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Each pocas is collectively owned by its members! All stores operate with an open-source business model where finances & rules of operation are transparent and democratically governed by those actively involved.
Protocolitos are shared tiny protocols established by the people who use them. These forms of organization are as small and flexible as required and can work together or independent of each other. Protocolitos are inspired by game-rules and follow principles of individual autonomy, self-determination, subsidiarity, and restorative justice.
Each pocas starts with the basics: water, bathrooms, a local node, internet and a safe space. From here, people can start to bring things, acquire infrastructure and come together to serve their needs and desires. Each pocas develops its own specialties related to their locality, surrounding communities and culture.
Plural markets are mixed-economy spaces where people offer goods and services to each other for 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 needs! Earn a positive balance when someone takes your offerings and use it to enjoy what your community offers back.
Work alone, form groups or join organs, if your product or service becomes particularly successful and you wish to scale your production, you are eligible for funding to become an external organization closely connected to the pocas network and financial services!
Pocas transactions, accounting and governance are all augmented by distributed open-source software and practices of communal computing and mesh-networking. Each pocas customizes their local app according to their particular use and needs. Its development is financially supported by the FoCos and a global community of contributors.
There’s no such thing as a standard membership at pocas, instead people participate in different protocolitos, creating their unique form of belonging to pocas. This means costs, payments, rights and rules depend on each person's participation and engagement.
Get remunerated by working for your community doing as little or as much as you want. Work at pocas is distributed as collections of tasks and roles defined by its members. From permanent positions as a pocas caretaker, to routine jobs like delivery and cleaning, to sporadic activities like performing repairs and DJing at a party. There’s a lot to do at a pocas and it’s its community who's doing the work!
The FoCos (Fondos Comunes) are meta-organizations for pocas stores to come together to share resources, collect funds, trade with each other, share stake and initiate any joint activity. FoCos provide support for the development and maintenance of shared digital, financial and legal infrastructure among a set of pocas stores.
Increasing the capabilities of your local pocas supports the entire network! Rely on the specialities of other stores to supplement yours and support the establishments of new pocas through FoCos. Together we can scale mutual aid to become a viable alternative to capitalism.
A FoCo aimd 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.
read more →Meta-organizations for pocas stores to come together to share resources, collect funds, trade with each other using mutual-credit, share stake in each other and initiate other joint activities. FoCos provide support for the development and maintenance of shared digital, financial and legal infrastructure among a set of pocas stores and their members.
read more →A FoCo focused on providing pocas and its members with collaborative financial services for different purposes. The CoFi FoCo offers services like insurance, grants, loans, shared accounting, stablecoin issuance and fiat exchange.
read more →A FoCo with the aim of providing support for the development of the cybernetic systems, including software and physical components. This includes the mesh network infrastructure, the pocas communal computer as well as the modules for the pocas app.
read more →Poca’s digital systems become present in different interfaces like screens, visitor’s personal devices or by interacting with systems equipped with sensors, and cameras. These interfaces give access to the accounting systems and decision making of the protocolitos each person uses at their pocas.
read more →Plural markets are mixed-economy spaces where people offer goods and services to each other for internal credits, external money or both. Plural markets serve simultaneously as a small-scale system to provide for one another and as the starting point of an incubator for independent cooperative organizations.
read more →These economic spaces are better suited for goods and services that are either external to the pocas, to be given away for free or temporarily borrowed. The free-store is simple infrastructure for a gift-economy. The coop shop is a space meant for products people don’t want to trade for mutual credit. The library of things (cosa-teca) is meant for sharing tools, machines, books, clothes and whatever members wish to offer to a common library of objects for other members to borrow temporarily.
read more →Establishes the minimal services that a physical pocas store must provide when opening. Its main objective 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. While the pocas might seem a bit empty at the beginning, it compensates for it with its potential for growth!
read more →Members of a pocas are encouraged to come together and invest in shared infrastructure to aid in the production of goods and the offering of services. The pocas-app allows for easy calculation of the cost of purchase and operation of various basic modules and their impact on the dynamic membership of the members involved.
