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Make soup, soap, snacks or drinks and exchange them with others, Trade second-hand items, team up to bulk buy groceries, share a large appliance, start a tools library, learn from each other or come up with your own form of mutual support!
Each pocas is collectively owned by its participants! Spaces operate as open-source systems where value flows & rules of operation are transparent and democratically governed by those actively involved.
Protocolitos are small voluntary agreements to coordinate action. These are as unique as each collaboration and can work together or independent of each other. Protocolitos follow principles of individual autonomy, self-determination, subsidiarity, and restorative justice.
Anything from a shelf on the street to a large warehouse can become a pocas. Each space develops its own specialties related to their locality, surrounding communities and culture.
Diverse modes of exchange allow people to offer what they have and find what they need free of charge or accounted for in internal credits, external money or both. Whether you cook, craft, teach, repair, listen or contribute in any other way, there's something you can do that someone else wants!
Transform successful initiatives into enduring cooperatives supported by the wider pocas network.
There's no fixed membership at pocas—people belong through participation, contributing as much or as little as they want. Each person's involvement across different protocolitos defines their role, rights, responsibilities, and how they're rewarded.
Connect with others through a local network that doesn't use the internet. Use distributed, secure and private software for your accounting and keep your data in communal computers that keep pocas autonomous, resilient and interlinked.
Bottom-up voluntary funds that people create to manage shared surplus and common resources. FoCos can be used to increase the capacities of a group and to provide support for the development and maintenance of shared digital, financial and legal infrastructure.
Increasing the capabilities of your local pocas supports the entire network! Rely on the specialities of other spaces to supplement yours and support the establishments of new pocas through FoCos. Together we can scale mutual aid to become a convenient alternative to capitalism.
A collection of FoCos aimed at supporting members to develop documentations, wikis and archives with old and new resources that can aid members in producing the things they require to fulfill their needs.
read more →FoCos (Fondos Comunes) are bottom-up voluntary funds that people create to manage shared surplus and common resources. FoCos can be used to increase the capacities of a group and to provide support for the development and maintenance of shared digital, financial and legal infrastructure.
read more →A collection of FoCos focused on providing associated pocas and their participants with collaborative financial services for different purposes like insurances, grants, loans, shared accounting, rotating credit associations, commitment pools, stablecoin issuance and p2p fiat exchange.
read more →A collection of FoCos providing support for the development and maintenance of the software and physical components of the cybernetic system. This includes the mesh network infrastructure, the pocas communal computers as well as the open-source modules for the pocas app.
read more →A collection of digital and physical systems that augment pocas with software for the management of data, inventories, shared infrastructure, accounting, exchange, communication and other computing services. Pocas digital layer exists mostly in local networks of nodes, communal computers and user devices not connected to the internet.
read more →Highly specialized decentralized collectives who research, produce and source the goods and services that become essential for a majority of pocas. These include things like nixtamalized flour, water filtration, legumes, cereals, oils, chemical precursors for hygiene and cleaning products, fermentation starters, natural medicines and others.
read more →Autonomous economic spaces where participants can engage in gifting, helping, sharing, borrowing, selling and serving each other with unique exchange systems and diverse units of account.
read more →Distributed collaborative structures that receive contributions towards maintaining the general systems that serve more specific activities. Support fronts include: Bases, Transport, Software, Communal Compute and Communication.
read more →Shared infrastructure such as machines, equipment or tools that are owned collectively, as well as goods and services that have been decommodified and are governed communally.
read more →Groups of people that collaborate around shared purposes. Some form temporarily for specific tasks while others formalize to sustain production and ensure quality. Each group defines its own level of commitment, structure, and shared responsibility.
read more →Protocolitos are small voluntary agreements to coordinate action. These are as tiny and flexible as required and can work together or independent of each other. Protocolitos follow principles of individual autonomy, self-determination, subsidiarity, and restorative justice.
read more →There's no such thing as a membership at pocas, instead people contribute to different spaces, creating their unique form of belonging to pocas. This means costs, payments, rights and rules depend on each person's participation and engagement.
read more →
There's multiple fruit trees in the vicinity of this pocas, including those in people's yards and the nearby streets. There's mangoes, bananas, guavas, tangerines, oranges, limes and lemons. A few roles are needed for this protocolito. Tree-keepers make sure the tree is in good shape, free from pests and receiving enough water and sun. Harvesters make sure to pick-up the fruit when it's ready. Transporters from the support fronts bring the fruit to the pocas or other locations.
Offering different fruits for people to take home, eat right there prepared with lime, chili and salt or used as the source material for other processes within pocas.
A collective offering by individuals and groups that processes fruit into pulp concentrates, essential oils, pigments and dehydrated snacks.
A sharing library (cosa-teca) for cooking and lab equipment, mostly used by groups from the concentrates plural market to make their products.
Thanks to the pigments made out of fruits and flowers from the vicinity, a few groups have formed to contribute to the communication's front of this pocas, printing paper material and packaging for various purposes.
A point-of-sale for the decentralized candy guild Dulce Dolor, who produces masochist spicy, sour and salty candies. They acquire some essential oils, concentrates and dehydrated fruit from this pocas, and pay back with a portion of the candies they produce.
Pocas is a research project at the intersection of distributed computing and alternative economies. It is inspired by centuries of self-governance, mutual aid and self-organization, as well as decades of free software, p2p networks, cryptography & distributed ledgers. Pocas investigates how recent advancements in distributed computing could make old and new mutualist economic practices viable, efficient and convenient. In the process, it maps the existing organizations, practices and technologies that could make this a reality today.
As a manifestation of this research, pocas uses economic science-fiction to imagine the culture and systems of a network of autonomous mutualist spaces set in an alternative version of contemporary Mexico City. In this pluriverse, organized communities utilize social and digital technologies to coordinate and cover their needs in collaborative ways. pocas appropriates the affects of speed, virality and efficiency of the ubiquitous capitalist self-service convenience store model to propose a mutualist mutation of convenience. By leveraging distributed computation and cryptography, pocas speculates systems that scale the coordination of mutual aid, solidarity and local economies to provide a competitive alternative to capitalism. By rendering this world possible today, and charting a possible path, pocas seeks to join those currently working for the reappropriation of the collective means of self-sustenance.
