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Comment by tacoopcurious | Hacker News Reader

I'm happily employed but I still want to keep an eye out for interesting developments in the tech coop space for AI. The field being what it is these days, N people sharing knowledge, code, and (as permitted) data could handle N similar applied AI projects much more easily than 1 person could handle 1. Are there successful examples of this model anywhere?

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Not in the tech field but in the consulting space, both Crisp https://dna.crisp.se and Enspiral https://enspiral.com came up with interesting organisational structures that they've extensively documented.

The fact that enspiral keeps coming up as an example tells me that doing this right is really hard; if it were easy there would be more examples people would mention, no?

edit: I hope it's clear I'm not trying to diminish the efforts, to the contrary!

Here's also an interview with Richard Bartlett on the matter:

https://codepodcast.com/posts/2018-09-17-richard-bartlett-on...

And an episode from the General Intellect Unit podcast relating to this:

http://generalintellectunit.net/e/068-common-knowledge/

I think the difficulty in finding other examples is reflective of the "emergent"/"meta modern"/"systems thinking" space being extremely heady to this day. The people there are good at conceptualizing how to maintain a well running group horizontally, but growing one anew requires a different set of skills and traits. Chiefly knowing what's important right now, whereas the emergent thinkers seem to get lost in the weeds of their thoughts and big words.

That field is also, in my humble experience, in a bind. Very few people outside of the coach/consulting sphere seem to talk about this as fervently as they do. I think mass adoption will require the concepts to be attractive and simple to people who may not be ardent supporters of the cause quite yet.

There's also a whole contingent of people who have built orgs that already do this, they just don't advertise themselves and do their work.

I think the next step is to deeply integrate the concepts of Enspiral and such into organisational design tools. Something like murmur.com but with a super low conceptual barrier to entry, that makes it obvious what the next distributed leadership shift is for a given group. That's what I'm developing, if you're curious contact me :)

There’s a big online event on these types of collaborations happening later this week run by enspiral people.

People from many different organisations are attending, this stuff is definitely spreading.

https://www.doing.betterworktogether.co/

A pop up digital village for building equitable, collaborative, distributed organisations

Eleuther and LAION are close to being tech coops for AI, and have helped open recent AI developments (LLM and diffusion).

They aren't actually coops and really belong to just a few people, but they do show that an AI community can do good work.

Here in HN someone posted a GitHub repo with thousands of coops. Search for it, maybe they are some as your model.

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