read more →A more formal, organized collective, often comprising multiple working groups that choose to formalize their collaboration to scale up production, acquire more space in their pocas’ spaces of exchange, and even sell their products in the cooperative shop of another pocas. Organs members benefit from more consistent labor expectations and standardized production and quality control.
read more →A low commitment collective of individuals united for a specific purpose. Examples include a one-time group assembled for a deep clean of their store, or a recurring group using pocas’ kitchen to prepare soups for exchange at the plural market. Working groups require minimal formalization which allows them to share profits and invest together.
read more →Membership in pocas follows a system of dynamic pricing, trust-based transfer and the granting of economic and political decision-making power. The base cost covers access to each pocas’ decommodifed offerings (usually water, internet and toilet access). Other than that, members pay only for the infrastructure and services they use.
read more →
Pocas compiles a collection of digital and physical organizational practices for local communities to engage in different mutualist economic activities to meet their needs in convenient ways. Pocas is inspired by old and new practices of organizing for autonomy and self-sustenance, and speculates on the potential of leveraging distributed computing, collaborative finance cryptography and free software to create local networks of cooperative economic activity. With accessible digital tools, cheap hardware requirements, playful systems and minimal rules, pocas facilitates the collective deployment of modular mutualist economies for local communities to meet their needs. These alternative structures can run intertwined, in parallel or even compete with capitalism, offering people the opportunities to redirect their time, wealth, and productive capacity toward communal social relations around labor, commodity production, and commerce.
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 population. All of this without any genuine concern for planetary boundaries and social impact which can all be considered ‘externalities’ that should 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 with the protection of corporations, Nation-States and the law. But non-capitalist organizing in the form of families, friends, community support, reproductive labor, care work, environmental activism and nourishment of the commons have underpinned the material conditions of our societies for centuries. These and 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 secure their sustenance long before capitalism existed, and some still do today. There’s also other practices of non-capitalist economic organzing, many as a reaction to capitalism, as is the case of cooperatives, timebanks, mutual-credit systems and community currencies.
Some of these practices have been present for long in what is considered contemporary 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 violent conflict, organized resistance, self-governance and parallel economies.
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. This includes taking advantage of ubiquitous, powerful computing hardware like mobile phones and affordable entry-level computers, tools for local manufacturing, the maturity of open-source software offering high-quality products 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, and 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.
'Space' within pocas is conceptualized as encompassing both a physical and a cybernetic layer, each constantly informing and updating the other. This approach means that the pocas app acts as the digital layer, linking a physical store with its virtual counterpart and the broader network. In practice it provides digital systems associated with specific physical components, including:
Inventories cataloging offerings at each exchange space.
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!
Maintaining a close relationship between the physical and the cybernetic layers not only makes the management of pocas more efficient and its operations simpler but also fosters innovative conceptions of what pocas fundamentally 'is.' It supports a holonic understanding where each individual can be seen simultaneously as a member, part of a collective, and an integral component of a specific store. Likewise, each store is viewed both as an autonomous entity and as a node within a broader network of multiple stores, facilitating 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.
[IMG isometric pocas and schematic]
Moreover, the physical/cybernetic concept of space within pocas allows for the inception of a pocas store starting from a cybernetic space, even in the absence of permanent physical infrastructure. This initial phase of pocas is what we refer to as the phantom pocas.
Inspiration: Cybersyn, Viable Systems Model, Metagov, Decidim, Towards an anarchist cybernetics, Against “Decentralization”, Liberatory Computing
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.
A particular manifestation of a phantom pocas 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.
Phantoms 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.
The minimum viable pocas established the minimal services that a physical pocas store must provide when opening. 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 the delivery network
Shelves, racks, display walls and refrigerated space for the basic spaces of exchange
A few mobile devices for members who don’t own one
The main objective of the minimum viable pocas 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. While the pocas might seem a bit empty at the beginning, it compensates for it with its potential for growth!
Inspiration: counter-economic action, informal economy, pirate media, tianguis, ambulantes
Collective infrastructure includes all tools, appliances, devices, gadgets, furniture, and spaces within a pocas that are considered collective property. Essentially, it encompasses everything in a pocas, except for built-in facilities necessary for the space’s operation, members' personal belongings and products offered in the exchange spaces. All members can reserve and use this infrastructure through the pocas app. All members can reserve and utilize this infrastructure through the pocas app. To ensure equitable access, usage time for items or spaces in high demand may be limited.