Pocas is inspired by cultures, technologies and practices from various domains including the commons, platform cooperativism, mutual-aid networks, collaborative finance, complementary currencies, counter-economics, financial activism, distributed ledger technologies, p2p, informal economies, black markets, piracy, self-governance, democratic-confederalism, autonomism, mutualism, anarcho-syndicalism, agorism, anti-colonial resistance, indigenous autonomy, feminism, cybernetics, post-web, lunar/solar punk, and other related practices.
Today, capitalism dominates our culture of economic organization. It permeates through the intimacy of our social relations and scales to the size of the largest infrastructure projects of humanity. It is also in a relentless state of expansion, privatizing value in the hands of a few while offering precarious conditions to an alienated rest. All of this without any capacity to account for planetary boundaries and social impact which are all considered 'externalities' to be dealt with by governments and civil society. As a continuation of colonial and imperial power, racial-capitalism allows a global extractivist system to perdure through global corporations and the complacency and protection of Nation-States and the law. But non-capitalist organizing in the form of families, friends, community support, reproductive labor, care work, environmental activism and the commons have underpinned the material conditions of our societies for centuries. These other cultures of economic organization have existed for thousands of years, enabling communities to support each other in local, communal, democratic, sustainable, and non-exploitative ways. Non-capitalist organizational cultures all around the world like tequio, Rotinonshonni (Iroquois) economy, Islamic Riba, Mwerya, chamas, to name just a few, have provided different means for communities to collectively provide their own sustenance long before capitalism existed, and some still do today. There's also other practices of non-capitalist economic organizing, many of which have emerged as a reaction to capitalism, as is the case of cooperatives, timebanks, mutual-credit systems, community currencies and solidarity primitives.
Some of these practices have been present for long in what is considered Mexico: Indigenous and communal self-governance, anti-colonial resistance, social revolution, land collective ownership, student organizing, queer liberation, feminist collectives, environmental activism, solidarity economy, cooperatives and a rich 'informal' sector including street food sellers, a vibrant culture of piracy, knock-offs and clones. Each one of these carries rich historical baggage, exists in a complex context, and responds to varying adversity degrees. While a thorough analysis of these practices exceeds this text's scope, one point is clear: People living in Mexico are no strangers to navigating the complexities of para-statal conflict, organized resistance, self-governance and parallel economies.
Historia del Mutualismo en Antorcha Virtual, Mutualismo en Revista Conjeturas Sociológicas, Carlos Illades, Hacia la república del trabajo (México, 1853-1876)
Pocas places a substantial bet on the potential of digital technologies to aid social coordination in ways that were not feasible just a few decades ago.
Ubiquitous, powerful computing hardware like mobile phones and affordable entry-level computers
The maturity of open-source software offering high-quality tools cheaply or free
Access to advanced cryptography for secure and private communication
Recent developments in peer-to-peer networking and distributed computing for cost-effective system scaling
A parallel programmable network of financial services enabled by cryptocurrencies and web3
A renewed interest in the potential of accounting and credit from a network-theory perspective, as demonstrated in the Commons Economy roadmap and the CoFi (Collaborative-Finance) movement.
These factors converge at a moment in time, making it ideal for a range of innovative forms of economic interactions, collaboration, and ownership models that can be embedded with postcapitalist values. Ultimately, the wager is that self-organization, aided by these technologies and cultural shifts, will prove to be more efficient, desirable, and humane compared to the harsh, alienating, colonizing and extractive capitalist, state, and corporate systems that currently dominate our organizational landscape.
Pocas leverages distributed computing to mash existing alternatives into an interoperable network so they can scale and replicate beyond their individual limits. By combining different practices pocas accelerates mutualism, just fast enough to offer a competitive alternative to the capitalist model of self-service convenience.
This project is developed within this economic and political context, capitalizing on shifts in political economy and technology and melding the potential of ubiquitous computing with practices of non-capitalist organizing.
Seize the means of self-organization! People organize at pocas through protocolitos. Protocolitos are tiny voluntary agreements people make to facilitate collaboration, they can describe anything from a mutual-credit plural market system to a soup recipe. Protocolitos are specific to each collaboration, and can be used independently or in coordination with others. Protocolitos can be a combination of loose norms, strict procedures, common practices, game rules, code, shared units of account, common interfaces or specific accounting mechanisms. These help keep activities safe, algorithms open, accountability systems transparent and help participants to easily contribute to projects and to create and follow voluntary agreements. Protocolitos are effective when they increase reliability and facilitate contribution while adding as minimal friction as possible. Keeping things working and agreements nimble is fundamental for scaling local economies to levels that can compete with capitalist counterparts without turning the commons into an alienating bureaucracy. Protocolitos enable formalization without standardization.
Protocolitos are:
As tiny as possible.
As unique as each collaboration.
Respect people's individual agency.
Describe how to contribute.
Can be changed by the participants.
Distribute responsibility.
Reveal implicit power relations.
Recognize care as essential.
Avoiding becoming bureaucratic.
Embrace adaptability and interpretation.
Inspiration: Guilds, Liberating structures, holocracy, pattern language, the tyranny of structurelessness, Sociocracy 3.0, Design Justice Network, schema.org
'Space' within pocas is conceptualized as encompassing both the physical and the digital worlds, creating a cybernetic space where each one is constantly informing and updating the other. Understanding pocas through cybernetics makes pocas efficient and simplifies its operation and it also fosters innovative conceptions of what pocas fundamentally 'is.' It supports a fractal understanding where each participant can be seen simultaneously as an individual, part of a collective, and contributor to a space. Likewise, each store is viewed both as an autonomous entity and as a node within a network of spaces. This perspective facilitates a variety of interactions based on perspective such as person-to-person, person-to-collective, person-to-pocas, pocas-to-pocas, and pocas-to-network. In practice it provides digital systems associated with specific physical components, including:
Inventories cataloging offerings at each exchange space.
Repository of protocolitos
Management of reservations to track the use of shared infrastructures.
Bulletin boards and calendars for tracking events and other essential information.
Digital decision-making systems that supplement in-person assemblies.
Management of collective funds and ensuring operational transparency.
And much more!
Moreover, the physical/cybernetic concept of space within pocas allows for the inception of a pocas space to operate even in the absence of permanent physical infrastructure in the form of fairs, phantom pocas, and maquinitas.
