Allow GreenNet to join CoTech

Thanks @chrislowis for conducting the poll and raising the issue.

I was one of the people voting against. @harryrobbins is right that being a co-op is not about being a member of Co-operatives UK or having a certificate. Also, as I have already pointed out, coops can take many different legal forms under English law. English law doesn’t define what is needed to be a coop.

We, on the other hand, do have a strict rule of membership. At the risk of re-opening an old debate, Brighton Digital Exchange:

Is a Co-operative Society under the 2014 act
Is a member of Co-operatives UK
Is 100% owned and controlled by its members

But is not allowed to join CoTech.

Whatever the intention of GreenNet (and their determination to become a co-op is indeed inspiring), the acid test is whether they apply the 7 principles. Arguably they do not meet Principle 3 because of their ownership. Trust-ownership models are not generally viewed as being co-ops (and indeed there is a long tradition in the worker-coop movement of opposing employee benefit trusts as a model).

So, I think we are being inconsistent.

At the risk of raking up old ground CoTech is an organisation for co-ops that are "owned and controlled by their workers". GreenNet is controlled but not (currently) owned by its workers, whereas Brighton Digital Exchange is neither owned nor controlled by its workers.

There are other organisations that are for all organisations that subscribe to at least some co-operative principles such as The Federation.

Yep agree with this and with @chrislowis suggestion in the outcome message that we put Greennet's application on hold. I voted a bit hastily in favour which doesn't really reflect well on me as a supposed expert on coop governance. I agree with the current criteria for membership (i.e., the formal identity of worker coop as the minimum requirement). I suppose that groups and individuals with a clear direction of travel to being worker-majority owned and controlled coops could participate in CoTech Community, if not the decision-making here.

@harryrobbins BDX doesn't have any workers. But the point has been debated and agreed that CoTech is for worker coops: my intention was not to reopen that debate rather to point to the inconsistency.

I don't know what the "certificates" are or who is handing them out?

I think that agreeing and following the ICA Co-operative Principals has to be the minimum requirement for an organisation to be considered a co-op?

Sorry I have just re-read this thread and realised that the certificates @harryrobbins was making reference to are the ones that Co-operatives UK sends to their members each year?

This is also key:

"Co-operatives are businesses owned and run by and for their members. "

https://ica.coop/en/what-co-operative

I doubt that the GreenNet Educational Trust owns Green Net Limited as it had a turnover of less than £500 for the year to 30th April 2016? Who owns Green Net Limited?

Hi,

Thanks to everyone for their kind words and suggestions. It does seem like it would be good for CoTech to review the membership criteria, given the discussion within this thread and the info on the CoTech website.

In any case, we're going to try to keep working on our transformation into a co-op. We'll follow up on some of the suggestions that have been made here as we navigate the process of changing our legal status.

To answer @chriscroome's question, currently GreenNet Ltd is the trading arm of the GreenNet Educational Trust (GET) and is wholely owned by the trust. GreenNet Ltd's accounts are completely separate from GET's accounts. In theory, GreenNet Ltd currently exists in order to make profit and donate it to the charity. However, the charity has been rather inactive lately, while GreenNet Ltd has not had any big year-end surpluses to donate to GET.

Also, agree with @sionwhellens and @chrislowis suggestion and change my mind (after the event)

Just reflecting that this looks a bit weird in the context of discussion under the consensus thread that anything with no blocks passes. The suggestion that Greennet's application is held for a while is not a bad one, but it has not been put as a proposal. Where's the consistency of process here? I hope it's not a case of the "Tyranny of Structurelessness"!

According to the proposals on the other thread, Greennet should now be accepted as a member. But then I'm opposing that other proposal, though I am in favour of Greennet joining now.

Confused? I am.

I agree, particularly now Developer Society has been agreed.

@asimong @felixwave my understanding is that the various proposals about how we make decisions all got variously blocked and disagreed with and no one felt comfortable progressing those discussions. It seems reasonable to that proposals with no disagrees and no blocks are considered to have passed, so I've been progressing on that basis - e.g. there was one abstain on the Developer Society vote and the co-op explicitly said it was an abstention due to being happy to defer to others as opposed to being a 'very minor disagree'.

I happen to know that some of the co-ops are very keen to leave Wortley Hall with a decision making process/agreement in place. That has the potential to create an 'inner group' who sign up to a fairly clear structure, etc. and an 'outer group' who prefer things to be more vague. Lots of groups (including Outlandish and Enspiral) have this kind of model, which I don't think is necessarily a problem.

FWIW GreenNet is not actually owned and controlled by its workers while Developer Society is, so I don't think we've made any inconsistent/wrong decisions based on the current criteria. Let's help GreenNet liberate themselves from their owners.

Thank you for your clarification and I agree completely. Just one small observation, the owner is the charity, the board of the charity are the workers, messy but it does not seem to have the inherent oppressions by non-workers. Anyway, I hope this conversation helps stimulate GN's efforts to become a w-coop.

Oh, I see. I hadn't followed that properly. I thought charity had spun out some sort of co-op, rather than the co-op spinning out the charity as a way of asset locking itself. We don't make life easy for ourselves do we? Hopefully we can bottom this out if Ed comes to Wortley Hall.

I'm in agreement that, as outward form, a proposal with no blocks and no disagrees is passed. On the other hand, I wouldn't be happy if a proposal is immediately passed with disagrees in place, even if there are no blocks. But the deeper point I was trying to make is that a consensus decision-making process is about much more than the counting "votes". The point of taking a "disagree" position should be that the person who disagrees enters into direct discussion and dialogue with the proposers, in an attempt to revise or reframe the proposal so that the disagreement is transformed into agreement.