Pocas stores fill fast and space is their most valuable resource. Members are encouraged to offer items they already own to the pocas community, thereby converting them into collectively owned infrastructure. This contribution can offset the costs of memberships. Additionally, communities can decide to purchase things from non-members too. In all cases, the app facilitates the calculation of costs relevant to collective purchase and operation and their impact on members' dynamic membership fees. Purchases can be subsidized or supported with a 0% interest loan from the FoCos, allowing members to gradually pay for needed infrastructure through their dynamic membership.
The usage cost of an infrastructure piece is higher initially and decreases over time as it is used more. It's also more costly when new and becomes cheaper as it ages. As members use an infrastructure piece, they continue to contribute to its purchase and maintenance costs. Even after it's fully paid for, new users will contribute towards its historical cost, effectively reducing the membership cost for those who have already paid. The goal is for the cost of each piece of collective infrastructure to be shared fairly among its users. Some pieces of collective infrastructure can be regarded ‘as a whole’ to make management easier, so instead of considering each pot and pan a separate piece they can all be regarded as ‘the kitchen’. How to categorize and divide the collective infrastructure is up to the pocas members.
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 resemble 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. They allow the community to easily keep track of the goods and services offered, as well as have records of what is being consumed and how often (but not by whom!) - All through a mostly automated system!
Virtual labels are metadata associated with the offered goods and services throughout pocas. A virtual label only requires a name for the product or service and the list of members with their respective proportional contribution for its creation. But it can 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, a cute graphic with your own branding, a short video or links to external sites.
To associate virtual labels with physical products, we utilize QR-code stamps or ‘tags’. You can easily associate a virtual label with a tag by scanning the QR-code or inputting its ID and choosing a virtual label you have created before. 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!
[IMG Board of diverse posters with QR codes]
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 exact location of each thing inside the store.
Inspiration: Fab City OS, Dyne, Sursiendo, Rancho electrónico
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 use. Therefore, a primary objective for a pocas store is to obtain full collective ownership and control over its established location, either through purchase, seizure, 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 members of the pocas, or by a FoCo of multiple pocas. In any case, if members of a store collectively decide to start a property purchase operation, it might be supported by a FoCo 0% interest loan. Members would then establish a rate for payments as part of their dynamic membership cost.
Inspiration: cooperativa palo alto
Pocas stores 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 healthy economy, from which fiat money is only a part of. The main instruments of exchange at pocas are: poco crédito (pc) and pocos pesos (pp).
When members spend fiat money outside of pocas to acquire ingredients, tools or anything that will be then used for or at a pocas, one could think of that as a form of “transvestment” in pocas, as that money will likely not be paid back or see a return of investment in fiat. In practice, what this entails is that such members trust that their spent fiat money will be more valuable when supporting a local postcapitalist economy, and that the returns in terms of community self-sustenance will impact their lives more positively, than if they would spend it on a capitalist business providing an equivalent product or service.
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 members and the pocas systems. Each pocas chooses what modules are relevant to their operation and, subsequently, each member uses only the modules relevant to their particular interactions with pocas, ending up in a different experience for each person interacting with the sytem. Examples of uses are:
Displaying a personal dashboard with membership status, pc and pp balance, involvement in groups and organs, etc.
Displaying a general dashboard for all finances, maintenance costs and public economic activity in the store.
Keeping track of the open-markets offers, needs and the corresponding member’s credits.
Allowing members to manage reservations to use the collective infrastructure.
Storing and facilitating access to the shared digital resources from the common knowledge archive.
Keeping track of the status of the library of objects and the offers at the coop shop.
Enabling diverse forms of decision-making, supporting both in-person meetings and asynchronous coordination.
Connecting members to the services and governance of the FoCos.
Inspiration: holochain, Secure Scuttlebut, ActivityPub, neighbourhoods, p2pcollab, urbit, Loomio, Anytype, folk interfaces
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 members 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.
Each pocas store is equipped with a high-range node, covering approximately a 150 sqm radius around the store. Neighboring members are encouraged to perform the ‘replicator node role’ 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.
