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.