 
Date: Wed, 01 Apr 92 01:28:43 EST
From: wce@hogbbs.scol.pa.us (Bill Eichman)
Subject: Last Entry?
To: +dist+~js9b/Public/camc.dl@andrew.cmu.edu
Message-Id: 
Organization: The Heart of Gold BBS, Lemont PA
Comments: Validated

Hi, all,

Well, it looks as though this mailist may have died the quick death. Too
bad.

I am going to research the possibility of starting an electronic
magazine devoted to this topic. So, hopefully, those of you who are
genuinely interested can continue to participate.

Jon, I'd appreciate it if you gave me some details of the mailist
software, the number of members, etc....

Here's another bit of flotsam from my files on this topic.....

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pioneering the 21st Century--summary--Bill Eichman wce@hogbbs.scol.pa.us
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organization, Documents, and the Village Corporation

-------------------

Our goal, then, is to produce a community with the efficiency, security,
and profitabilty of the modern corporation, combined with the emotional
warmth, ecological soundness, and creative intimacy of the traditional
tribal village.

There are four ways in which we can organize these new villages that can
accomnplish these goals, and at the same time avoid the problems that
have plauged intentional comunities in the past:

(1) The For-Profit Incorporation

    (The typical projected form of these proposed corporate villages,
    especially once the first experiments have been performed, and the
    first bugs worked out of the plans.)

(2) The Non-Profit Incorporation

    (Presumably the first corporate villages will be non-profit, run as
    experimental test-models, with a fair proportion of community
    capital invested in recording, measuring, documenting the corporate
    experiments, and publishing reports, tapes, and software to help run
    future communities [or to warn off others from a bad idea, if the
    data so indicate].)

(3) The Incorporated Church

   (In the US, and in some instances, it may be a good idea to
   experiment with running these communities as a "religion", in effect
   forming a Church of Planet Earth to teach a new way of life.)

(4) The Employee-Owned Partnership

   (Smaller comunity experiments could be formed with minimal paperwork and
   rather more informality and risk, using the unincorporated
   partnership format, in effect creating an employee owned business
   most of the time, though true partnerships may also be used.)

.....And, of course, several more informal possibilities, which include:

(5) Private Club

   (Just like it sounds, a casual, non-documented association--
   presumably most village experiments will start as essentially private
   clubs of interested people.)

(6) Scoff-law Private Organizations

   (A private club, or documented organization, that builds communities
   on land that it owns without consulting with local governments or
   paying building code fees, or a nomadic village, and similar scoflaw
   activities.)

(7) Outside-of-the-law Private Organizations

   (A private club, by definition not documented, that forms such a
   village by squatting, or just taking remote federal land, or uses
   other methods to stake out a land claim and build a 'secret'
   community.)

-----------------

The essence of the corporate village exists in two documents-- The
corporate constitution and the employee-stockholder membership contract.
Together, these two documents turn these group efforts from unorganized
communal experiments to clearly defined entreprenuerial businesses.

The corporate constitution is ratified at the very beginning of the
corporate tribes existence, and is in effect simply the articles of
incorporation and bylaws typical of any conventional corporation
adapted to the needs of a businees fused with community living.

The membership contract is negotiated with each new member, prior to
their formal entry into the corporate tribe, and it spells out the
expected responsibilities of the new member, and the corresponding
responsibilities of the tribe. It also describes specifically the 'exit'
proceedures to be used if the relationship between new member and tribe
do not work out.

-----------------

A typical situation might be as follows-- The Pan-Earth Corporation
(;-}) is meeting with prospective new members, a couple, married and
pregnant. The male is an archtitectural student, with experience in
plastics manufacturing, and the female has experience in retail
management. They agree to sign a contract that will eventually give them
three shares apeice, and three more for their future child, plus an
option to sign up for more shares. The shares themselves would
ordinarily sell for 2500 dollars apeice, a price established by the
board of directers of the corporation, subject to approval vote by all
voting members. The new members agree to pay 500 in cash up front as
partial payment for their shares, and agree to perform ten hours of
labor a week, above and beyond the ten hours required of all members
whatsoever, labor of profit to the corporation to pay off over time the
rest of the money they owe for the 9 shares. The contract has a five
year duration, and an interest rate comparable to the rate on borrowed
dollars is applied to the "sweat equity" being agreed upon by the new
members and the corporation, and the precise work hours are calculated
at an agred rate, and otherwise properly amortized over time, so that
the new members can see for themselves wether or not the contract is
completely fair.

Provisions are made for a 'more-rapid-than-anticipated' payback, in the
event that the members want to switch, after training, to more valuable
work, and thus pay back the remainder more quickly. Likewise if the
couple decides to buy the shares outright.

Provisions are also made for the calculation and payback of the
investment that the new members risked in the event that the new
members decide that this particular corporation is not for them.
Naturally, this includes some calculation algorythms that protect the
community by deducting from the investment the value of the benfits that
the new members have recieved while they lived in the community, using
community housing and community facilities.

In this contract the community describes the type of housing that it
guarentees, the benfits such as access to education, use of the business
incubator facilities, health insurance, and other values that the
community offers to the new members as the "special rights" that
shareholder status confers.

---------------------

The design of these contracts will be a special concern of the first
community experiments. Ideally, in time, an expert software package
would be generated that would include clauses for almost all
possibilties, stored in a database, and ready to be custom adapted to
the specific needs of nearly any corporation-and-member negotiation.

Following are several examples of the types of contracts that we are
suggesting:


(Specific Contract Forms inserted here)

---------------------


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