IMG [Street view with a pocas and antennas]
Furthermore, members' mobile devices function as relayers of data, allowing drivers and commuters 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.
Each pocas can have a computer on site acting as a local node in the network. Members 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. 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. Maintaining a communal computer can bring a small income to the pocas.
Inspiration: Local-first, p2pCollab, Post-web, Permacomputing, Altermundi, Libre router, REDES, freifunk, guifi, Communal Computing, TIC OMV and Wiki Katat
The delivery network is a simple system for members from different pocas stores to send and receive physical goods from one-another. Goods for delivery are made available as tasks within a pocas, so that any member can commit to delivering something to another pocas or to a particular location. Some self-driving phantoms can be part of delivery networks.
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
The four basic spaces of exchange (plural markets, coop shop, library of things and the free-store) allow for economic activity among members in formalized ways supported by the pocas app. They are the main economic pillars sustaining the local economy of a pocas.
plural markets are the main space of exchange at a pocas. They facilitate the exchange of goods and services through a mutual credit system, where members can offer and provide for one-another. At an plural market one would find things like:
Products: beverages, food, snacks, drugs, medicine, hygiene and cleaning products, cosmetics, clothes, small appliances, electronics, cables, plants & gardening products, pet products, furniture, bicycles, decoration, 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 cooperative organizations. Members can offer things they are already producing or start producing specifically for the plural market. 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 the FoCo to become an independent external cooperative organization that remains connected to the network. See MUCHAS.
Poco crédito (pc) is an implementation of a mutual credit system and is used exclusively at the open-markets. Each open-market has 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 based on a balanced production and consumption of each other’s offerings.
Members of a pocas can, at any point, express their needs through an open offer. This creates a clear view for other members of what they could produce for the plural market! Members can then produce something to try and satisfy that need, or just offer something else entirely!
New members join an open-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 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.
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 open-market or join an existing one when offering or requesting something. An 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 mutual credit system. However, it is possible to bridge these systems through credit exchange among members. 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 their opportunity to shine. Special consideration is given to goods that require specific spaces, such as refrigerators for food or display walls for art.
Grab an empty recipient or bring your own and attach a tag. You should also add the agents involved in its production, individual, group or guild and their proportional contribution. Others will see this information when scanning products and the proper credit and debit operations and allocations will be performed if your product is consumed!
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 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? Members 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 the 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 sell your products at other pocas 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 pocas coop! As an external coop emerging from pocas 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
These supplement the offers of the open-markets with economic spaces that are better suited for goods and services that are either external to the pocas or better suited to be given away for free or temporarily borrowed.
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.
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
Once there’s certain clarity over the usual products and services the community of a pocas needs, it becomes possible to try to expand pocas production to encompass the primary materials and ingredients that compose the products and services offered at pocas. This can be done in multiple ways, including incentivizing urban farming or extending the possibility of a membership to food producers in the store’s vicinity, as well as strategically investing in infrastructure to provide certain materials.
The terms for acquiring and maintaining a pocas membership are up to the members of each pocas, but generally speaking they follow a simple system of dynamic pricing, trust-based transfer and the granting of economic and political decision-making power.
Trust is a way of organically growing the members-base of a local pocas. Each member can extend a finite monthly number of invitations for new members.
Memberships have a dynamic pricing system. The base cost covers access to the basics: Water, internet and toilet access, other than that you pay only for the infrastructure and services you use. Certain activities, deemed valuable to the pocas, count towards the payment of your membership, things like working for pocas, sustained activity in any of the spaces of exchange or simply being present. Members of a pocas can also decide on certain status that waive or reduce the costs of memberships for children and the elderly, students, people with disabilities, homeless members or formally unemployed people.
If you don’t have time, energy or you simply don’t feel like spending time in pocas or getting significantly involved, don’t worry! You can always just pay a monthly fee in pp to retain your membership and use pocas services.
By being a member of pocas you acquire partial control over a portion of the funds that your local pocas accumulates. While you cannot use the funds for your personal needs outside pocas, you can individually decide how they are spent inside pocas. Multiple members can join forces to group their funds and spend them together, but if no collective effort is appealing to you, you can always decide individually or save them for later. There’s no majority ruling over the spending of collective resources!
