Dilemma: owned vs member based organizations

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If David didn’t own MaidSAFE it may never have seen the light of day and it might not have made it through needed re-organizations. But…

We can’t own people yet we allow ownership of organizations made of people and their relationships.

That can’t be right because it is the defacto ownership of people and the mechanism of unnecessary rent seeking that is undermining society. It may be precisely backwards. Maybe at scale ownership should fall away? Maybe if it can’t fit in a garage or Berkshire Hathaways Tennis Court sized facility it sould not be owned but converted to membership?

And its a dilemma because while I’d sacrifice better performing organizations for free people in a heartbeat because I think having free people is a catagorically more important value than organizations that might perform better and I don’t care if some stuff doesn’t get made or done and I recognize our current organizations don’t really perform when they produce 14 trucks of waste per truck of product on average, despite this I can see if there wasn’t a David Irvine as a owner with control of the purse strings MaidSafe might have gone under in the last re-organization with the project halted. Also I couldn’t see investing (ownership) in Tesla if it was subjected to a Union (membership organization.) I don’t see the point of modern unions because they all seem like sold out capitulators even though they are based on membership. I also don’t like political parties based on membership. And don’t care for clubs based on membership.

A credit union seems closer to a better membership organization but it has ownership built in so its a hybrid.

Best guess so far is that larger organization should be coverted to a pure membership basis once they get past a certain size. The key is that people who make up the organization have full control and benefit from it aside from the larger public that must check it. In particular there are no absentee non contributing skimmers that claim to be owners stealing the fruits of other’s labor. Also don’t want to see other useless crap like boards, executives, managers and supervisors. So at scale (and these might have trouble scaling beyond about 500 people) these might not perform well. Imagine a college department with no head and just some consensus building rules and proceedures.

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If people embraced the spirit of Georgism and Mutualism and (most importantly) the non-aggression principle, we would probably be heading in the sort if direction you suggest. It would lead to more cooperatives where state institutions currently exist and the scourge of rent seeking through violent monopoly necessarily be rejected.

A cooperative is much like a subscription based state institution. It’s membership is voluntary, instead of by force, yet it is still democratically run and owned by its members.

However, we must always consider that the state is an involuntary institution, which uses a combination of monopoly and aggression to deliver its results. This makes it almost impossible for cooperatives to compete in the area the state wishes to manage.

Perhaps within the crypto space, where borders don’t exist and only pseudo identity can be known, such a system could start to compete. It will only do so if it is at the will of the people who wish to be involved though.

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CEO does not own MaidSafe.

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But the principal funder and architect?

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I’m not concerned with how Maidsafe is structured at all. We have the Maidsafe Foundation as the charitable conscience for the project and right now we need the focus that a private company provides in order to deliver the project goals.

Once the SAFENetwork has been delivered, there can be competition between different teams, which may also be funded by the Maidsafe Foundation. These different teams can choose different models to give people choice in how they support the SAFENetwork.

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