Coopshares Hackathon — 05/06/18

[vmatekole]

Introduction to Coopshares

Coopshares seeks to support the exchange of shares in incorporated/unincorporated cooperative projects. Allowing for exchange of shares will provide liquidity to members of projects whilst retaining capital vested in them. Additionally, it supports the storage and exchange of social currency. Social currency can be accrued from exchange between users or from a number of interactions with the issuing project: — interest from shares held in the Project — contributions to projects

Social currencies are expected to have limited store of value and to carry high demurrage fees — lending to high velocity in exchange and to provide projects means to reinvest (from fee revenue) in new initiatives, this is a common example of a social currency but not an exhaustive one. The mechanism for issuing currency and levying of fees is ultimately dependent on the rules defined by the project. Depending on the project, currencies as well as shares can carry voting rights in decision making within the collective and/or project.

Glossary

Agent — a person or group of persons. A person/group must be a member of the BOfC. Member — an agent who retains a membership to a collective or project Non-member - an agent who has no membership to a collective or project. Collectives — Incorporated/unincorporated entities that are made up of groups of agents that represent a project. A collective must be a member of the BOfC cooperative. Project — A project is listed within Coopshares, which represents shares within an incorporated/unincorporated collective or a project ran by a collective. Each project can issue shares to its members and those shares, dependent on the project, can be exchanged with non-members. Social currency/Currency — Currency used amongst members of a collective and/or non-members (agents/collectives external to a collective). Shares — Equity held within a project or collective BOfC member — an agent that is a registered member of the BOfC Multi-stakeholder — A collective made up of uniquely defined subgroups that can have differing voting rights and/or profit distributions.

Pilot goals

In May 2018 it was decided to develop a Coopshares pilot to validate certain technical presumptions around Freecoin, a Social wallet API. Presumptions are that Freecoin will allow simpler development for wallet features required for Coopshares application. In addition to validating Freecoin, the pilot will facilitate discussion amongst Coopshare stakeholders, which will help define requirements for the public beta. Below summarises the goals for the pilot:

Define/implement basic share portfolio mgmt:

• Capped and un-capped shares (by co-op/project)
• Exchange (sale or purchase by Agent(s) to another Agent(s))
• Withdrawal (by project or Agent)
• Identity (OCP/Chip-chap) Ref. to further discussion on pilot goals — #4

Identity

In order for any persons/groups of people to participate in Coopshares they must be a member of the BOfC. Therefore, all participants must have a BOfC identity, which is currently stored in OCP.

Shares

All BOfC share allocations data is currently stored within OCP. The pilot must define a single source of truth where OCP and Coopshares can reference BOfC share allocation data.

In scope

• Identity
• Wallets (share attribution only)
• Share attribution is limited to BofC shares
• Single group to represent BofC

Out of scope

Geographic groups and groups concerning collectives. Creation of new projects

Hackathon Goals

The Hackathon should focus on the immediate goals of the pilot, therefore scope of the POC is limited to the exchange of BOfC shares. Conversely, initial discussions shouldn't be limited to POC scope, we should take advantage of key stakeholders being available in Macao, to discuss medium to long-term goals for Coopshares.

• Identity within OCP
• Usecases for Coopshares & social currencies. In particular, we need to determine where shares and social currency differ.
• Validate Freecoin API and its use in the Coopshares architecture
• Testing fairchains with omnilayer port
• Create a flexible payment gateway for the exchange of BofC shares when both parties can use Faircoin, crypto and/or FIAT.

[ivanminutillo]

Although I share hackaton goals, I think for this meeting in macao we should strategically set another priority:

• The OCP membership process is not working properly. This affects botc / freedomcoop / local nodes and general groups. This behaviour is due to past work done to separate concern between botc and freedomcoop. The developer who coded that part will be at the hackaton (bumbum), together with one of the main user/admin of the membership process (Maro). For this reason, it is -imho- foundamental to re-discuss about membership, understand how it works now, what are current problems, and find a solution to make it usable again - also for the sake of coopshares.

On RNW topic, I ported all components that I created for varnelli in plain react, you can see them here https://kit.opencoopecosystem.net/?selectedKind=Wallet&selectedStory=Simple%20wallet&full=0&addons=1&stories=1&panelRight=0&addonPanel=storybook%2Factions%2Factions-panel I dont think to continue the work on react-native-web since its too time consuming try to adapt all my current workflow in RNW and I dont have enough time now to do it :/

[skoria]

I'm interested in the human issues behind coopshares. As a platform to supposedly provide credit seeking cooperatives with more entrepreneurial project seekers, so that they can find fund and bring back social benefits from it. In that sense it would be like Kiva. So there are various stakeholders, some of whom are going to Macao. There is also a lot of different types of them who won't be there, so we should probably identify use cases and build tests around them. In all these things, how can we cause developers, users, funders, project members and whoever else, to follow and put in practice the principles of cooperation such as mutual aid, ecological regeneration, rights of minorities etc..