Sporadic customers, visitors, tourists and people who don’t want to become members can all engage with pocas in limited ways: They can buy some things from the open-market and all things from the coop-shop using pp by paying a premium price and can join some workshops, parties or other activities deemed open to the general public.
Inspiration: Circles UBI, entropy, Trustlines network
Pocas reimagines the traditional concept of 'jobs' by framing necessary labor as a collection of tasks and roles. This system aims to modularize employment and facilitates the distribution of work in equitable ways. While employment at pocas can resemble a blend of permanent positions, recurring jobs, and project-specific tasks, members have the flexibility to execute these roles themselves or opt for 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, an awareness member 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
All tasks, roles and their respective applications from members who wish to perform them are visible to all members and decided upon collectively by those affected. Any form of work for pocas done by members goes first into covering the cost of their dynamic membership, then to settle a percentage of any outstanding debts they have in pp (not in pc). The rest is paid in pp with the possibility of exchanging it to a cryptocurrency or local fiat money.
Pocas’ most important position, it is both a role and a de facto representative position, as care-takers naturally spend a lot of time in their pocas and become central members of the community.
At any moment there has to be at least 2 care-takers whose tasks involve 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 rotate daily to work on pocas, since pocas are usually open 24/7. They can collectively decide on how they distribute their shift and how much they want to work.
To become a care-taker one must be an active member of pocas with a significant time of involvement, as well as undergo a capacitation in emergency response, first-aid and conflict resolution.
Everyday a couple of cleaning shifts might take place. These include tasks like: tidying up, cleaning the bathroom, washing and disinfecting recipients and taking care of machines that require regular maintenance. Any member can decide to cover these tasks. It can also be performed by care-takers if they have time.
People who own vehicles (cars, motorcycles, bicycles, etc) can choose to do routine drives for pocas for various purposes like weekly trips to bulk-buy ingredients for members at a large market, transporting products between pocas, picking up products for the cooperative-shop or delivering pocas products somewhere else.
People with development skills can contribute to their local pocas p2p app development, crashing bugs or adding new features.
People with competent knowledge can provide regular maintenance to the local pocas-node and other technical infrastructure of their pocas. Tasks in this role include things like assuring the internet is always running and safe to use or helping members set-up mesh-network nodes and supporting them in the correct functioning.
Pocas stores are in constant need of good branding, proper communication and design solutions to keep their stores accessible and useful. Organs and working groups need branding and communication work for their products.
Members of pocas can create and wear a mascot costume and get crazy outside to promote your pocas! Mascots have become a huge factor in pocas’ culture, it plays a big role in bringing visibility to the store and onboarding potential new members. Mascots also usually perform security tasks.
Things like repairing broken things or installing new infrastructure, doing tech-support, plumbing, electricity, DJ at a party, etc.
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, agreed upon by those involved in mediating a conflict. 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
Involvement in pocas can range from casual and informal to organized and formal. Members can engage in a variety of roles, jobs, and forms of participation, both individually and collectively. Some members work extensively within pocas, relying on it as a significant part of their livelihood, while others may participate only amongst themselves, visit sporadically, or engage in specific activities. Regardless of their level of involvement, all members are encouraged to organize in whatever way they see fit to fulfill their needs, whatever those are. Pocas systems are designed to be minimal and reliable, fostering diverse cultures of convenience. To this end, pocas promotes the documentation and sharing of effective organizational patterns created by members, encouraging a culture of learning and adaptation across different pocas. Organizational structures tend to be decentralized, with various groups within and across pocas performing similar activities and exchanging knowledge and resources, both material and informational. To maintain a wide array of organizational diversity, pocas employs classifications for individual members and groups, distinguishing between casual collaborations and more formal collective relationships. These categories allow for internal self-organization in any manner, requiring only minimal information to utilize pocas structures and services.
This category includes individuals acting independently, such as a person making soap at home to trade at an plural market.
A group represents a low-commitment collective united for a specific purpose. Examples include a one-time group gathering for a deep clean of their store or a recurring group using pocas’ kitchen to prepare soups for the plural market. Working groups need minimal formalization, allowing them to share profits and make collective investments.
