Token Based Platform Cooperatives For Ethical Businesses
You may not know this, but I have a small business that sells goods online. One primary reason it exists is to explore alternatives to extractive capitalist business models. For me, I want to see how much beauty I can create with an enterprise, and I use it as a research platform for ethical ways of doing business.
I believe the work and value put into the business deserves to be rewarded in priority to ownership or stake. So I'm looking for a way to distribute profits based on jobs to be done. Incentives based on financial investment needs to be considered as well, perhaps returning the funds to the investors with a 0% return is a good idea.
While I'm not entirely convinced that investors shouldn't profit simply by depositing funds early, I know that I'm looking for more ways to decentralize ownership and allow more people stake in the company's profits through work investments. Finding a balance between market forces and ownership/stake based profit sharing is my goal.
I've been inspired by the thinking about platform cooperatives from the P2Pfoundation and am looking for tools that I can use.
The first thing I'd like to find/develop is a very simple accounting system. A system to do this is through the opencollective platform for managing votes and budgets. I'd like to issue a token that allows us to transparently track jobs, work done, validate work in a decentralized way, distribute tokens, and then at the end of the month distribute the profits the business makes to the token holders. I believe this can be a start of a decentralized platform cooperative that can create and share profits within the cooperative directed by the core values and mission of the organization.
For now, I never thought I'd be this excited about accounting. Anyone have ERC accounting tips/software?
Have you heard of Sharetribe? It's a open source market place set up by a guy enthusiastic about platform cooperatives. I don't know the guy but will have lunch with him in the next month or so. If there's anything I can do to help you, don't hesitate to message me!
Hey @leosammallahti! I'm sorry I didn't see this earlier. How was the meeting, excited to learn more. Thanks for your comment :)!
Hi Bilal, good to meet you at Internet of Agreements. There will be other ways for us to connect, but this one will do for now :)