Inspiration: Cybersyn, Viable Systems Model, Metagov, Decidim, Towards an anarchist cybernetics, Against "Decentralization", Cooperativism in Mexico
The phantom pocas is a popular strategy for kick-starting a pocas community and its services before securing a permanent physical location. These provisional systems take advantage of pocas' digital infrastructure to organize person-to-person exchanges, establish delivery networks, coordinate bulk-buying, and create makeshift exchange spaces in streets, car trunks, doorways, and home garages. Phantom pocas look a lot more like itinerant trade. But, although these physical setups are temporary, their digital counterparts provide lasting support. Thus, a phantom pocas enables local communities to begin shifting away from reliance on traditional capitalist stores, steering the flow of goods and services towards postcapitalist production. This also paves the way for potential FoCo funding to rent or acquire a permanent location for a store in the locality of the phantom pocas. By the time a physical store is established, both the community and various systems are already operational, smoothing out the challenges typically faced in the early stages of opening a new store.
In certain instances, a phantom pocas can even lead to the closure of a nearby capitalist store, creating an opportunity for pocas to take over the space. Utilizing existing capitalist storefronts has significant benefits: these spaces are typically of appropriate size, located in familiar areas, and immediately remove a capitalist competitor. To address the impact on employees who lose their jobs due to the closure of these stores, pocas should offer support. Those previously employed on a wage basis could be eligible for additional compensation from the new pocas store, such as a covered membership fee, a loan, or a job opportunity.
The confusingly also named Fantasmas are fully or partially autonomous self-driving vehicles assembled with recycled electric bicycle and motorcycle parts which perform different delivery, transport and phantom pocas actions in public space or in-between pocas. These phantoms bring goods back and forth between stores, deliver packages to pocas members and accompany deliveries in larger convoys.
Maquinitas is a common name for all forms of urban furniture part of the pocas network. These can take the form of lockers, fridges, vending machines and other secured storages where people can quickly get packages, drinks, food and snacks
Ambulates are individual pocas members who carry some pocas goods to sell in their pocas vicinity. A specific type of ambulante, the tortuga (turtle) are retrofitted electric pick-up trucks slowly driving at walking speed to promote and offer some of pocas finest luxury goods.
Anti-capitalist protest in the form of alternative markets where participants use public space to display their economic activities and organizational structures. Protestianguis can take the form of a peaceful demonstration, an itinerant market and anything in between. Protestianguis aims for participants to engage in economic activities in a temporal space, gather for planning and to share their postcapitalist experiences with people around them and as a way to garner further community involvement.
A pocas store is a space large enough to contain the minimum requirements of a permanent location. It consists of:
Water filtering system
Water boiler, coffee maker & tea kettles
Gender-neutral toilets and showers
Fast and secure internet access
Places to sit
Tables to work
A 'pocas-node' (a computer serving as a p2p node for that particular pocas)
Spaces for deliveries of the transport support front
Shelves, racks, display walls and refrigerated space to start some spaces of exchange
A few mobile devices for members who don't own one
While the pocas might seem a bit empty at the beginning, it compensates for it with its potential for growth! The first step is offering people the opportunity to spend time in a pocas and get to know each other, discuss their needs and start planning for the future.
Inspiration: counter-economic action, informal economy, pirate media, tianguis, ambulantes, freedge, mercado alternativo
Common infrastructure includes all tools, appliances, devices, gadgets, furniture, and spaces within a pocas that are owned collectively. Different things at pocas have different sets of owners, ownership models and protocols for distributing access.
People can gift, borrow or offer to exchange equipment or infrastructure that they own personally, so it can instead be owned collectively. Additionally, communities can decide to purchase things from non-members too. In all cases, software facilitates the calculation of costs relevant to collective purchase and operation. Focos can form for people with money to offer others 0% interest loans, allowing members to gradually pay for collectivizing infrastructure.
Space is highly valued in pocas, and there should always be an effort to balance the areas designated for production with those set aside for storage and product display. Smaller pocas often prioritize areas for exchange, while larger ones may afford a broader range of collective infrastructure for production purposes. Generally, collective infrastructure proves most beneficial when it supports activities that a wide range of members can engage in. However, pocas also have the option to specialize by acquiring specific infrastructure and tools tailored to particular needs. Maintaining spaces for exchange is essential for a location to be classified as a pocas rather than a MUCHAS. Yet, in some instances, a MUCHAS may in fact have spaces of exchange and therefore also act as a pocas, and vice versa, depending on their setup and the facilities they offer.
Virtual labels are a central element of the pocas cybernetic system. These are QR code stamps and plastic tags that can be attached to physical goods to enable a layer of digital metadata. A virtual label only requires a name for the product or service and a public or private list of members with their respective proportional contribution for its creation. But it can also contain much more! Information like descriptions of a service or ingredient lists, nutritional facts, allergy notices or use recommendations of a product. Even additional information like stories of origin, branding, a short video or links to external sites.
Labels are all the time re-used, recycled and overwritten. One can easily associate an empty virtual label with a physical tag by scanning the QR-code or inputting its ID and composing or choosing a previously existing virtual label. This information can easily be updated or reset so tags can be reused after a product has been consumed. When bringing a product to pocas, you can either create your own custom packaging or use a reusable or recycled container. Any bottle, jar, tupperware, bucket or recipient can be fitted with a tag, making it readable to the system and reusable!
Virtual labels also help to keep the spaces of exchange easily navigable, both digitally through the app and in the physical space through augmented reality. Open your camera through the pocas-app and all tags will turn into their virtual label counterpart when on view! No need to keep your pocas too tidy, cameras that oversee the spaces of exchange constantly read the QR codes in the tags to create a mapping of the location of each thing inside the store.
Inspiration: Fab City OS, Dyne, Sursiendo, Rancho electrónico, Kommunitin, Cybernetics library
Pocas considers private property as illegitimate and views rent as a form of capitalist exploitation where value is extracted from those who actually render the space productive through their work, presence, and active use. Therefore, a primary objective for a pocas store is to obtain full collective ownership and control over its established location, either through purchase, or occupation, depending on the context and the legal circumstances of each site.
Different collective ownership models are possible for a store, it could be owned either by the participants of the pocas, or by a larger FoCo in the form of a syndicate with other multiple pocas.