[vmatekole]

@ivanminutillo Thanks for the update. Do you feel the issues concerning Identity in OCP will take most of the day?

[ivanminutillo]

yes, I think one full day... unfortunately I am not the best person to give you proper information about the status of membership and identity issue, since I work on the frontend, untill the graphql layer... In the next days we should know directly from the developer who worked on that part the current situation and we can create a report...

[fosterlynn]

Just making sure we are clear on the membership issues @ivanminutillo raised. Those have a bit of Identity in them, but are also about agent relationships and the membership processes for different organizations bleeding into each other (Freedom Coop, OCW, local nodes, and BotC is somewhat involved).

It would be great to be able to split bumbum's time so he can participate on both BotC related code he has been working on especially as it affects CoopShares (@skoria can help), and separately on the membership issues (Maro can help I hope, she is the primary user affected).

So, good idea to clarify the schedule!

[enricduran]

The part of social currencies on the description I see too big -related shares part - and too specific.

It can be many different social currencies designs, and high demurrage fees is just one of many possible models, that im not a fan of it... The tech work should be agnostic to different possibilities and just take care of facilitate the different configurations

[enricduran]

Otherwise, For the OCP part, I think that we should take this chance for migrating Botc to a different instance than faircoop, as is planned to growth a lot when coopshares launch, and any customization that could need, should not be an issue related freedomcoop, agent and so, (we have still the issue of the email...etc.)

[fosterlynn]

Otherwise, For the OCP part, I think that we should take this chance for migrating Botc to a different instance than faircoop

I don't disagree with this at all. But to let you know of some things to think about if you want to do it.

• Get FairLogin working. A dev who helps out with Mikorizal is working on this, has gotten it working locally. (Or alternatively, people will need to have different logins for botc and faircoop. Would be good to avoid if we can.)
• Write some scripts to split all the data up based on the agents' relationships.
• Fork and split up the membership code and probably other functions.

It might be a good idea to split off Freedom Coop at the same time, I don't know.

I also think it will take some time. Nothing complicated, just a lot of careful work.

[vmatekole]

@enricduran We have similar view on social currency and I made attempts to highlight support for mixed models... I have changed the description to be clearer toward this vision.

[vmatekole]

As indicated in the Hackathon goals — I don't view social currency support as important at this stage. Having an application that can support mixed models of share offerings will be a substantial effort in of itself.

However, from inspecting comments and proposals from stakeholders, there is a strong desire that social currencies are supported by issuing them, based on equity held or by contributions made to a project. Having something working that allows for the exchange of BOfC shares has a big enough scope and it appears (from recent comments) Identity is already a big chunk of work.

That being said, perhaps there is too much overlap between what we deem as a Share and what we view as a currency. Perhaps, the group could take sometime to discuss this point?

I have adjusted the Hackathon goals to reflect recent comments.

[enricduran]

@vmatekole On the part of the pilot project could you define the difference between allocation and aditional issuance of shares?

In the case of Bank of the commons, the campaign is permanent of issuing new shares, as it happens each time there is new members. So i guess is the same. But perhaps you think in something else...

[vmatekole]

@enricduran Yes, you're right the distinction is not so clear... I am really talking about capped vs uncapped shares.

I am thinking of one case I know of, an Australian co-op that we worked with at the beginning of Seedbloom.... And more generally of the Australian cooperative financial instrument, CCUs (Cooperative Capital Units). CCU's can be modelled in several ways, it is quite an open framework. One example is where they can be treated as interest bearing and fixed in the amount issued. For example, a local coffee co-op needing new equipment worth €10,000 can issue interest bearing CCU's worth €500 each, meaning only 20 can be issued and interest is only given for the duration the CCU is held by the holder of the CCU. Incidentally, CCU's in Australian cooperative law can be traded between non-members and members but this is ultimately decided upon by the issuing Cooperative. The co-op at anytime can withdraw these CCU's by paying back the principal + interest for the length of time the CCU was held.

Some source material can be found here – http://www.cooperativeswa.org.au/Documents/Co-operative_Capital_Units_as_a_Solution_to_Co-operative_Financing.pdf