business and employment cooperative<\/a> except for programmers rather than entrepreneurs. Ideally once it got big enough it would become self-sustaining and then undergo exponential growth. Part of the nature of software is that it requires very little capital investment (really just the programmers' salary). Another part is that because it can be copied indefinitely and exhibit network effects, once a piece of software is written it can have great influence and importance. So a successful software project can make much more money than it costs, and one only needs a small percentage of projects to be financially successful in order to sustain the entire system.<\/p>\nI imagine that a very large number of programmers would like to join such a cooperative - what could be better than getting paid and not having anyone tell you what to work on? So one would need some method for choosing between a very large number of applications. Let's suppose for a moment we have some infallible way of weeding out people who, given the choice, would rather go skiing or watch TV all day than write computer programs of any sort. Suppose also we have a way of weeding out those programmers who are actually working on something for someone else and want to get paid for it twice.<\/p>\n
One way to choose amongst the remainder would be for them each to submit a few ideas of some things they would like to work on, and how much they want to be paid. The cooperative would then pick those ideas that have the most \"bang per buck\" (i.e. are most interesting, not too expensive and have some chance of commercial success). The member might change their mind about what they work on, but the initial idea would give some idea about what sort of things they're interested in.<\/p>\n
Every few months, each member would give a demo of what they've been working on to the rest of the company. Or, alternatively, make regular blog posts about their progress. This gives some cross-pollination of ideas, and may lead to collaborations within the cooperative. Such collaborations can be very flexible and informal, ending as soon as they stop being fun for any of the parties involved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If I suddenly found myself with lots of money to spare, one thing I'd like to do is hire some talented programmers to work on whatever they wanted to work on. I suspect that there are lots of talented programmers out there who have ambitious projects they'd like to take on but which they just […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":944,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions\/944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reenigne.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}