An organ denotes a formal collective, often composed of one or more working groups that decide to formalize their collaboration. This can be to scale up production, enhance quality, secure more space in pocas’ exchange areas, or even sell products in another pocas’ cooperative shop. Members of an organ enjoy more consistent labor expectations and benefit from standardized production and quality control. Organs are eligible for specific FoCo funding aimed at research, product development, and documenting processes for the common knowledge archive. Organs can also extend across different pocas stores, enabling the production of more complex goods and services.
Each structure provides different levels of involvement and benefits, accommodating the diverse needs and contributions of pocas members.
Inspiration: Guilds, Liberating structures, holocracy, pattern language, the tyranny of structurelessness
Individuals, working groups, or organs whose products or services become particularly successful and require significant space or resources in their respective pocas store are encouraged to evolve into a MUCHA (Modelo Utilitario de Cooperativa Heterogénea Autónoma) with potential funding from a FoCo. 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 development of MUCHAs from pocas activities is a crucial aspect of 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. Continuously interfacing with the FoCo's financial services, MUCHAs play a vital role in sustaining the FoCo's liquidity. 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 dynamic collective focused on empowering communities through the mastery 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, CasaTech fosters 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.
CasaTech's approach demystifies technology, making it accessible and repairable by the very people who use it daily. By providing the tools, knowledge, and community support, CasaTech ensures that everyone has access to the appliances that make modern life convenient, without being dependent on expensive, proprietary options.
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 and other health and physical culture enthusiasts engaged in the exploration of 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 to healing and personal discovery. Through rigorous research, community workshops, and shared experiential knowledge, the collective aims to empower individuals with 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.
Some of these MUCHAs provide vital services to the pocas network as primary providers of goods and services at the pocas coop-shop. A crucial part of the pocas’ support for MUCHAS as it becomes a point-of-sale of products and services from the MUCHAS where pocas members and non-members can find offerings from different organizations simultaneously.
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
The FoCos (Fondos Comunes) are meta-organizations for pocas stores to come together to share resources, collect funds, trade with each other using mutual-credit, share stake in each other and initiate other joint activities. FoCos provide support for the development and maintenance of shared digital, financial and legal infrastructure among a set of pocas stores and their members. Any group of two or more pocas can start a FoCo, each pocas store can be part of multiple FoCos simultaneously.
FoCos can be seen as common backgrounds that pocas stores use to share or to do something in common. In practical terms, FoCos can take different shapes: A FoCo can be a cooperative business, which offers accounting or legal services to multiple pocas. A FoCo can also manifest as a shared account that holds funds to work on a joint project. Another FoCo can provide insurance to pocas and members. Some FoCos exist from the beginning, while others form, and disappear as the pocas evolves. The largest and most long-lasting FoCos are the ‘commons knowledge FoCo’, the cybernetic infrastructure FoCo, and the Collaborative Finance FoCo.
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 FoCo focused on providing associated pocas and its members with collaborative financial services for different purposes like insurance, grants, loans, shared accounting, stablecoin issuance and p2p fiat exchange.
Pocos pesos (pp) is the only monetary currency accepted inside and across all pocas. It 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. Pp is the only form of fiat-equivalent used to transact inside pocas and to do pocas-to-pocas transactions. Nevertheless, the use of pp is quite limited, as many of pocas operations are resolved through accounting mechanisms like Multilateral Credit Clearing (MTSC), mutual credit or simply, by not accounting for transactions as is the case with the ‘free store’ and the ‘library of things’ spaces of exchange. To do any pp operation in a pocas, like paying a membership fee or buying from the coop shop members need to convert Mexican pesos to pocos pesos in the pocas app through the FoCo exchange. 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.
Anyone is allowed to turn mexican pesos into pocos pesos to use at pocas but only members are allowed to exchange them back into mexican pesos.
Non-members can buy anything from the open-market and the coop-shop with pps, paying a premium on the price.
FoCos can be used as cooperative capital 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. What cycles to prioritize for credit clearing is a political decision and a matter of pocas-to-pocas governance. Businesses that engage in credit clearing can create a more favorable economic environment for small businesses. Such networks require less cash for operations, streamline accounting processes, and reduce banking activities. 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
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