forking from %FM67qEk..., a reply to @mwmeyer's question about what is a "communal and cooperative-based thing".

if i was to say "a more communal or cooperative-based thing", i would mean: i want to maximize high-trust cooperative relationships that benefit community and commons, minimize low-trust transactional relationships that benefit capital.

transactional relationships

recently i've noticed a spectrum between more and less transactional relationships.

a transactional relationship is one where the terms of the relationship is very explicit as an economic exchange.

in general, the recent trend towards the "on-demand economy" or "renting economy" (sometimes mis-named the "sharing economy") where workers are contractors hired on-demand or rented to do X.

example: you buy food via a delivery service. you participate in a relationship with the delivery service software developers, the restaurant staff, and the delivery person, but you only have a minor interaction with the delivery person at the door.

on the opposite side of the spectrum, we have: an extended family living in the same home or neighborhood, maybe many parents and grandparents take care of young children across many families. (this was the example that turned me on to how the economy is growing without productivity growth, basically more relationships are become transactional, thus growing the "economy". learned from @joshuavial in one of his videos online.)

somewhere in the middle, we have: a family-owned restaurant that you and your family visit regularly over your lifetime. you get to know the workers, their stories, their dreams, and they get to know yours.

i'm interested in learning more about relationships with less clear terms, more space for shared human connection.

in my professional family Root Systems (@ssb.rootsystems.nz), we have recently come up with an updated version for our financial model.

our first financial model and our second version meant we were paid based on how much time we intended to work (and other variables like how much savings we had in the bank and how much billable client money you earned for the company).

at one point, i noticed myself feeling that others' were not pulling their weight and they were being rewarded as if they were, i felt yuck. i was stuck in a loop of scarcity thinking! we don't have enough, workers' aren't productive unless incentivized, etc. i started advocating for a more transactional model, where we were paid directly based on hours tracked and billed.

eventually (after weeks of trying to re-frame my mindset in a view of abundance) i realized the error with paying based on hours tracked and billed. we'd lose our trust, our team would be reduced to numbers and tangible output, yuck! so thus became our current model, we each say how much we feel we worked per day as either a short (0.5), full (1.0), or long (1.25) day. details here: https://github.com/root-systems/agreement-financial

anyways, enough rambling. what do others think about transactions in the context of a cooperative? when is it appropriate to have clear economic terms for your interaction? what are ways to create abundant relationships without transactions?

Nice insight into your patterns @mikey , thanks :)

I don't think there's anything wrong with transactions per se. I think it might be how they're implemented or something. I'm constantly trying to build trust relationships and my path there is normally gifting and seeing what happens. I've tried :

• A) buy a person lunch and tell them they're in social debt now
• B) buying a person lunch and telling them they can get the next one
• C) buying a person lunch and saying nothing

I think B is actually a good first step. It establishes an expectation of reciprocation in a loose way. I think running B a few times with some nice "who bought last time" confusion in the middle is a nice way to graduate to abundance thinking where everyone is gifting and it feels great.

I definitely track people for whom gifting is one way. (speaking of which, I want to buy the beer next week at Art~Hack). I don't think it's about the quantity so much as the quality of the transactions... I dunno I just made that up.

@Alanna thanks for your response. i appreciate the framing as "when you are out-of-balance to this side of the transaction spectrum, these things can go wrong". i think you're right that transactions are not pure evil, it's a tool we should aim to reclaim infused with the other powers we have available.

@mixxx yeah, i appreciate your practice of gifts. maybe a loose transaction that is repeated to build a strong connection, enough to lose the sense of a clear numeric "credit balance". which is probably similar to when you ask a favor of someone, maybe related to open source contributions to a shared project, since i feel if i've recently asked a favor of someone or they've directly contributed to a project i care deeply about (thus indirectly contributing to my sense of self), i'm more than happy to gift this time.

maybe transactions can be the scaffolding for strong relationship? conceived this way transactions are in service of building more than just personal wealth, they're about constructing the 3rd entity, the one between (I've been talking with @billy about his experiences in a community he travelled to, where they explicitly name the 3rd. This also fits with conceiving of groups or organisations as entities / actors.)