Why A Collaborative?

Why a collaborative? Why not a cooperative?

Cooperatives serve local economic communities, having hundreds of years history serving many types of business. They are conventional businesses centered on buying and selling commodities amongst members. Often their approach unites buyers, purchasers, and investors using economies of scale to succeed. For example, there are vertically integrated agricultual cooperatives called, 'New Generation Cooperatives' achieving significant success in the Upper-Midwest.

Collaboratives serve emergent businesses who wish to share resources and talent. Collaboratives can serve distributed economic communities. However, because of the complexity of the problems a collaborative is focused on, a greater sense of commitment and interpersonal social obligation is required than is normally expected in a cooperative. Working together to solve complex problems by applying creativity and new technologies. Given the complexities of the software domain the term 'collaborative' makes more sense to us. See CSDI Covenant.

In the simplest sense, knowledge worker training is essential and provides a big business advantage. Therefore, everyone is expected to help train others in order to have the fastest capability growth. Higher capability means lower costs and lower prices with higher wages. In a cooperative, people work together but are not necessarily expected to help bootstrap the company. However, we have no utopian visions --our collaborative will certainly require work like other places. Collaboratives are built to work smarter, not harder.

Basic to our strategy is to form a collaborative which has a social covenant for the membership to help each other in our tasks of professional growth. We understand the global competitive marketplace but do not intend to compete as such globally, but rather we intend to develop new products and services which will generate our own growth as we encourage other regional groups to form similar collaborative groups. Many such groups exist already. It is in this future system of collaboratives that we see a prosperous future. Like cities inevitably sprouting at crossroads, collaboratives will likely form regionally. Like the supplier chain system of hard goods manufacturing, software collaboratives can specialize in various skill sets. The problem is finding these emergent groups, reaching out to them, and finding ways to share relative advantages and capabilities. We have a strategy and several scenarios. Somehow it seems more practical to share the fruits of specialized labor investment in tooling and various expertise than trying to be good at everything. That can be done first within a collaborative then between collaboratives where each one develops a special part of the infrastructure.

For more details on our concept of collaboration, see: Concepts of Collaboration.