Inspiration: cooperativa palo alto, Syndikat, Community Land Trust Network, Radical Routes, Project Equity
Most pocas spaces have a computer on site acting as a local node in the network. Participants can decide if they want to run a very light node and do their computations in a more decentralized manner, or to have a more powerful node that can act as a high storage, high bandwidth, always-on node that can offer additional computing services for the network. Community projects around the local node can grow into assembling local supercomputers out of recycled hardware donated by members. Communal computers can become nodes in other p2p networks, web3 protocols or fediverse communities. Communal computers can also be shared by members for processing of local data and for members to use for computational experiments like data analysis and local AI deployments.
The pocas app is the heart of pocas' digital infrastructure. It is not really an app but a collection of open-source services and modules that facilitate interactions between contributors and pocas. Each space uses only modules relevant to their operation and, subsequently, each member uses only the modules relevant to their particular interactions with pocas. Therefore, each app is different for each person interacting with the system. Examples of uses are:
Displaying a personal dashboard with status, balances, involvement in groups and guilds, etc.
Keeping track of offers in different spaces of exchange.
Allowing people to manage reservations to use common infrastructure.
Facilitating access to the shared digital resources from the common knowledge archive.
Enabling diverse forms of decision-making, supporting both in-person meetings and asynchronous coordination.
Connecting members to the services and governance of different FoCos.
Inspiration: holochain, Secure Scuttlebut, ActivityPub, neighbourhoods, p2pcollab, urbit, Loomio, Anytype, folk interfaces, spritely goblins, Radicle, HTMX
The majority of the pocas digital infrastructure does not connect through the internet. Instead, it operates on a mesh network infrastructure using interconnected routers and mobile devices that function as replicating nodes and data relayers. This creates a private local network accessible only to people within its range. The pocas app is designed as a "local-first" application, meaning members own their data and share only as much data as necessary to interact with the system at each step.
Pocas spaces are equipped with nodes, covering their physical location and its vicinity. Neighboring members are encouraged to join the communal computing support front by taking the role of replicator nodes. In practice, that means to set up their own nodes on balconies and windows, extending each store's network coverage. Ideally, with sufficient members installing replication nodes strategically, the network of a specific pocas store could encompass the entire local community it serves and could eventually connect with other pocas stores' local networks.
Furthermore, members' mobile devices function as relayers of data, allowing drivers and commuters from the transport support front to assist in maintaining communication between different pocas stores when passing by or delivering physical goods.
Relying on a mesh network instead of connecting through the internet is part of pocas' effort to re-localize its physical and digital operations to the territory it is placed at. This considerably decreases reliance on privately or stated owned infrastructure, increasing privacy and security. It is significantly more resilient to intentional or accidental internet outages and allows people to interact with the network through devices even without a cellular connection.
Even if the majority of pocas internal digital infrastructure operates through a mesh network, pocas stores offer high-speed and secure internet to their members in each store through maintaining a VPN enabled network, assisting members in TOR usage and other privacy-preserving technologies.
Certain pocas services are still reliant on a global internet connection, such as some of the FoCo's operations with cryptocurrencies, and the fetching of new and relevant information for the Common knowledge archive.
Pocas local nodes and their clients can look very different from one another, but an usual practice is to have one or more repurposed computers running Linux, usually NixOS or Guix, and serving a local network with a software stack based on a Goblins Runtime (Guile Scheme) and a simple HTMX-based UI. Thanks to NixOS, new nodes can be added to the network by replicating the node's configuration to create redundancy and scale beyond the immediacy of a physical store. On the user-facing side, the approach is to use Hypermedia principles in combination with an object capabilities implementation, in this paradigm the interface is the capability, meaning people only see or interact with the capabilities they've been granted access to where each hypermedia interaction invokes specific capabilities in a secure, distributed fashion.
Inspiration: Local-first, HATEOAS, p2pCollab, Post-web, Permacomputing, Altermundi, Libre router, REDES, freifunk, guifi, Communal Computing, TIC OMV and Wiki Katat, Espora, Yanapak, Laboratorio de Medios, principle of least authority
By leveraging familiar aesthetics and accessible tools such as marketing and branding, pocas proposes a postcapitalist approach that speaks to a broad audience in a language they are familiar with.
Pocas instrumentalizes its radical approach by promoting self-determination, collective ownership, democratic decision-making, financial transparency, and individual agency as competitive advantages over traditional capitalist modes of production, which often rely on deceptive marketing tactics, value extraction, and limiting the agency of individuals to the narrow confines of the consumer role. As such, pocas challenges capitalist convenience stores not just on a commercial scale but also at the systemic level. It does this by offering an entirely different set of social and productive forms of economic engagement. Therefore, the mutualist values that make pocas unique become market-differentiators that distinguish pocas from competitors. The overarching premise is that pocas can capitalize on people's disillusionment with capitalism to advance a postcapitalist economic project.
Inspiration: ad busters, post-branding, venture communism
The support fronts are a fundamental part of keeping pocas running as a network. These distributed collaborative structures receive contributions towards creating and sustaining the basic shared infrastructure that most pocas rely on to function.
People that run and maintain local nodes at pocas or at home to provide local computing power to people in the pocas network. The pocas software runs on a local mesh network that is not connected to the internet, but instead distributed among local participants.
A distributed network of programmers, users and non-technical contributors maintaining the software used by different pocas.
Distributed communication group creating, publishing and distributing public-facing materials to promote pocas, its services and those of its adjacent organizations. Pocas spaces are in constant need of good communication and design solutions to keep their stores accessible and useful.
A collection of protocols for moving physical goods throughout the city using a mix of recurring routes as well as opportunistic rides, micro-deliveries, community drop-off points and other tactics for moving things around. This front enables the pocas network with a distributed supply chain that embraces emergence to move things effectively and with minimal costs.
Inspiration: Feral Trade, Chaos post, FEX, Fahrwerk, CoopCycle, Messengerville, actinomy, anarchaserver, Cyberfeminism Index
A series of protocolitos based around exchanging goods and services. Things like plural markets, coop shops, libraries of things and free-stores allow for economic activity among members in informal and formal ways.
Pocas spaces and the pocas network as a whole rely on a diverse set of instruments and accounting mechanisms to aid in the creation and sustenance of a plural economy, from which fiat money is only a part of. The exchanges at pocas can go from gift to trust-based and non-accounted or can be accounted for in work hours, different internal credits, money or a combination of any.
