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Going into this New Year, I'd like to share how I'm working to counteract the negative influences I see in the world today.

A lot of people look at society & government and apply their ideals and life experience to thinking of how they would replace it with something they see as better. Historically, this usually takes the form of revolution and turmoil.

For a brief period of time in human history, the concept of democracy has allowed a slight reduction in the ferocity of that churn. In many cases, long traditions of violent and unpleasant regime change have been replaced by peaceful elections.

But what if I told you that democracy could work in areas outside of government, too?

Enter: The Co-Op.

To quote the International Cooperative Alliance, a cooperative is:

"an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise."

A democratic Enterprise. Not even Star Trek has envisioned that. (sorry, disregard that, moving on ...)

Now, if you have any knowledge of history – or even of contemporary events – you are probably thinking, "but Kevin, democracy isn't always that great ...", and you wouldn't be wrong to think that. Democracy is famously said to be "the least-bad form of government".

However, Democracy practically sparkles when compared to Autocracy, because Democracy contains within it a method for correcting its own mistakes – without having to topple things and start over. At least, this holds true when the elections are not interfered with & foreign governments don't try to install an autocratic dictator. Not looking at anybody in particular. No sir.

Here in Canada, we're taught that Autocracy is a very undesirable state of affairs. Even the Monarchy is considered rather antiquated - we mainly keep it around out of quaintness, I think.

Yet it seems that Autocracy has nevertheless insinuated itself into our daily lives. Often, several autocracies. Modern empires have been built on the back of autocratic principles. We usually don't recognize it as such, but that's because we know this autocracy by another name:

The Corporation.

I could go on a detailed rant about Corporations, but that would be banal and patently obvious to anyone who has lived in western society in this century. Instead, I want to pitch the Cooperative as an alternative to the scourge that the Corporation has mutated into.

I am currently directly involved in three cooperatives. Two of them are established, one at a very small scale and one at a rather large scale. The third is in the very earliest stages of being started. There's also a fourth kind I'm aware of that I'll touch on at the end. It would make the most sense to discuss the one I've been with the longest, so I'll start there.

Small-Scale: Sooke Sailing Cooperative

https://sookesailingcoop.com

I have long dreamt of purchasing a sailboat and travelling the Pacific. Unfortunately, my bank account has not shared the same dream. (Donate to my Ko-Fi, or buy my photos, so I can make that dream come true!)

In 2021, I was pleased to discover a stopgap solution: a group of people in a nearby community that owned a sailboat & were looking for members to join their cooperative. For a low initiation fee, and low annual membership dues, this has enabled me to get out sailing whenever time & weather allow.

Since then, I have become the co-op's Membership Director and Webmaster. I've had all kinds of experiences out on the boat. I've lost a hat in a windstorm, anchored overnight under a meteor shower, seen the fata morgana, and been caught in a tidal rip so strong that I ended up sailing in reverse.

And through it all, co-op members have been there with me, helping me gain experience and confidence in sailing and skippering the boat.

In addition to the annual dues, we contribute "sweat equity", generally in the form of boat upkeep. This allows us to reduce our overall maintenance costs and keep the budget under control.

As a nonprofit cooperative, our dues pay for the annual operating costs of the co-op. We're a very "lean" organization, to borrow a corporate buzzword. We're always looking for new members - after all, the more members we onboard, the more boats we can afford - and hopefully we'll be entering a new growth phase next season.

We recently had to swap out our boat for a slightly newer one, and the process included all members of the co-op as equally as possible. Each member had an equal vote for deciding which boats to consider & eventually to purchase. Everything has worked out well so far, and we are doing some final improvements on our new vessel to get everything ship-shape.

Every year, we have an Annual General Meeting where the various directors present reports of how the year went. We discuss plans for the coming year, and members can put forward proposals for a vote.

All of this is a stark contrast to the Yacht Club or Boat Ownership Club experience. Of the clubs I've looked into, few are open and accepting of new (boatless) members. At best, it is a Bring Your Own Boat situation – once you join, though, I'm certain the other club members are wonderful. On the other hand, some clubs seem to be exclusive, nepotistic, and unaccommodating of those who are new to sailing. On top of that, you probably won't be shocked to hear that almost all of them are entirely too expensive. The expense comes with perks, of course. Private marinas and clubhouses with private chefs. Resort islands fully owned by the club. Reciprocal moorage agreements. But if my money is going to that instead of to my sailboat fund, how will I be able to afford my dream?

Thus, the co-op has been a huge factor in gaining experience in an affordable and accommodating way.

Large-Scale: Peninsula Co-Op, Mid-Island Co-Op, and Ucluelet Co-Op

Across Canada, there are over 150 small Consumer Co-Ops that have formed around things like grocery shopping, gas purchasing, and other common needs. They are part of an association of Co-Ops providing similar services, and gain access to special branding (Cooperative Retailing System, or CRS) for this category of co-op.

