that its largest issue is scaling as an organisation given its current capacity. Since Morocco’s independence there has been an exodus of highly-skilled talent looking for better opportunities abroad.33 Anou struggles to find candidates who are both highly-skilled and passionate about improving conditions in rural areas. Recently, they received an influx of support from private foreign investors that will help them alleviate this problem. Another challenge faced by the organisation is its legal formation—specifically the regulatory and administrative consequences of having profit and non-profit arms (Anou and Atlas).
Anou are hesitant to licence their digital software to other organisations, despite their expressions of solidarity with other worker-led social movements. They see the digital platform as a product of a situated grassroots movement. Cherif Douezzan notes that communities need to “struggle their way into figuring out solutions. We are more than happy to share and assist; to share the expertise that we’ve developed. But it’s really important [that it comes from] communities themselves.”
While Anou’s model would be difficult to transfer to other contexts, it offers a vital framework for other ecosystems looking to develop their own networks and tools. Anou has (and continues) to collaborate with allies abroad. While these exchanges are generative, Anou re-emphasises the importance of artisan ownership and artisan-led craft futures in countering the impacts of colonial hegemonies on Morocco’s craft market and providing a better alternative to current neocolonial trajectories.
Smart Coop is a constellation of European cooperatives, founded as a response to worker precarity in the arts and culture sector. In 1998, just as the Internet began its ascendency, a group of Belgian culture workers came together to found the "Société Mutuelle pour Artistes" (i.e. SMART)34 as a way to improve their collective job security and to forge a path for career freedom while also respecting legal and tax requirements. The Belgian organisation became a cooperative in 201735, and Smart currently has cooperatives in seven European jurisdictions: Belgium, Germany, France, Austria, Sweden, Italy and Iberia (Spain). In many European countries, freelancers do not have the same legal status as those who are regularly employed, owing to tax and social security contributions.36 Smart addresses this administrative and legal challenge through the form of the cooperative, and crucially, creates a community of freelancers who can rely on each other for shared resources and support. The following case study takes a closer look at Smart's German node.
As Alicja Möltner, co-founder and co-CEO of the Smart Germany cooperative (eingetragene Genossenschaft), notes, “[Smart] mutualizes the risks of the professional activities of our members and gives access to social security protection that is being gained by the status of an employee in Germany.” Freelancers who want to become members of Smart Germany purchase a cooperative membership for €5037 and then become a shareholder of the cooperative. Members then invoice clients and receive payments via Smart, which takes 6.5% to 9% of the freelancers’ total revenue as payment for the administrative services it delivers on behalf of the members. Each Smart cooperative sets its own fees so there is a range of both membership and administrative fees. These services include:
- Invoicing
- Contracts
- Payroll and expenses management
- Payments (Smart remits payment to members regardless of whether a client has paid)
- Insurance coverage
- Access to shared tools and workspace
- Training opportunities
Members have the freedom to pursue most types of service-oriented business and clients, to work their own hours (including full or part-time), and to run their businesses with autonomy.38 In essence, Smart alleviates the administrative burden of self-employment, while also nurturing a community through shared digital platforms, in-person workshops, training, and exchanges of ideas.
“What is important for us is that every member has the feeling of being a shareholder and a co-owner of the cooperative, because that's … the solidarity base of our business model. So we have to create this community that feels responsible for the cooperative itself.”
- Alicja Möltner, co-founder and co-CEO of Smart Germany
Each Smart entity operates as an independent cooperative, but the co-ops collaborate closely on a number of shared platforms and tools and most have developed their own software tools.39 The German and Austrian co-ops recently completed work on the Smart Portal, a two-and-a-half year project focused on building a shared platform for members to manage all of their Smart-related activities. (Given the unique legal requirements for each country, German and Austrian members have separate portals.) The portal also combines governance and community activities, offering a single point of connection for members who might be geographically disconnected. Similarly, Smart Belgium offers several bespoke digital tools—online (and in-person) training sessions and the Agora, a member directory.
40Most members of Smart are freelancers. Möltner estimates that nearly all of the German co-op’s members fit that description, although she notes that there are some members who retain membership but are not self-employed, as well as a few organizations who hold membership. Smart Germany sees itself as “a kind of multi-stakeholder co-op”41 supporting freelancers, their clients, and partners in the broader social economy ecosystem. Möltner says its membership agreements are fairly simple: members agree to actively find clients and generate revenue. What’s most important is ensuring that members feel like they are “a shareholder and co-owner of the cooperative” as this builds a foundation of solidarity and shared responsibility.42 Members are also invited, although not obligated, to participate in the governance of the cooperative itself.
Smart Germany has a four-tiered governance structure; a five seat advisory board (Aufsichtsrat), a two-seat board of directors (geschäftsführender Vorstand), the membership, and a small contingent of administrative staff. The board is made up of the co-op’s two original founders, and they report to the advisory board, which in turn is made of one representative of the SmartBe Fondation (covering the mandatory seat of one founding member according to the Statutes of SMartDe eG); one representative of the active members; one representative from the science and research community; one representative from the Smart staff team; and one representative from the broader business or social economy.
