Hi! I’m the governance and community building nerd from Circle-A Studios. We’re making a video game about squatting, queer community, mutual aid and housing justice in the context of global capitalism . Technically we’re currently an Ltd in private ownership but we’re in the process of transitioning into a workers co-operative structure, to better reflect our values and for the most part practice.
Personally I’m involved with a few projects in different sectors who are transitioning to cooperative governance, so this is an exciting time. I joined because I attended a workers.coop open call about their Own the Future programme but I have heard of the space before through Web Architects, who host my website for another project.
Really excited to connect with you all and I’m specifically interested in learning about:
What legal structure do you use? We’re torn between CIC and CBS.
Your decision making practice. I’m a fan of consent-based decision-making, which I use in another project, and would love to hear about how anyone is using it.
What’s the deal with loan stock? Can a member supply loan stock? Anything else I need to know?
Hello! I’m also a game developer and I’ve been interested in games as a tool in class war, if that’s a fair description (a group in London called “Class wargames” introduced to me to this concept). I know someone who is experienced in the squatter’s movement in France and who was working on a board game for educating French squatters. Do you think it would be beneficial to one or the other effort if I try to put you in touch? (“try”, because I haven’t spoken with them in a while).
I think that there is a very broad space to explore in the domain of anti-capitalist games and it’s exciting to see that there are others out there. On my side I’m working on something called the Games Commons, an approach to games design built upon the principles of commoning; games which are built to adapt to new content and new rules published to the federation by players (at runtime), and hence games which evolve over time from the creativity of their players. The loftiest ambition is to be like Wikipedia for games content, hence governance and consensus is key to the publishing process. Our flagship (or, guinea-pig) project is a game called Sim Polis, which is about making and breaking systems.
What is the best way to stay up-to-date with Circle-A Studios? Do you publish news regularly?
Regarding governance, I also like consent-based decision-making, someone in CoTech once described it as being less conflict-prone than consensus because “agreeing that everyone can live with a solution” is a lower barrier than “agreeing on the ideal solution”. We’ve used it in CoTech, and in Code-Operative, although as explained in the linked article we’ve replaced that co-op with SEPHEO, and I’ve not been active in decision-making there. I think I understood what loan stock is — in co-ops in general I’ve liked the idea of tracking work put in by people to get it off the ground, hoping that later they can be remunerated for their work financially, because I think the potential for being paid can make people less possessive about things they worked hard to build. I don’t think loaning finance or work should be attached to equity, but I understand that working on the foundations can create soft power that any co-op needs to manage.
Welcome Artemis! Great to have you here. I’m a member of Outlandish Co-operative and I’ve been leading on lots of CoTech network-y stuff that past year. I hope you join the workers.coop federation, then you’ll automatically become an official member of CoTech by the sounds of it. Where are you based btw. Because we have a CoTech gathering inMarch that you’d be welcome to join.
Did you apply for the Own The Future programme in the end? I’ll actually be running it so if you get through I will be hearing more from you!
Anyway short answers to some of the question you have:
We’re registered as a cooperative society with the FCA, so we went full coop. It was before my time though so I couldn’t tell you the details. We’d definitely be able to help you with that through Own the Future though. And if you don’t get through you can also get paid advice from Coops UK.
We use Sociocracy for our business structure and for consent based decision making. We love it. We actually do training on it if you have some budget.
I’m afraid I don’t have knowledge about member loan stock. I’ll leave that to someone else for now.
If you’re in London please do stop by our cooperative coworking space SPACE4.
Hi Natasha, thanks for your reply and the great advice! I’m finalising our application for Own the Future today - we’re planning to join workers.coop regardless, so hope to connect more. We’re in Bristol but I’ll definitely stop by next time I’m in London
Hi Calum, thanks so much for your reply and answers to my curiosities
We’re always up for meeting other folk with shared interests, so please do put us in touch with the French squatting board game people if you can. The forum isn’t letting my post links in my reply, for some reason but we have a Linktree you can search for that has our Steam page, Discord and events.
Games Commons sounds amazing. Can’t wait to hear more about it!
I think your posts were being required approval / refusing links because you’re a new user, I bumped the permissions on your account, so that should stop happening now.
Regarding registration and rules I’m a big fan of the Somerset ones (Webarchitects uses them):
These can be used with a Society and a CIC, if you were to use their rules I’m sure they would be able to give you the pros and cons of a Society vs a CIC.
