Hi, So I have been thinking for a long time how to change the tide and make the workplace democracy (one worker one vote and zero shareholder votes, or worker cooperatives) more of the norm rather than exception, as well as how to start one 😅
In that vein, I thought about the sort of market in which workplace democracy really has the natural competitive advantage, rather than just having nicer administration and relationships among the workers? I wonder if this is a viable idea - we set up a software worker cooperative whose business model is to divide the customers' problems into pieces of free software with multiple aims: * Lower the cost of maintenance by relying as much as possible on 'free lunch' provided the by the free software. * Prevent the internal cottage industry within large enterprises that require huge IT budgets due to all systems being custom made for the organization and there is not enough exposure or critical analysis * Create better public relations by making contributions to Free Software as necessary. * Effective documentation that is verified by the community open to any new comer * Ensure relevant workers can be found and hired when needed * and so on The worker cooperatives, with its democratic cultures will fit naturally to the Free Software community and they can help closed private (capitalist) enterprises so they can decompose their software requirements to pieces of Free Software, stitch them together to have the real corporate systems. To be more concrete, say a bank has proprietary risk evaluation systems that cost a lot of money for them to maintain. What part of the system do they really want to maintain and what part of is just commodity trucking of information (ETL) that they only regard as cost of doing business. Can we break it up into pieces of Free Software and reduce the problem into the integration of the software as the enterprises see fit? I wonder what your thoughts are 😄 Cheers, Yasu _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
