P.S. Coops often have volunteer requirements. The Park Slope Food Coop
on the east coast, for example, requires each member to donate IIRC 4
hours of work every month, they are a $20+ million operation. Prices
would be determined by costs divided by number of people using the
service. Everything is open and transparent. Quality is guaranteed by
member control and design of the entire process. Money can be saved by
requiring some reasonable amount of time investment. Sometimes coops
allow a financial buy-out of the labor requirement (usually priced at
whatever the paid labor cost of the hours would represent, plus an
overhead percent. Others don't allow a buy-out because they want
everyone to be part of the work, which has both ideological and
practical/management notes within it.
rmw
On 9/23/2014 5:55 PM, Bob Waldrop wrote:
I am not likely to ever make it to Burning Man although I am quite the
fan and spend a lot of time watching the video feeds.
But I am something of a maven of what permaculturists refer to as
"invisible structures" and the thing that immediately popped into my
mind is that what y'all need is the Burning Man Hexayurt Cooperative.
Cooperatives exist to provide a service to their members. If they run
an operating surplus (a/k/a "profit"), then it is refunded to the
members in proportion to their patronage (that is to say, the amount
of business they did with the coop, which means they paid more into
the surplus, so they get back more). Cooperatives are business
organizations that can facilitate the traditional self-help ethos that
we see in barn and house raisings and other such communal efforts.
People join a cooperative by buying a membership share. The group
sets an initial price, which is usually the expected startup costs of
the organization divided by however many members they think they
can/need to attract to make it viable. The coop is governed on a one
member, one share, one vote basis. When a member leaves, the coop
buys the membership share back (although there can be restrictions on
that if the coop is not doing well financially, most state laws on
coops forbid buying back shares if doing so would endanger the
financial status of the coop).
The whole thing can then be designed to meet the needs of the members.
I will resist the temptation to give me entire 90 minute "What is a
cooperative" workshop in this email, lol, but I do have such a
workshop I do, as well as a longer 8 hour workshop for groups actually
getting started.
There are lots of resources available to help organize coops. I am
not a lawyer, but incorporating a coop is not advanced legal
procedure, and I have written articles of incorporation for one hybrid
customer/producer coop (the Oklahoma Food Coop, which was the first
food coop in the US to only sell locally grown and made food and
non-food items, in business for 10 years, sales approaching $6 million
total), the Oklahoma Worker Cooperative Network (a cooperative
organizing group), Fertile Ground Compost Coop (a worker-owned coop
offering residential compost services in the OKC area).
SO ANYWAY. . . I will help if y'all are interested in putting together
something like that. We can do it right here in this group (I'm sure
Vinay wouldn't mind), or we can go into private email or another
google or yahoo group etc.
The first thing is to decide exactly what it is this cooperative can
or could do. This storage and transportation idea is one.
But another issue I keep hearing about in this forum is access to the
Thermax panels which are often hard to get. The Coop could organize
"thermax bulk purchases" and deliver quantities of them to locations
chosen strategically for access to the people who pre-order them.
E.g., if there are lots of people in the SF Bay Area, Seattle,
portland, interested, the Coop might be able to arrange deliveries to
those areas on a pay-in-advance-you-come-pick-them-up basis.
Same same with any other supply issues involving the hexayurts.
So let me if anyone is interested in this.
Bob Waldrop
Oklahoma City
On 9/23/2014 4:46 PM, Jay Batson wrote:
I very much like the idea of a centralized yurt-storage service. A
couple of thoughts:
* There's a guy who did this last year for me ("Black Rock
Hexayurts"). He charged a very modest price last year ($75), but
raised it to $300 this year. Sadly, his service quality was poor;
yurts were not on-playa on the date promised, the yurts were
buried under lots of his other camp "stuff", and he was rarely
around when you went to find him. A solo person, unorganized,
with poor standards is NOT the solution. (I found a different
solution this year, but would still like a quality service.)
* Charging for this in advance of the burn is reasonable. The
service must incur a fairly substantial investment to make this
happen; having a predictable number of people / yurts is crucial
to viability.
* It's also reasonable to require that Yurts be packaged to
specific requirements. Because people are not likely to always
comply with them, the service should have some spare supplies -
tarps, ply, etc. - to "fix" those that are not delivered properly
(at either end). By the way: 1/4" ply adds a huge amount of
weight to a wrapped bundle; I used 1/8" satisfactorily.
* I LOVE the trolly solution pictured in this thread. These could
actually be made of ply & some wheels with carriage that could be
broken down for storage year-to-year. We could actually have /
make a half-a-dozen of these to help people get yurts to their
camp quickly (and back). Some form of generalized
clamp-to-bike-seatpost needs thought up, so people can use their
own bikes.
--
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