By consistently participating in pocas, people are betting that their time and energy are better spent there than on a capitalist store. The more invested someone is in pocas, the more they rely on it for their self sustenance.
Plural markets are mixed-economy spaces where people offer goods and services to each other for internal credits, vouchers, time external money or a combination of any. From the outside it might look like a usual market. You can most likely come and buy something, while on the inside it looks more like a multi-barter system for participants. At a plural market one would find things like:
Products: beverages, food, snacks, frozen meals, drugs, medicine, hygiene and cleaning products, cosmetics, clothes, small appliances, electronics, cables, plants & gardening products, pet products, furniture, bicycles, art, trinkets, decoration, toys, etc.
Services: workshops, private lessons, reading groups, child-care, after-school activities, medical consultancy, electronic repair, tech-support & many more.
Plural markets serve simultaneously as a small-scale system to provide for one another and as the starting point of an incubator for independent collaborative organizations. Members can offer things they are already producing or start producing specifically for the plural market. People at pocas can, at any point, express their needs through an open offer. This creates a clear view for others of what they could produce. As production grows and products gain recognition and increase their quality, members have the potential to scale up their production capacity through the use of shared physical infrastructure and through assembling into working-groups or organs. Finally, if their offerings are very successful, members are encouraged to apply for investment from a FoCo to become an independent external organization that remains connected to the network.
Poco crédito (pc) is an implementation of a mutual credit system that can be used at plural-markets. Each market can have its own internal implementation of a pc system with unique rules and logic. It is a trust-based, hyper-local accounting mechanism that allows members to engage in economic activity without using money by extending credit lines to each other.
New members join a plural-market with a neutral credit balance. Fulfilling someone's needs generates positive credit, while the other person incurs an equal amount of negative credit (debt). Therefore, every credit is counterbalanced by an equal and opposite debt, maintaining the sum of all debt and credit in the system always at zero.
The extent to which a member can incur debt or accumulate credit is primarily determined by the overall economic activity of the plural market and the individual's activity level on the plural market. Moreover, these credit limits can be collectively defined by the participants of each plural market. Generally, credit access is determined by trust in the member's ability to settle their debt or their willingness to spend the positive credit back to zero. New members typically start with tighter limits, which are progressively relaxed as they participate in the plural market.
Exchange rates for goods and services are user-determined. Different credit denominations lead to unique market dynamics. For instance, exchange rates mirroring those of a national currency would emulate traditional market dynamics, while simplified credit denominations (e.g., all products valued at 1 credit) would be more akin to facilitating a multi-barter system.
Plural markets can use time as their unit of accounting, therefore people are trading hours of work with each other. This benefits certain offerings like services, workshops, classes, therapy or care.
People can also turn their offerings into vouchers that can be redeemed for a product or service at a later point.
Members who wish to produce something regularly, are encouraged to offer a subscription system for other members to commit to acquiring their offerings on a regular basis. This allows producers to have clearer expectations on quantities, base-materials and the resulting positive credit, as well as minimizing waste. It also allows members to have clear expectations about their membership costs.
All transactions in the system are accounted for, yet, who bought what remains obscured. This way pocas assures the fairness of the system while maintaining members privacy!
There can be multiple, unique plural markets! Any member can create a new market or join an existing one when offering or requesting something. A plural market can focus on a specific good or service or encompass multiple.
A pocas could have plural markets dedicated exclusively to second-hand clothing, frozen food, or artworks, or it could be more general-purpose and encompass a variety of goods and services. Moreover, a single item can be offered in multiple plural markets at different exchange rates simultaneously! The plural market where the offer gets fulfilled first, cancels any active offers in other plural markets.
Each plural market operates its own mixed system. However, it is possible to bridge these systems through credit exchange or intent-based systems. A member could offer or request a specific amount of credits from market A as if it were a product within market B. If another member accepts, an exchange of credits is achieved.
The space each individual or collective can use is determined by the total available area, the number of participants, and their activity level. A member-controlled dynamic system ensures that popular products get the space they deserve while newcomers also get an opportunity. Special consideration is given to goods that require specific spaces, such as refrigerators for food or display walls for art.
At pocas, it's other members of pocas who assess the quality of offers. From casual feedback to full reviews, people expect good quality and care from their community.
Check your pocas app to see what people have signaled as needs, join the bulk-buy for the best possible price on ingredients and start by producing something from home. You can cook food, prepare snacks or beverages, make soap, detergent, cosmetics, simple remedies or anything you consider useful and bring it to the plural market. You can also offer services like amending clothes, fixing electronics, giving tech support, teaching workshops or whatever you feel competent at!
You have no idea what to do? Others are signaling a need for something but no one knows how to make it? Check the common knowledge section of the pocas app for a tutorial, ask a FoCo for a micro-grant to organize a workshop and assemble a new working group to produce it!
Your home production is at max capacity? People love your products? Invest in collective infrastructure at your pocas and form a working group to produce them at a larger scale! Got some surplus? Other pocas stores might be interested! You can offer your products at other pocas, exchange for something they have or simply sell it in their respective coop-shop.
Your products became an absolute success? You are at a limit on the space you can take at your local pocas? Then you qualify for investment from the FoCo to grow your business outside of the pocas to become an external organization! You will still benefit from some of pocas infrastructure, community and network, but you'll also be able to grow your business freely and sell more widely!
Inspiration: Mutual Credit Services, Complementary currencies & LETS, Timebanks, Grassroots economics, Collaborative Finance (CoFi), Anoma: Graphs and economic networks, Circles UBI, entropy, Trustlines network
Simple infrastructure for a gift-economy. A few shelves, a clothes rack and some space in the fridge. Bring anything you don't want and take anything you need, no questions asked!
A space meant for products people don't want to trade for mutual credit, things made by members from other pocas, external cooperatives, local family businesses, social-purpose companies or any business that is owned by their workers. The coop shop is a fundamental piece for pocas-to-pocas economic activity, as it allows for surplus of products from a pocas to be offered at another pocas or to have certain products constantly produced to be distributed among pocas. It is also a fundamental point-of-sale for products and services offered by different MUCHAS and external cooperatives.
