In many cooperatives member involvement, contribution, and concern is roughly equivalent. For example a grocery cooperative has individual consumers as members, and there's very little meaningful variation in grocery spending between individuals.
However in an internet-based cooperative members might have extremely different amounts of involvement and concern. For example a cloud computing cooperative would have mostly businesses as members, some spending millions of dollars a year and others spending just hundreds of dollars. In an enterprise like that it would make very little sense for the member spending millions to have the same amount of voting power as those spending hundreds.
Further complicating this is the inherently variable nature of any internet enterprise. Since joining an internet cooperative should be as easy as joining any other service, we need a way of assigning voting weight that has a few properties:
- It doesn't allow swarms of bots to overwhelm the service and fraudulently effect its elections.
- It's fair, meaning members who have been stalwart contributors shouldn't have their voices overwhelmed by floods of members who barely contribute and don't really care (want to avoid "spam voting").
- It allows members to come and go in a way that doesn't unreasonably distort the voting systems. A large number of members joining in some burst of activity shouldn't create strange election problems.
Participation-based voting weight allocation satisfies these properties, and works like this:
- Members gain a voting "weight" for every cent/dollar they pay into the cooperative, either in investment or as payment for the cooperative's services. This means that members who actually use and care about the cooperative's services will tend to have more say over its long term trajectory.
- Voting weights decay over time according to some function, reflecting the fact that voting power shouldn't be eternal. If a member was once highly active in the cooperative but has since dramatically reduced their usage for whatever reason, their voting power shouldn't be as strong as it was. Members who have been very active for the last year are more invested and should have more overall say than members who were very active five years ago but aren't now. So, voting weights decay over time. The decay curve can possibly include a "cliff" where the decay doesn't begin until something happens.
Not all or nothing
It's important to note that participation-based voting weight doesn't have to be taken to its full extreme. A hybrid model could allow members to contribute substantial investment capital and so receive much larger amounts of voting weight at that moment, but also have much more "equal" normal allocations to members over time that are disconnected from how much they spend into the cooperative.
How voting weight is allocated to members over time is fully within the purview of the members themselves, based on what bylaws they choose. There are many possible models of voting weight allocation members could choose. Here are just a few possibilities:
- Fully spend-based, so members gain voting weight directly proportional to how much they spend into the cooperative. This will tend to prioritize the needs and wishes of those who are most active in the cooperative, which could be the most fair arrangement depending on the nature of the cooperative and who is a typical member.
- Fully spend-based, but weights are scaled quadratically, either when they are granted (
) or when they are placed ( ). This keeps the heavier weight toward larger contributors, but "dampens" it so very big members can be more easily outweighed by many small ones. - Spend-based but clamped to within a narrow range.
- Fully equal, so members gain exactly the same amount of voting weight every period regardless of their spend. Changing the shape of the weight decay curve allows changing how much preference there is for members who have been around longer.