Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder, is among those who have joined the board of directors of Mastodon's new U.S. nonprofit, Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko

I would like to do more research on alternative non-profit governance structures. In my experience, non-profit boards seem to be just another mechanism by which the wealthy control decision-making in society. However, I don’t know what kind of structure would be better.

Riley
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Workers co-op

I think workers coops are definitely better than private ownership but it seems like there should also be some involvement of the broader community being served (or negatively impacted in some cases) in the case of non-profits.

Workers coops tend to fall apart when they’re made of non business savvy workers who just want to do their job. They tend to delegate the business “chores” onto someone more savvy… who ends up simply stealing from them.

Primary.

So you don’t have one then? I’ve seen plenty of research on worker coops, and I’ve never seen any that supports this idea. Without any evidence I’m left to conclude that this is just capitalist apologia.

I have first-hand experience, actually too much of it. Feel free to conclude anything, you can even set up a worker coop and get your own data; be the change you want in the world, and all that.

So anecdotal? Have you worked in a worker’s coop? It’s hard to see how some workers taking advantage of others would be worse than the owner taking advantage of them but if you have seen it maybe you can explain how.

Love me some Anark—I did watch this but I don’t remember seeing much detail on how community governance works. Is it in there and I missed it?

From what I understood after I watched it and looked into it a bit more is that individuals have roles within the organization and are able to decide their own actions on how to fulfill that role. The actions are informed by the collective understanding of their goals and norms that are formed during their frequent meetings (which are very different in vibes from regular corporate meetings).

This is how I understood it works for most decisions but there a few decisions that fall back on voting which after the vote occurs the individuals are expected to carry out whatever was voted on.

So like it says in the video it is a largely informal structure but one that seems to work very well.

So the employees who are employed by donations, or all contributors? Not trying to throw a wrench in your suggestion, just wondering what this would look like for masto

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