43Smart members elect the advisory board, which holds the power to name and dismiss the board of directors, as well as make strategic business decisions for the cooperative. Smart Germany currently has a staff of eight (who are also all members), and who manage the administrative work for the co-op’s one thousand members. Across all of the Smart cooperatives, there are roughly 90,000 members.
“The advisory board can control, name, but also, dismiss, the board anytime. So [it’s] the most powerful. And I think that's the interesting construction around the cooperative that basically the members co-curate the advisory board. So this is what makes the whole cooperative a very democratised legal form,” says Möltner
Möltner notes that there is an ongoing discussion about how involved members should be in decision-making within the cooperative. Larger issues are discussed or ratified at the annual general meeting (AGM), but smaller day-to-day matters are largely handled by the staff in order to expedite decision-making. In 2021, Smart Germany undertook a lengthy discussion about whether to raise the fees taken by the cooperative. Möltner says that this process, which took about six months to complete, is an issue that almost all members are interested in. But overall, members trust Möltner and her peers to manage the administrative running of the cooperatives so that they can focus on their own careers and clients.
“I think a flat decision-making is one of the hardest things to do as a team or as a group.”– Alicja Möltner
Smart is an ecosystem unto itself, operating across seven different jurisdictions, and is very closely aligned with cooperative and broader social economy networks in each of these places. Smart Germany in particular has been involved in lobbying to improve the cooperative structure in the country; aiming to “support … the ecosystem of cooperatives, especially young, innovative models.”44 According to Möltner, it can take several years to form a cooperative in Germany, a length of time that would disincentivize many would-be cooperators. Möltner is working with a cross-sector group called GenoDigital to lobby the government to modernise cooperative law, calling for small but critical changes in policy to allow for digital membership, coop formation, and registration, all of which are currently restricted to paper forms.
“Historically cooperatives in Germany are very strong in the electricity field and in real estate or energy but not as a client to other clients in the service field. So one thing is the image of cooperatives which on one hand is very positive but on the other hand also is a little bit, let's say old-fashioned, so it can be an obstacle," says Möltner.
Smart Germany also works closely with partners in the broader social economy, both through their growing roster of over 4,000 clients, as well as by participating in programs that support alternative enterprises. Unlike some jurisdictions, coops in Germany appear embedded within the broader social economy; Smart Germany is connected to Social Entrepreneurship Network Germany and Social Economy Berlin, as well as several other ecosystem partners. And although Smart is a cooperative of freelancers, it also works with unions and labour organisers as part of a broader social economic strategy.45 Smart’s network effects were tested during the challenging years of the early part of the pandemic, and Möltner credits the coop’s diverse network of freelancers and Smart’s connections to other cooperatives as key to their continued success.
Maintaining connections to other social economy actors requires work and relationship building, but the most important ties are those between cooperative members. Möltner questions how a community can retain its feeling of closeness and personal connection while also growing its membership and expanding its physical footprint. She points to an ongoing discussion within Smart Germany as to whether maintaining a larger, Berlin-based cooperative is better than devolving into smaller, more local coops in the long run.
“We want to be accessible for everybody but we are really thinking, ‘okay how to how to grow so that the community feeling stays alive.’” Alicja Möltner.
The question of scale has often dogged cooperatives, especially given that these entities are often expected to compete against traditional commercial organizations. Smart enjoyed rapid expansion in Belgium in the early years (from one office to eight), and has actively pursued a movement-building agenda, based on international growth. After opening a location in France (2007), Smart Belgium partnered with existing cooperative entities and individuals to open cooperatives in Austria, Germany, Sweden, Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy in the span of five years, from 2015 to 2019. The following year, the Hungarian and Dutch experiments were put on hold, and the Netherlands foundation formally wound down in 2022.48 In the same year, Smart France was put into receivership for a brief period while the cooperative reorganised its affairs, which had seen a 26% decrease in revenue49, likely due to pandemic restrictions on theatre and performing arts productions.50 The Franco-Belgian ‘parent’ cooperative styles itself as a “cofounder, a partner, but also an investor,”51 and in its role as investor, its decisions must balance economic sustainability with the desire for social and economic change through cooperativism. Although these two priorities can sometimes conflict, the longevity of the Smart cooperative experiment speaks for itself. By providing an administrative home—and a shared community—for freelance artists, musicians, consultants, chefs, data scientists, and graphic designers52 —Smart is a remarkably resilient example of democratic workplace governance and international cooperativism in action.
Thank you to Kate Sassoon and John Smith for your guidance and feedback, and to the New Constellations Mycelium Fund for supporting this work. If you have any thoughts, questions or would like to support our work/start a similar line of inquiry, we would love to chat. Reach out to us on twitter, warpcast or at hello@v6acolab.org.
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Rithikha Rajamohan
