Overview

This document describes a governance/economic model for self-sustaining, mission-oriented, distributed organizations.

It values pro-bono, care, and paid work with complementary metrics and dispenses rewards accordingly. The purpose is to extract people from the capitalist marketplace so they can use their unique talents to do fulfilling, socially and environmentally meaningful work. The document prototypes a governance model fit for digital labor as applied to an existing organization: the P2P translation collective Guerrilla Translation which is, in turn, embedded into a larger umbrella organization called the Guerrilla Media Collective. Guerrilla Translation serves as the practical example to illustrate the model. The Guerrilla Media Collective is a pilot project for Distributed Cooperative Organizations or DisCOs.

The DisCO model is a substantially developed fork of the Better Means Open Enterprise Governance Model (OEGM). The adaptations have been made to:

1. Bypass the original model’s start-up/for profit orientation
2. Address the needs and ideals of
   1. The Commons and P2P;
   2. Open Cooperativism;
   3. Open Value Networks; and
   4. Feminist Economics
3. benefit, commons-oriented market entities self sustain their social vision. while addressing their specific requirements and allow for future modifications.
4. Shift the focus from technical, protocol-based solutions to relations, trust and care work.

What we offer here is an equipotential and opt-in engagement model. This means that anyone who participates in the collective as a member will have their work valued, and will be expected to participate in the decision making process. Decisions and control are shared, based on contributions and peer review. In the following sections we'll examine:

• Open Value Cooperativism and Distributed Cooperative Organizations: a brief introduction to these concepts.
• Roles and responsibilities within the organization and how decisions are made
• Contribution and tracking (The ways that value is tracked and rewarded)
• Decision making processes (How stewardship is held by all who have demonstrated willingness and invested personal effort participating in the collective's goals)

These three areas are interdependent. Roles and Responsibilities reflect a member's investment in the coop and their level of participation. This investment is not monetary, but contribution based — the more a member puts into building the Open Value Coop, whether through pro-bono, agency or reproductive work, the more their investment is weighted in the coop's ownership and decision making mechanisms. This investment/stake is measured through Contribution Tracking and it also affects the Decision making process.

While we have presented the three sections sequentially, the document doesn't necessarily follow a linear narrative. Each section refers to the others and the document features many page-jump links to different relevant sections^[1] and related entries in the Guerrilla Media Collective Wiki. ^[2]. For now, we recommend reading it at a your own pace, taking notes and jumping from section to section until you have a clear picture. We plan to add graphics and other support materials to improve understanding and uptake.

To see how we envision the model in practice, Guerrilla Translation is used as a showcase example, but it’s important to note that the model is designed to be picked up and adapted by other Distributed Cooperative Organizations whether they’re part of Guerrilla Media Collective, or not. To ease the narrative, the terms "Guerrilla Translation", "the DisCO" and "the collective" are often used interchangeably.^[3]