Tools, machines, books, clothes and whatever members wish to offer to a common library of objects for other members to use at pocas or taken home for limited periods of time. The things you bring to the library of things remain yours! You are just lending it indefinitely to the rest of the members. Just as the open-markets, there can be independent libraries of things dedicated to specific goods, or they can be mixed. To become a member of a library of things simply contribute to it by bringing something suitable for it, afterwards you can already take something.
Inspiration: HerratecA, Caixa d'Eines i Feines, Haus der Materialisierung, Umsonstladen Altona, Biobulkbende, Darksoils plenty, Uptrade, Shareitt
There's no such thing as a membership at pocas, instead people contribute to different spaces, creating their unique forms of belonging. Different resources are accessible to different people in exchange for different things depending on their personal involvement and particular arrangements.
Sporadic customers, visitors, tourists and people who don't want to become contributors can all engage with pocas in limited ways: They can buy some things from plural-market and most things from the coop-shops with money and they can join some workshops, parties or other activities deemed open to the general public.
Pocas reimagines the traditional concept of 'jobs' by framing necessary labor as a collection of tasks and roles described in protocolitos and performed by individuals and groups acting in fronts. Tactics like these facilitate the distribution of work in equitable ways. While very non-traditional, employment at pocas can resemble a blend of permanent positions, recurring jobs, and project-specific tasks. When something needs to be done at a pocas that nobody can do participants can opt to hire external contractors.
Tasks in pocas are discrete activities with clear beginnings and ends. Examples include cleaning the toilets, repairing the water filter, onboarding new members, DJing at a party, updating the inventory system, organizing community events, or conducting a workshop. These tasks can range from routine maintenance to creative or social engagements, offering a variety of responsibilities.
Roles are groupings of tasks that are logically connected or benefit from continuity in management. For example, a person working in the bases support front might be responsible for maintaining the safe-space environment, which could include conflict resolution, ensuring inclusivity, and monitoring overall member well-being. A pocas caretaker might oversee the overall functioning of the store, handling minor repairs, coordinating with external contractors for major issues, and ensuring the smooth operation of daily activities. These roles allow individuals to take on consistent responsibilities while also adapting to the dynamic needs of the community.
Inspired by Parecon (Participatory Economics), pocas adapts the principles of “balanced jobs” and “compensation for effort” to determine the distribution and compensation of the multitude of tasks that make-up the entirety of labor needed to sustain a pocas store. The concept of balanced jobs aims for a fair distribution of tasks, mixing those that are fulfilling and empowering with those that are monotonous and less desirable. The principle of “Compensation for Effort“ complements balanced jobs, allowing for the formalization of the characteristics of different tasks and the affective quality of performing them. Each store has the autonomy to decide the specifics of how to measure effort or sacrifice, the only important thing is being conscious of formalizing a differentiation based on these factors.
While this doesn't imply that everyone will perform every task or that all tasks will be rotated, it highlights the importance of balancing different types of tasks to create a more equitable workplace, while still respecting expertise and specialization. Determining the necessary tasks for each pocas and balancing them is each store's responsibility. To facilitate this, each pocas should a) compile and constantly update a comprehensive list of all tasks and roles, making it accessible to everyone via the pocas app, and b) collaboratively evaluate the difficulty and desirability of each task to establish appropriate compensation. Special attention needs to be given to identifying tasks and roles that extend beyond conventional work definitions, including reproductive labor, care work, and organizational tasks, ensuring they are recognized and fairly compensated.
The measurement and compensation of tasks can vary, with different tasks benefiting from different assessment methods. Often, tasks might have a fixed price, or their completion could be recorded as hours worked. For example, time might be a suitable measure for the labor involved in preparing a workshop, but it may be less effective for conducting the workshop itself. The effort required can vary significantly based on attendance size, even if the workshop's content remains the same. In such instances, a compensation model based on the number of attendees might more accurately reflect the effort and provide fair remuneration for the facilitator.
Inspiration: Parecon, Platform cooperatives, DisCO, DAOs & Coops
Pocas' care-takers are people who spend a lot of time in their pocas and become central members of the community.
Care-takers might be involved in many tasks like making sure the pocas runs well, keeping it as a safe space, onboarding new members, supporting working groups, reporting malfunctioning of infrastructure, performing small repairs, etc. The specific tasks of the care-taker role are dependent on the unique characteristics of each pocas.
Multiple care-takers can be present at the same time and rotate daily, since pocas are usually open 24/7. They can collectively decide on how they distribute their time and how much they want to work.
To become a care-taker one must be an active participant of pocas with a significant time of involvement, as well as undergo a capacitation in emergency response, first-aid and conflict resolution.
People at pocas can create and wear a mascot costume to stand outside and promote their pocas! Mascots have become a huge factor in pocas' culture, they play a big role in bringing visibility to the store and onboarding potential new members. Mascots also usually perform security tasks when necessary.
The creation and maintenance of a safer space, along with self-determination are fundamental concerns at pocas, given that pocas do not rely on police or any state-support for conflict resolution. At the same time pocas aspires to a frugal structure, with a minimal bureaucracy that respects people’s time and agency. While each pocas can determine their own way of dealing with governance, safety and conflict, there are some principles that most pocas share:
Each member of a pocas is regarded as an autonomous individual with the agency to make personal choices and establish their own ethical and behavioral standards. They are trusted to exercise this autonomy responsibly and with respect for the autonomy and safety of others.
Each pocas is recognized as having the authority and ability to govern itself. This recognition of self-determination promotes a sense of ownership among members and fosters responsibility towards the community.
Pocas follows the principle of subsidiarity, stating that any social and political issues should be dealt with at the most local level possible, and should only scale up when it cannot be resolved at that level. This means that most decision-making in pocas happens independently within each group, organ or collective and the particular system used by that group. The only general rules all members of a pocas need to agree are the terms to acquire and retain a membership.
When a conflict scales to the point of requiring mediation, affected parties, trusted members, and any interested individuals in the community may participate in a discussion to determine the best course of action. These discussions are not a trial, but an open conversation focused on understanding the situation, the harm done, the possible outcome and the necessary steps to prevent similar situations in the future.
Sanctions for rule-breaking behavior are not one-size-fits-all, but are graduated based on the severity of the offense and the people involved. This ensures that punishment remains a last resort, and that there is fairness in the treatment of rule-breaking behavior.