Way back in 1909, in the tiny BC village of Sointula on Malcolm Island, the oldest association in CRS's network was founded. On the CRS network's About page, they note that 70% of their local co-op associations have been operational for over 75 years.

Memberships in these co-op associations are obtained by a single small payment, often less than $30. You generally only buy memberships for the co-ops in the specific areas you frequently shop.

Purchases made through the co-op, at their various locations (each local association has different services and locations available), are tracked by member number in order to provide members with an annual rebate cheque.

These co-ops generally don't rely on "Sweat Equity" - they hire employees and run in much the same way as regular businesses. It's just that the members are the ones who hold the ownership stake for the business.

Here on the south end of Vancouver Island, there are two main co-ops: Peninsula Co-Op, which began by serving the Saanich Peninsula area, and Mid-Island Co-Op, serving north of Duncan up to Port Hardy. There are several smaller co-ops sprinkled around the island, such as the Port Alberni co-op.

My favourite of the smaller ones is the Ucluelet Co-Op Food & Hardware Store. It's always fun to walk into that store and have tons of groceries on one side, and a wide selection of fishing gear and other activities on the other.

For many years, my participation in the Peninsula Co-Op took the form of using the local elementary school's co-op number. This way, the rebate became a contribution to the school's PAC & would benefit the students. In 2025 I decided to join the co-op as a full member. I won't see my first rebate until December of 2026, and I expect it to be a whopping number on the order of, um, $100 or so. But still, not bad for only having a one-time $27 payment to join.

If they end up opening a closer grocery store to me, that rebate number could go WAY up. And since I'm a full member now, I can potentially try to guide the decision-making toward that possibility.

I'm not yet a member of the Mid-Island Co-Op, nor the Ucluelet Co-Op. I can still shop there or purchase gas from them - these aren't exclusive clubs like Costco or Sam's Club - but I won't qualify for a rebate unless I pay the one-time fee for a membership.

Earliest Stage: Federated Video Co-Op

Starting any operation on the ground floor is guaranteed to be a challenge. This is as true for a tech startup as it is for a cooperative.

I've spent the fall of 2025 helping in one such effort, and my number one recommendation is to accept all the help you can from (nearly) anyone who is willing to offer it.

We're trying to start a federated video cooperative for social video makers – i.e., YouTubers – to have more control and ownership of their online platform.

Right now, this space has been carved up between Google and Meta and TikTok. They control the horizontal, and the vertical. Their algorithms and moderation decisions can destroy livelihoods, and this gives them the power to put their thumb on global discourse.

Decentralization is one answer to this. Two video projects (PeerTube and Loops.video) aim to bring a YouTube/TikTok-like experience to the decentralized ActivityPub protocol. Traditionally, this has resulted in new topic-based servers coming online

For example, when I went exploring the video situation on Fediverse, I created an account on MakerTube. This is a PeerTube server that caters to the Maker/DIY/Retro-Tech crowd.

Important Note:

The ActivityPub protocol allows all of these servers to "talk" to each other. The videos I post to MakerTube are also available to other PeerTube and Mastodon servers. Instead of a single-service silo, ActivityPub lets us build communities that can all talk to each other: together, they form a network called the Fediverse.

You might think, "But Kevin ... I've never seen you make a Retro-Tech video, or a DIY/Maker video", and again you'd be right. I chose this server because the videos I was working on at the time involved a tiny bit of DIY, in the form of my rowboat dolly project & a sailing repair project.

However, it is not suitable as a permanent home for the kinds of videos I want to make. I need a server that is general-interest, so my channel can be about Whatever Thing that interests me in the moment.

That's where the federated video co-op comes in. The software exists already – PeerTube is an open-source project by FramaSoft, a French company. But a space for general-interest channels doesn't seem to currently exist in the form I'd like it to.

So, myself & others are working to establish a British Columbia-based Federated Video Cooperative that will host videos in Canada. People (not just Canadians) will be able to pay a fee to become a member-owner, which will give them the ability to create an account and post videos. Member-Owners will also be able to aid in planning and decision-making for the future of the co-op.

We haven't sorted out the exact plan for ongoing fees and costs – storage/compute/bandwidth can be expensive – but we're working to iron out those details before we choose a name and launch our service in the new year.

It's Not Always Peaches and Cream

Because this is at such an early stage, things with the Federated Video Co-Op are not yet in balance. Nor are they even fully in place.

For example, it took us a month to decide on a communication system that would be viable going forward. We started out with Signal, but quickly discovered that its adherence to good encryption practices made it a poor choice for building a new group of contributors.

When you're trying to onboard someone to a new organization, having them show up to a chat group and have zero access to any backscroll is not ideal. And while it might be a good idea to solve that with an onboarding document, we also didn't have a good place to create and share such a document.

