Bauwens’s proposals include four key elements of what an open cooperative is:
– Cooperatives must be statutorily oriented towards the common good.
– Cooperatives need to have governance models that include all stakeholders.
– Cooperatives must actively co-produce intangible and material common goods.
– Social cooperatives should be politically organized on a global basis, even locally.
These 4 elements are foundational to what FairCoop claims as an open cooperative.
Moreover, among the principles Fair.Coop supports are the ones related to the open Cooperativism and the call to the Integral Revolution.
a / Retrieve property as common well, with popular possession and control.
We must regain control of the land and of the means of production as a common good, ensuring their use through communal property (the community) and therefore, as public goods.
b / Building a cooperative and self-managed public system based on mutual support.
We work for the common good, to ensure that all our basic needs (food, health, housing, education, energy, transport…) are covered through a public system actually built for ourselves based on self-management, cooperating with each other, essentially promoting human values and capacities.
c / Free access to information and knowledge
We share knowledge among all to build a greater good.
On a practical level, we must continue to strengthen our resources (people, self organization, money, space …) to expand our activity in the common good.
One key area in relation to open for FairCoop cooperative is to facilitate communication and networking among all manufacturing projects developed under Open Source principles.
It would be useful to create links with other groups committed to the common good, to learn to work together, especially in the intangible aspects of this type of material creation (knowledge, design, backgrounds).
At the same time it is a key objective for Fair Coop as an open cooperative to support peer production to generate commons through collaboration with groups and communities that will take advantage of this setting either as means or resources for their own production, or its direct consumption.
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