Greetings

Thanks to Neil for bringing my attention to this group, glad to see the co-op concept is resurfacing again :-)

As Neil said day job and other priorities, the work that ifossf.org envisioned (see our home page) has not progressed as much as we would like to see. The main concept of iFOSSF is around building the FOSS ecosystem with a focus on business/social problems/opportunities first, technology second. The followings are provided as point of references on how we see this would work - i.e. the co-op should have an end-goal that all members share. In iFOSSF, We bring technologies and other required business skills together (e.g. sales, marketing, lifecycle maintenance) only when a sound opportunity is identified that has the potential to sustain itself for the long run and creating "positive changes" by doing things differently, rather than one time paid job. This will be the emotional sticking point that allow members to build up both free and paid work portfolios.

@ nicolo - "where does free work start and end, where does paid work start and end"

here is an example: iFOSSF focuses on using open source and emerging technologies to leap frog developing communities/countries.
One of our flagship project is a partnership project with our partner at onevillagefoundation.org to establish replicateable Open Digital Villages (ODiV), open source software and open source way of working is a key part of this program. Ghana has been the first center http://www.onevillagefoundation.org/opendigitalvillages

So to answer the question about:
"Where does free work start and end" in ODiV case, we expect a centralized portal (in progress) which will be a place to

• identify appropriate open source components for ODiV through collective intelligence
• build knowledge base/best practices with both global perspectives and local field agent experience
• members build up their reputation through contributions to this portal or other traceable work
• free work ends when a business plan is established and funded that is jointly developed by group members

Note that paid work does not have to be writing code, for example: business development and visual design are equaly important if not more to make a project successul.

"Where does paid work start and end"

• Part of the FOSS ecosystem is also the business development with suitable skills, where project funding will be raised and managed through a legal structure (in this case iFOSSF)
• once funding is secured, a "project team" will be assembled and managed very similar as what one would do in a corporate structure of a funded project.

Of course, devil is all in the details. This current model works, as the # of contributing members are still very small so the contribution/reward system is somewhat easy to manage. I suspect when there are many projects and hundreds/thousands of contributors, maintaining a transparent system will be challenging especially at a global level. Community currency and peer-to-peer production have been the frequent discussions among our core members. I have not had time to read through all the posts on this group yet, a quick glance the co-op proposed seem more like a membership based trade associate which is most likely will have different regulations on what it is/isn't allowed to do than what I stated above. Would love to explore with this group to find synergies.. ODiV might sound foreign to some, the same process can easily apply to, say, deploying Druapl, open source enterprise applications for Cloud.

Jenny