[Mageia-discuss] A suggestion regarding community organization.

[Gamaliel Lamboy Rodríguez]

Hi, I'm Gamaliel Lamboy. I am a student of Economics at Puerto Rico
University, with a minor concentration in Cooperativism. I was truly
impressed by your efforts to fork Mandriva Linux into a full community-based
operating system, and I fully advocate it. I look forward to contributing,
although probably not in coding (I am no programmer), to the community in
various ways, including promoting it among my academic and personal
environment (I have been getting people on Linux for a good amount of time
now, and would certainly move them to Mageia ASAP).

Regarding the future plans, I was thinking that you could consider becoming
a cooperative, since it upholds most of the values behind free software by
itself, is a community enterprise, and -being an established movement- has
an enormous amount of financial resources available to its development. It
is offered simply a means to fund the community, not a community in itself.
I will brief a bit why I think this is a good choice, but in the end it's
the community's choice what should reign, and I will support it whichever
way I can (I'm unemployed right now) regardless of their choice.

1 - collective capital. That means the project will never be individually
owned or become a free rider inside a corporation's umbrella. More
importantly, it ensures democracy in the decisions due to joint ownership
(there is a whole standardized structure to ensure democracy and full
excercise of joint ownership inside cooperatives).
2 - transparency. Cooperatives and Linux believe in openness, which in Linux
means anybody can use, modify and redistribute particular works. A similar
thing happens in cooperatives; every associate holds the institution
accountable for the safe management of their funding, which means that all
accountings and dealings must be openly communicated to all members.
3 - opportunities - Cooperatives have created a complete ecosystem for
funding, educating, and assisting emerging institutions: there are
international alliances such as the International Cooperative
Alliance<http://www.ica.coop>,
thousands of national-scale organizations, cooperative banks, and virtually
almost any kind of service possible. By choosing to create a cooperative, we
would not necessarily need to rely on our own capital, but we could finance
our initial investments through cooperatives specially dedicated for the
development of these community enterprises. (e.g.
http://www.cdscotland.co.uk/).
4 - it is a nonprofit organization by its own structure.

My idea is that we create a software cooperative that is dedicated to
funding Mageia Linux through various digital and cooperative means. The
cooperative would contribute to Mageia, and Mageia would contribute back to
the community. That's the general plan, but I can make more specific
statements and answers to queries if needed/wanted.

Anyway, the most important thing is, it's a means to help the entire Linux
community grow. The definition of cooperative says much more than my
blabbering: "A co-operative is an autonomous association of persons united
voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and
aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled
enterprise." It's close enough to what you guys are doing.

There are a gazillion resources to help you guys organize into this model:
we only need to adapt to it.

Just my 2 cents.
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