Serve the cooperative economy

[chadwhitacre]

Our current attempt at solving an interesting (~= large, yet focused) problem is to make it easy for companies to give money to open source projects (#987). Looking beyond that to other possible markets, are there interesting problems in the cooperative economy that would be a hop or two away?

Reticketing proximately from @ntnsndr at gratipay/gratipay.com#4339 (comment):

Since OC seems to be hitting that membership/expense niche well, in certain ways, it'd be great to think of ways that Gratipay can do even more. Some ideas:

• More sophisticated membership management
• Other legal support structure options
• Decision-making tools or integration with other ones
• GitHub/Lab integration

For the social.coop project, I'm not sure how things are playing out, but I've recommended a structure wherein members are users and contributors (who can receive payouts for labor or services) may or may not be members, strictly.

and gratipay/gratipay.com#236 (comment):

Let's think.about features that.could even do more to make gratipay the go-to tool for new co-ops.

• accounting tools
• github integration for open contributions
• legal structure support, payroll

[chadwhitacre]

What are the payments-related pain points that thriving food co-ops, credit unions, utility co-ops, worker co-ops etc. have? Is Gratipay at all close to being something that could serve those needs? The place to start here would be to map out the trillion-dollar cooperative economy a bit and then start talking to lots of people. This is pre-FOCUS, even.