Arriving to a consensus-backed decision on this proved to be difficult. As anyone remembers from school, group projects can be messy. People have to proactively volunteer their time in order for progress to be made. There can be strong feelings that lead to passionate conversations that only seem to slow things down.

Frequently, it can be advisable to put aside consensus and intentionally make what could be a "wrong" decision. The decision-making progress becomes so much of a blocker that any result is better than more stalling.

We ended up taking a hybrid version of this approach: an offer was put forward for a free three-month trial of a Managed NextCloud service. Rather than continuing to mull options while still using unsuitable tools, we decided to move to that. We will revisit the decision later to see if it was the right one or not.

We still have to establish our legal operating entity as a BC Co-Op. We'll be getting some help with this from a consulting firm that specializes in spinning up cooperatives.

This will involve establishing our operating rules and bylaws, to ensure stable operation of the business. We want it to be self-sustaining. We don't want to have to rely on volunteer efforts to keep it operational – people should be paid for their contributions – though there will definitely be some volunteer work needed in the early days.

We also want the bylaws to enshrine our code of conduct and our vision for the co-op. This will help protect it from the temptations that drag down tech startups.

All of this needs to be sorted out before we choose a name and begin the process of setting up server infrastructure.

Taking It to the Limit

Going back to problems with Corporations for a moment, one big issue they have as autocracies is that it is easy to seize power. At least, if you have money. You can buy the company outright, or you can acquire a controlling interest of shares, or you can execute a hostile takeover. If you're a government, you can coerce the company to satisfy your requests by secret orders – or by selectively determining how much cheese you grant or deny to the corporate rats.

Cooperatives are somewhat more resilient to some of those threats. In most co-op structures, a member-owner only ever gets one vote/one equity share. You can't hoard equity and "buy" the co-op the same way you can with a corporation.

Seizing power in such a democracy is still possible, of course. Especially if you know a good hat designer and have a spray tan supplier on speed dial.

This happened to the Mountain Equipment Co-Op. Founded in 1974 in Vancouver as a Co-Op, in 2020 the co-op member-owners were surprised when the bulk of its assets were sold to an American private equity firm. The firm now operates the resulting "Mountain Equipment Company" as a regular corporation. The move was very unpopular with the members, who felt like they had been lied to for a decade & that elections had been manipulated to keep an inner circle of money-losing decision makers and executives in power.

It appears as though the directors and CEO strategically instituted policies that excluded members from decisions and gradually consolidated full power with the executives and the Board of Directors. Simultaneously, they enacted a somewhat aggressive expansion policy & a shift in their core market focus. As this was beginning to unravel, and amidst a bit of a scandal over lack of diversity in advertising materials, the CEO resigned and was replaced by an infamous retail box store's former CFO.

This coincided with an announcement of a net loss in the tens of millions for 2019 – coupled with a large debt to external lenders. From there, it's a hop, skip, and a jump to the sale of the co-op assets in fall of 2020. A sale that completely bypassed the democratic controls that were supposed to keep the member-owners in control of the organization.

Anyone founding a co-op around the ideals of democratic control and empowering member-owners needs to view the MEC story as a case study. It lays bare the perpetual temptations of greed and power and the reckless pursuit of growth over sustainability.

It also has suspicious parallels to the way that certain world powers destabilize countries that are of particular interest to them. I am not sure if that is due to an actual conspiracy (highly doubtful) or just an unfortunate primary effect of North America's approach to conducting business.

Or, in other words, don't let business-brained hudsuckers have an ounce of control. They'll ruin everything on their quest for short-term gains as their grubby hands vie for more and more power.

For a co-op, or indeed any viable long-term business, you want sustainability and stability. Don't hand the reins to people who have an internal drive for growth at all costs in order to score a huge exit.

To Live the Dream, First You Must Dream the Dream

I dream of a future where the people you do business with are primarily interested in doing right by you. They go into business to provide their services for the customer's success and the health and well-being of their community and the world at large. They want their business to be long-lived and stable.

In short: I dream of a world where the corporate equivalent of property flippers are resolutely unwelcome.

Co-Op Housing

Speaking of property-flippers, the cooperative model has also been used successfully for housing. In many areas that face housing pressures, a co-op approach allows people to get housing that is affordable and delivers greater value than equivalent non-co-op housing.

Housing pressures can have various causes, such as limited land area for development, but most often the cause is a mixture of speculation and greed. This usually includes landlords, developers, property-flippers, and nonresident real estate hoarders (a specific breed of landlord that is particularly responsible for such issues).

Co-op funding models allow a collection of people to have far greater purchasing power for the initial land and development costs. As the property ages, the co-op is attentive to maintenance and collaboratively ensures that everything is taken care of properly.

In Closing ...

We live in a world, you and I, where corporations think they can abuse their customers & employees and get away with it because Wall Street pumps up their stock price, while their execs get sky-high bonuses and golden parachutes.

I don't think I can change that. But that doesn't mean we have to tolerate it.