Matt Ludt
If you come to a fork in the road, take it! Imagine www.Cooperative-Library.coop
By Matt Ludt
What: An online wiki-style website that is organized sensibly by relevant jurisdiction, type of cooperative, and type of information. After an introduction there would be alternative options to zoom-in by country or language or topic. Under such there are alternative sub-options by sector or topic. For example, under “U.S.” there are sectoral links to Credit Unions, Worker Co-ops, Grocery, etc. and by topic there are links to Cooperative Finance, Member Linkage, Employee Training, Democratic Rule/Annual Meeting, etc. The topics include all business topics, formal legal & legislative policies, and the practices behind the each of the seven cooperative principles. And the depth includes not just documents but informational posts.
Who: A bit different from normal libraries where there a reference desk librarian to help you with your research, participating cooperators may serve a volunteer reference librarians. There would be the opportunity tag documents and information with the submitting individual and cooperative identities for users to contact them for further information. So better than a typical library, you have many more reference librarians to help you and you can have email/telephone/otherwise direct contact with the authors.
Why: The consideration for the 5th and 6th cooperative principles: co-ops across the world exchanging their issues, challenges and solutions for the benefit all. Imagine helping smaller co-ops to have access to the same information, documents, and education that larger co-ops have. Imagine the cost saving, time saving and efficiency, especially relative to the groupware, internet connectivity, and wiki technologies. A central location of how each co-op handles X, Y, & Z would be an amazing resources for improving all cooperatives’ performances on the triple bottom line.
How: While the maintenance of this library should be distinctly grassroots given its task to fulfill people’s and cooperatives’ practical needs, it would definitely need some functional support that can best be provided by the ICA.
To keep to the advantages that come from local control and familiarity, (to follow the hypothetical above) the U.S. Credit Union Association manages its own documents/learning summaries pages, the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives does the same for its docs, et cetera. If a country does not have a sector association, the relevant members from the national association form a working committee to do it.
The functional support though comes from the top-down ICA endorsement in a singular umbrella site where all cooperative learning can be found (like Wikipedia.org aims to do with encyclopedic knowledge). Further the support/guidelines are provided by a ICA oversight committee so that "tags" can be sensibly assigned so that cross-sectoral or inter-state/province/national exploration amongst the basic and advanced website search function yields relevant results.
Conclusion: In addition to the “Why” above, there is a superlative reason for this library: the cooperative advantage. When asked above, you were capable of imagining this cooperative library. But you would be stumped if I had suggested a library where investor-owned companies pool their proprietary and confidential operating documents and information for anyone to use, wouldn’t you? Our principles and refined way of doing business gives cooperatives this advantage, and thus we should take it.