Pocas emphasizes processes which allow the person who has caused harm to understand the impact of their actions and to participate in deciding how best to repair that harm. It's an empathetic approach that prioritizes healing and reconciliation over punishment.
As an aspiration, but not necessarily a rule, most sanctions that limit the agency of a member should also establish a path of redemption for that member, so that they can regain full rights as members.
Locations inside pocas are fitted with cameras that, among other things, record live video and audio on-site. These video files are divided into 10 minute intervals and encrypted in a multi-signature vault controlled by all members. This means the footage is encrypted and unwatchable by default and is only accessible under specific circumstances. All present members can request access to a video, notifying other present people in the process. Each person is generally limited by how many recordings they equest, and generally an explanation of the request is advised. This respects the privacy of individuals while ensuring safety within pocas.
Inspiration: Zapatista Local Autonomous governments, restorative justice, anarchist organizing, Black Panther's Free medical clinics, Democratic Confederalism, Community Rule, 8 Principles for Managing A Commmons, Disambiguating Autonomy
Groups whose products or services become particularly successful and require significant space or resources in their respective pocas spaces are encouraged to evolve into a MUCHA (Modelo Utilitario de Colaboración Heterogénea Autónoma). This transition allows them to expand as an external organization, cooperative business or project beyond the limitations of a pocas store, while maintaining strong integration within the pocas network and access to FoCo services. The incubation of MUCHAs emerging from pocas is crucial for the postcapitalist transition envisioned by the pocas system.
A beneficial outcome of members transitioning to a MUCHA is the liberation of space within the store, making room for others or welcoming new members. MUCHAs originating from a pocas have the flexibility to remain as involved with the network as they wish. This can range from using the pocas' coop shop for sales, to offering tasks, roles, and services to members, entire pocas stores, or even the broader network. Some of pocas most successful MUCHAs are:
Saltaharinas is a semi-decentralized cooperative that specializes in producing high-protein flours and food additives by processing insects, focusing primarily on grasshoppers and ants. They provide open-source guides and ready-to-assemble kits for anyone interested in starting their own small-scale insect farm, whether at a pocas store or at home. Members can then trade their harvested insects with Saltaharinas' processors in return for finished products, equity, credit, or cash. Saltaharinas also shares recipes and how-tos for turning these bugs into various flours, snacks, and supplements. This opens the door for larger cooperative workshops to join the network as producers. Processors distribute their output to reward the farmers, supply different pocas, and even sell directly to the broader public market.
Dulce Dolor is a decentralized guild for enthusiasts of small, spicy treats, particularly candy. From mild delights to extreme, masochistic experiences, Dulce Dolor's broad open-source culture of candy-making offers something for everyone. Gaining entry into the official guild is challenging, given the high standards expected of producers by consumers. However, through consistent quality and building a good reputation, Dulce Dolor gradually expands its membership. Members typically work in small groups or individually, leveraging the shared brand for recognition, reach, and as a mark of quality. Not all candy makers associated with Dulce Dolor exclusively produce candies under its brand, though some do. Staples like quemalenguas, bombilocas, and espiropicos are well-established, but new candies are often introduced in 'drops.' A drop marks the debut of a new recipe and the first official batch of a new candy. Depending on how well these are received, other guild members may reproduce, remix, transform, or experiment with the original recipe. If a candy becomes highly popular, it might join the roster of regular offerings.
The Trans+Feminist Pharmacy is a collaborative initiative involving various working groups across pocas dedicated to bodily autonomy through the support of communities of self-diagnose and mutual care. The pharmacy acts as a broad repository of resources and tools for various collectives, decentralized laboratories and other initiatives. Among other things the pharmacy documents the small-scale production of open-source drugs, medicines, and pharmaceutical products for transition, contraception, sexual health, lactation, abortion, menstruation, menopause, hormonal treatments, and preventive medicine, including early detection of conditions such as endometriosis and breast cancer.
Pocas aguas is a grassroots collective dedicated to enhancing community self-reliance through the capturing, filtering and treatment of water in the city. Harnessing the simplicity of DIY methods and repurposed materials, this initiative stands as a beacon of practical sustainability and autonomy. With a focus on purifying water they provide accessible, open-source blueprints enabling any community member to build their own filters and systems from readily available resources.
Máquinas de hogar is a collective of various groups focused on the development of open-hardware home appliances. Rooted in the principles of participation and self-sufficiency, Máquinas de hogar organizes hands-on workshops where individuals come together to build a variety of essential household appliances from kits—ranging from blenders and toasters to microwaves, ovens, water boilers, coffee makers, stoves, fridges, and vacuum cleaners. Beyond just assembly, they have built a culture of sustainability and shared knowledge through repair parties, where community members learn to maintain and fix their appliances, extending their life and reducing waste.
Vegetales con patas is a cooperative laboratory dedicated to experimenting with vegan meat substitutes using legumes. This inventive collective specializes in crafting credible textures that mimic the consistency of fictitious animals they describe as part of their products. Through a blend of culinary artistry and scientific experimentation, they pushed the boundaries of plant-based cuisine, offering a playful and delicious alternative to traditional meat products. Members collaborate in research, development, and production, sharing their creations under a shared brand that guarantees quality and innovation. Their range includes a variety of textures and flavors designed to appeal to vegans, vegetarians, and curious carnivores alike, all while fostering a sense of community and creativity in the realm of sustainable eating.
Armamente is a decentralized open-hardware armory specializing in the creation of light projectile weapons such as slingshots, bows, and crossbows, easily crafted from recycled plastic, 3D printers and readily available PVC piping, and rubber. Promoting resilience and self-reliance, Armamente members constantly improve and share new detailed blueprints with all pocas, empowering them to manufacture their own defensive tools to safeguard their autonomy.
A decentralized collective of engineering teams specialized in retrofitting cargo bikes and ingeniously crafting affordable self-driving cargo vehicles from upcycled materials like discarded trash and DIY components. This grassroots initiative is vital for facilitating the autonomous transportation of goods between pocas, enabling a sustainable and interconnected web of local economies. These self-driving unique vehicles are commonly known as phantoms.
