Federated retail

About

The distributed co-op is a business concept intended to serve the following goals:

• increasing local autonomy
• increasing economic resiliency, especially on a local level
• starving the corporate beast
• encouraging open, democratic, accountable, and transparent processes in every aspect of public life, especially business
• encouraging awareness of alternatives to business neo-standard practices (e.g. big-box retail, chain stores, bottom-line worship)
• exploring the use of new tools for commerce, especially those that the mainstream have been reluctant to adopt (e.g. in-store search engines)

The core idea is to provide resources that will enable certain types of less-privileged businesses to be able to better compete against larger businesses that use more exploitative practices.

Qualifications

The types of businesses this concept would aim to support would include:

• businesses whose practices are sustainable or encourage sustainability (primary goal)
• businesses who do a substantial amount of business locally (because this promotes local autonomy, economic resiliency, sustainability, and accountability)
• businesses who seek to minimize their dependency on businesses that do not meet these qualifications

Resources

web site

The initial resource to get this network off the ground would be an online database and web site that would serve as an interface between the various entities (buyers and sellers) in the network:

• sellers (whether businesses or not) could enter in lists of items they have for sale
• customers could enter shopping lists (which could be anything), and the web site would let them know where it is available. (The site could even plan a shopping trip to minimize travel distance, expense, etc.)
• sellers would be aware of what items customers were looking for, and could investigate the possibility of selling those items (via making connections with new suppliers, special orders to existing suppliers, or creating items in-house)

computer help

Member businesses would receive assistance, to the extent that resources are available, with:

• connecting their inventory systems to the online database
• systematizing and streamlining their inventory and ordering processes

other benefits

Members would probably offer each other discounts, to encourage repeat business and knowing that they are all serving some common goals that benefit everyone.

preliminary guidelines

• There would be no rigid distinction between "buyers" and "sellers"; anyone in the network can be either, at any time.
• There would be no fixed membership fee; the means for gathering resources needed to keep the network running and healthy would be decided on in a democratic way. This could be a transaction fee or percentage that would be adjusted regularly by popular vote, voluntary contributions from individual buyers and sellers in exchange for name recognition or advertising, or by any other method the members decide upon at any given time.

software

The software to run the web site and database will be:

• open-source, free for anyone else to use and adapt
• designed so that multiple instances can network
• designed to ease replication of member data

This has the following benefits

• if any particular co-op node becomes corrupt, "taken over" by powermongery, members can take the code and member data and go start a new one.
• multiple nodes designed to appeal to different markets or mindsets can co-exist and network together
• nodes primarily serving different geographic areas can network together to find the nearest provider for a given item, when it is not available within the scope of a particular note
• decentralization:
  • if one node experiences technical difficulties, this will only affect a relatively small number of people
  • other nodes should be able to "fill in" for a node that is "down", allowing people affected by an outage to continue doing business in some capacity

Future Problems

Target businesses might see the co-op as competition rather than a mutually beneficial project, and be reluctant to suggest it to their customers.

At some point, this project will likely face stiff opposition from the unsustainable business community. This will probably take the form of everything from regulatory changes to surprise government inspections or even arrests of members on trumped-up charges, depending on the level of government corruption in various areas served by the co-op.

Implementation

There are three main aspects to implementation of this idea:

1. business plan (for the first node, anyway)
2. software (design and coding)
3. people interfacing (i.e. getting people interested in using it)

Woozle has the ability and experience to make substantial progress with software (having already written a centralized e-commerce package from scratch twice) and come up with details of how business operations would work, but is less good at dealing with any bureaucratic issues that may arise, and definitely not much good at getting people interested in anything new.