It seems people have gotten the idea of what a co-operative is down pretty well. That's great. Carson is, however, not limited to just a plain old vanilla co-operative style. As it says in the charter, Carson is a federative co-operative. Federated co-operatives are co-operatives where the members of the co-operative are co-operatives themselves. It is what it sounds like, a federation of co-operatives. Federative Co-operatives are meant to be a method to organize a bunch of different, specialized co-operatives who focus on one thing, into a big co-operative, so they can organize, in order to achieve a more complex end. For example, Carson is basically going to be a giant effort to climb the entire tech tree together.

Historically, one of the most commonly cited examples of a federated co-operative is the Mondragon Corporation, which, collectively, operates in over 100 different industries as a 'single' entity. That's what I'm aiming for with Carson.

It will basically function as a bunch of different worker-cooperatives doing their own thing, and all their earnings go into the federation, and are used/consumed. It sort of defeats the purpose to try and 'profit' off of other co-operatives/workers in Carson, since we are all united by a single goal. We will still sell things in a market setting, but workers in Carson will be the ones employing capital, not the other way around.

So, as an example of how things might work is, we could vote/decide/discuss on what our goal should be. This isn't really hard, because the Civcraft tech tree isn't that complicated, so the only way to go is 'up', really. Either way, let's say we want to establish a massive Prot 4 production run. The orders would be sent down by the federation (That has yet to be named, I guess I should get on that) to the co-operatives that are affected by the production run, and the quota is met, the items are produced, and any surpluses are either distributed to the members, sold off for a profit in a market, and the profits distributed, or they could be stored for surplus. All of this has to be decided still, but do you see the point? The co-operatives are not separate entities, they are part of the whole.

That being said, people are still free to form their own vanilla co-operatives, but they won't be part of the Federated Cooperatives of Carson.

I'm sorry if I wasn't clear about how things would work, I should have finished the charter a while ago, and probably should have gone in more detail. I'll be pulling an all-nighter, in preparation for Day 1, so I'll hope to wrap up everything before we all login.