A collective of doctors, therapists, psychonauts and other health and physical culture enthusiasts exploring conscious bodily habitation and the vast potentials of natural medicine. With a rich spectrum that encompasses everything from traditional home remedies using plants and mushrooms to the frontiers of psychonautic exploration with psychedelic drugs, therapy medications, nootropics, microdosing practices, and nutritional supplements, Cuerpo raíz has a holistic approach that combines healing and personal discovery. Through rigorous research, community workshops, and shared experiential knowledge, the collective aims to offer individuals the tools and understanding needed for self-directed healing and the expansion of consciousness. At the heart of their mission lies a commitment to rekindling humanity's ancient bond with natural remedies and pioneering new pathways in mental and physical wellness that are both transformational and grounded in a deep respect for the natural world.
Highly specialized decentralized collectives who research, produce and source the goods and services that become essential for a majority of pocas. These include things like nixtamalized flour, water filtration, legumes, cereals, oils, chemical precursors for hygiene and cleaning products, fermentation starters, natural medicines and others. Primary providers are composed of a mix of MUCHAS and other external producers who are willing to provide goods and services to the pocas network in exchange for things at pocas.
Inspiration: Anarcho-syndicalism, Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, Morras help morras, Precious Plastic, tamarind candy, defcad, open source ecology, openStructures, upcycling, Exodus: General Idea of the Revolution in the XXI Century, re:Mix
The FoCos (Fondos Comunes) are bottom-up voluntary funds that people create to manag common resources and shared surplus. FoCos are created to support specific purposes, they can be as small as a two-person soup making group looking to buy equipment to increase their production, or as large as multiple pocas spaces getting together to provide support for the development and maintenance of shared digital, financial and legal infrastructure among a set of pocas stores.
While FoCos define their purpose collectively, each participant retains full autonomy over how to allocate their share of resources toward that purpose. You can act alone, pool funds with others for larger initiatives, or simply save them for future use. This structure removes the need for majority approval, encouraging contributors to voluntarily pool or decide autonomously.
The common knowledge FoCo aims at supporting members to develop a digital archive containing old and new resources (generated by members or documented from the internet) that aid members in producing the things they require to fulfill their needs. The hope of the Commons Knowledge FoCo is that this is a shared endeavor among pocas and constantly expanded upon. This archive includes tutorials, recipes, troubleshooting guides, manuals, and any other well organized resource that aids in the production or maintenance of goods and services relevant to pocas. Members can apply for funds from the FoCo to create high quality documentation of processes, tutorials and instructions that they've come up with or improved. It also includes a comprehensive guide of various open-source business models ready to be deployed by members. Things like small-scale mushroom and insect farming, tortilla making, recycled plastic object production, meat-substitute production, bicycle maintenance workshop, mobile devices repair and many more. These open-source plans contain a mapping of inputs and outputs needed, including outputs that are considered 'waste' but which could become material sources of another plan. For example, frying food creates significant oil waste which can be taken as an input by a different member or to make soap and detergent. In this way, communities can collectively plan for supply-chains that are efficient and relevant to their endeavors. Some of these documentation of production processes even include insights on initial and running operation costs, with estimates on return of investment so that members can make informed decisions about what's accessible to them in terms of time and financial investment.
Inspiration: Appropedia, Whole Earth Catalog, Dynamic Archive, Con nuestros propios esfuerzos, technological disobedience, right to repair, Knowledge Hub
The CoFi FoCos focus on providing associated pocas and people with collaborative financial services for different purposes like insurance, grants, loans, shared accounting, stablecoin issuance and p2p fiat exchange.
Pocos pesos (pp) is an implementation of a stable cryptocurrency whose financial value is pegged to that of the Mexican peso. It is backed one-to-one by reserves of Mexican pesos held by the FoCo. Using pp instead of mexican pesos for the internal operations of pocas allows for ease of management, reduced transaction costs and full financial transparency, as well as acting as an interface between a national currency and the broader Web3 space and services, particularly those in the Decentralized Finance and Collaborative Finance space. Pocos pesos are turned into Mexican pesos only when the counterparty requires a payment in national currency, for example to pay for the rent and utilities of a store or if any person working for pocas determines they require a portion or all of the payment for their labor to be paid in national currency. The FoCo takes care of paying for the rent, if applicable, and utilities for each shop, to reduce the bureaucratic burden of financial operations for each individual shop.
FoCos can be used as cooperative funds with reserves in Mexican Pesos or any cryptocurrency and used in either traditional or DeFi infrastructure that allows pocas to invest in different financial products. A popular FoCo operates as a cooperative hedge-fund investing in postcapitalist infrastructure and shorting the stocks of capitalist self-service convenience stores, effectively tying part of its success to the demise of their capitalist counterpart.
The CoFi FoCo offers multiple mechanisms to recognize and support valuable contributions by members, such as grant programs, loans backed by community trust, retroactive funding, continuous dependency funding, qua patronage systems and others.
The FoCo aids in the governance of a form of decentralized multilateral credit clearing, where pocas utilize a system of mutual credit to settle their balances among stores, also known as a multilateral offset. This system works by keeping track of the balances between pocas, every so-often, the decentralized algorithm runs and finds loops of debt between stores with the objective of settling between them with the least amount of fiat currency needed. Each pocas can decide if they want to recall their positive balance into their local fund, move it to the FoCo or leave it there for the next cycle. Such networks require less cash for operations, streamline accounting processes, and reduce the reliance on banks. This aspect is particularly pertinent for the pocas network, which aims to be efficient and agile in its financial operations, minimizing the necessity to settle debts in national currencies as much as possible.
Inspiration: MTCS, EthicHub, RobinHood Coop, FairCoin, Sardex, Lunarpunk Squadwealth, Interfacer, ECSA, Local Loop Merseyside, Mutual credit services, Commitment Pooling
This FoCo focuses on supporting the development of the digital systems (and their corresponding physical counterparts) which serve as the cybernetic layer of pocas. This includes the mesh network digital and physical components, as well as the modules for the pocas app. The development of these pieces of infrastructure is supported by the FoCo through various programs, including retroactive funding, development grants and salaries for main contributors and maintainers. One objective is making sure that development of modules are generalized to serve as many use-cases as possible, even outside pocas, while being conscious of supporting the particularities of each case. All of the software is developed and released as free software and relies on a global community of contributors.
Inspiration: Gitcoin, Retroactive Public Goods Funding, Continuous Dependency Funding, Quadratic Funding, Token Engineering Commons, Cookie Jars, Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA), Giveth, clr.fund, Drips