If a proposal is passed with disagrees in place, it seems to me no more than good sense, as well as good consensus practice, that time and effort must have been expended on improving the proposal to bring more people into agreement. Exactly how much time and effort — and what the process is — I would have thought should be the subject of consensus decision like any other.

As I recall, at the point at which GreenNet applied to be considered for membership, there was no legal cooperative entity although there was the intent to create one. the rationale for temporarily denying membership was to spur them on to get their cooperative act together. I thought, and still think, that this was a good decision. And I very much look forward to voting in favour of their membership soon.

As for the inner group/outer group structural model for CoTech, I've always been a fan of that approach, as it offers a lot of flexibility and multiple agendas.

Hi all,

At the CoTech Gathering, a number of representatives from CoTech member coops sat down with Ed from Greennet to discuss their rejected application last year to join the network.

After some initial recapping of events and Ed restating who Greennet are, why they want to join and what is hindering them from becoming a worker owner and controlled cooperative, a proposal was made and using the consent process we worked through a number of critical concerns before passing the proposal.

A detailed, and hopefully accurate, account of what happened can be found on the Wiki.

For simplicity’s sake,I’ll restate the proposal here:

We accept Greennet as a member of CoTech providing they resolve the issue of worker ownership and control by becoming a coop within 2 years. CoTech will provide support to enable them to do this, by offering Sion Whellens skills and expertise and by supporting an application to Solid Fund to get funding to help them with the legal costs.

Moving forward, we have agreed to use a thread on the forum to keep members updated of progress.

According to the constitution, member decisions are supposed to be made on Loomio so I am happy to open a new proposal to ratify this. We have a good number of member coops in the room during this process so it feels both solid and with the blessing of the network but thought I'd raise it here for transparency's sake.

Thanks for putting this up, Aaron.

My sense is that the decision should be ratified on Loomio for a couple of reasons:

1. So that the constitution remains a meaningful document.
2. Because being in the room, at the right time, should not be a pre-condition on participation in decision-making. This is important for a distributed coalition like CoTech. But it is also important for accessibility and equality. There are a lot of reasons why someone may be able to be physically present at a meeting: care responsibilities, the cost of attendance, an inaccessible venue, parental leave, intermittent health problems etc etc. The ability to be present is not distributed equally - so these remote forms of participation remain important, I think.

This is not a judgement on GreenNet - I would happily vote for them to be admitted - but I would also like CoTech's processes to be as transparent, predictable and accessible as possible.

Thanks @jacklord totally appreciate what you say. I'll start the proposal forthwith!

@sionwhellens happy to discuss in the new year. I feel responsible given I threw you under that particular bus! I know you like a challenge :-)

sorry for the statis on this, I have had a very busy end and beginning of year.

@pauledevans the proposal states "We accept Greennet as a member of CoTech providing they resolve the issue of worker ownership and control by becoming a coop within 2 years." Does this not allay your concerns?
The vibe of the proposal and of members that met at the last meetup was to try to be inclusive where possible and encourage and help potential members who needed it.

According to the Constitution, a proposal "passes if there are no 'disagree' or 'block' votes". I'm raising this in case you are not aware of this. Would you be able to provide further clarification on your reasons for disagreeing and provide a way forward e.g an amendment to the proposal that you would then be happy with.

@aaronhirtenstein I'm content to abstain if that unblocks things.

In terms of my thoughts, it's about semantics. If CoTech is a coop for coops, then that's clear and straightforward. But if what we're saying is it's a coop for coops, and those aspiring to- and admiring of coop shapes, than that's different. As someone who was a director/owner of an ltd which converted, I know these things take time. Looking back over the thread - and forgive me if I'm misreading what's happening here - there was the same vote 2 years back which was similarly blocked then. At that point they were also making a commitment to convert (see Chris Croome, July 12). I would ask why that didn't happen then, and what guarantees they can offer that they will this time around.

But as I say, I'm content to abstain to unblock, if the same vote is reopened.

hi @pauledevans thanks for the quick reply, I take your point and can see why you would doubt if this will happen given the recent history. There were two main constraints for Greennet in getting this pushed through, beyond the fact that their situation is complex and there is no straightforward resolution. One is that they have a limited amount of time to commit to doing this, and the other is it will cost money to get the right advice. The proposal aimed to address this by providing expertise (Sion) and an avenue for raising some funding (SolidFund); by setting a deadline we also felt that this would encourage a proactive approach to changing. It may not be possible to change, in which case they will gracefully withdraw but part of our remit is to help grow the tech coop sector and so the members present this was a good approach in keeping with the spirit of CoTech. I hope that alleviates your concern, and if you are happy to abstain pending further evidence, that would be appreciated by Greennet and CoTech (I think!).
I hope we can meet in person at the next meetup in Sheffield, Thursday 25th - Friday 26th April?

I understand the complexity and cost point, having been involved in stepping through them myself. I would disagree that the best way to encourage and grow the coop sector is simply to allow groups to become members regardless of their actual legal status. But on the spectrum of issues that I care enough about to block, this doesn't feature - particularly given that I'm behind that growth agenda.

Still: content to abstain.

I agree @pauledevans that it should be for co-ops and not people who are somewhat co-op-curious.

In this case my understanding is that CoTech is ruling that GreenNet is a co-op, but one with a problematic issue in their legal documents that needs to be resolved.

My understanding is that a charity owns a (possibly controlling) share of GreenNet but that it does not exercise its control or extract income. To me this is quite different from, for example, them having private shareholders.

@harryrobbins thanks for clarifying, that is also my understanding and the reason we felt it was an acceptable exception.

@pauledevans thanks for amending your vote, I hope we will hear good news on this in the not too distant future... and hope to meet you in the flesh soon!