I agree with Chris Cook that this endeavour would be much more likely to get serious consideration from the press and Twitter community if it were being led in partnership with Twitter employees. Maintaining a platform like Twitter is no small feat and building a business model that can sustain the platform over the long term in the highly competitive social media landscape is a complex undertaking that could only be plausibly executed by people with deep knowledge of Twitter's operations. Ignoring these practicalities will make this effort look naive to the press, Twitter's users, shareholder and employees IMHO.

So, if Twitter were to be a multi-stakeholder co-op, what would be the optimal worker consumer ownership split? 50/50? Something else?

Or could it make sense to split the business into a worker and a consumer co-op with a strong contractual relationship. The consumers own their data, and hire a worker co-op to maintain and improve the infrastructure on which they deploy said data. The old '70s-era food co-ops used to functionally work that way. An assembly of household cluster reps would meet with the worker's collective on pick-up day each month to make decisions.

My understanding of B-Corps was that they were a certification body, but not in themselves a business model, ie. not a model for incorporation. So we could be a co-op that is also a certified B-Corp. As for multi-stakeholder cooperative structure, i see this as necessary. With a member class for consumers, workers, and then probably at least one additional class for investors.

I advocate a complementary & participative approach through the use of a US LLC framework.

Rather than raising an enormous amount of dollars to buy out existing shareholders (ie Buying Twitter) the existing Twitter Inc would be absorbed into an LLC vehicle which will transform legacy Twitter Inc into a sustainable Twitter Utility.

Phase One - Resolution LLC (Caterpillar)

• BuyTwitter sets up Twitter LLC and Twitter Coop

• Twitter Inc and Twitter Coop become Twitter LLC Founder Members.

• some or all existing managers & staff transfer to Twitter Coop

• existing Twitter Inc revenues allocated proportionally between Twitter Inc and Twitter Coop

Phase Two - Transition LLC (Chrysalis)

• new Twitter strategy & business model developed by Twitter Coop and agreed by Twitter Inc.

• Twitter Coop members receive basic reasonable remuneration plus agreed % share of surplus value created.

• Active (risk-friendly) investors invited as Investor Members to cover this remuneration and other implementation costs in exchange for a % share of surplus value created.

Phase Three - Utility LLC (Butterfly)

• Twitter Utility has a long term sustainable utility return.

• Long term passive (risk averse) investment by new LLC Investor members directly in Twitter utility revenues.

• Passive investment enables all legacy Twitter Inc investors and transitional development investment to obtain an optimal outcome.

Just to be clear here, the proposal we're offering here is not to define a transition for Twitter, but to encouage the company to merely study the options.

Good point, @ntnsndr - carts and horses and such... ;)

In any case, I just bought my 1 share of Twitter before the 3/30 deadline so I can participate however minutely in the vote... :)

Friends, this is a friendly reminder about our organizing call tomorrow – Wednesday, March 29th at 10am Pacific Time.

If you want to get more involved, please RSVP at https://goo.gl/forms/36Bewf2Y64Wm2Wux2

We hope that long-time volunteers who have more context and hold more vision can join us!

Is there a way similar to robinhood and loyal3 to buy shares from Europe?

I was wondering that! Maybe @acyment found an option?

Great! I just bought stock to support the cause!

I was travelling and unable to participate in the recent conversation. I feel strongly enough about the proposal as drafted to have Blocked it (never done that before - there's always a first time)

I feel strongly that to specify 'User-owned' is unnecessary and rules out ab initio other forms of Co-op such as a Platform Cooperative co-owned by users and other stakeholders such as staff and management in particular.

Experience of sizeable user-owned Co-ops in the UK - particularly in recent years - has been negative, in that they invariably become corporate in behaviour (eg in treatment of staff) and run for the benefit of management, privatised or worse. cf Coop Bank.

So I would be happy to support this proposal if the phrase 'user-owned' is deleted because its use closes off Co-op options which IMHO could be left open and explored at no cost to the proposal.

Thanks, Chris. I appreciate the concern.

Good news: The phrasing has already been changed to make the idea more open-ended, if you look at the revised petition at https://wearetwitter.global

@chriscook1 @timothyamcdonald I would just note that this proposal is quite open-ended, and it doesn't preclude employee ownership as part of the mix. In a document we're preparing for shareholders, we encourage considering employee owners as part of the process.

However, Twitter generally has a well-compensated, highly skilled workforce who have not so far expressed grievances about a potential sale, as users have. The company also has the data of hundreds of millions of users who have no say in the fate of that data. Users also represent a capitalization opportunitiy (which is crucial for making the case to shareholders), while the employee pool is likely not large enough to do so. I think it's strategic to emphsize users in the publicity (which needs to be as simple and direct as possible, appealing to the broadest number of people), but in the details to make sure that employees are part of the conversation as well.

In the event that this isn't satisfying to you, @chriscook1, can you specify what you intend with your block? That nobody in this group should be participating in supporting the current shareholder proposal? A block is obviously very serious, and so it's crucial that we understand what your intention is, given the ongoing progress and process of this campaign, rather than simply using it as a form of protest vote.

@ntnsndr Naturally the Twitter user base is a great place to look for investment, and I take your point about employees.

Simply put, provided it is clear that ownership will be democratic but will not be exclusive to users - which is how 'user-owned' speaks to me - I'm cool and withdraw the block.

@chriscook1 the shareholder proposal has already been submitted, so it cannot be changed at this point. Further, it was not a project of this group, per se, but of individual TWTR shareholders whose efforts this group is supporting. What they submitted will appear on the ballot as is. What we can change currently are the documents we use to publicize and advocate for the proposal, and we can certainly propose multi-stakeholder structures in those.

What does everyone think about the new Mastodon network that has just hit the headlines this week?

There's actually a sub-group in our community that is working on developing social.coop as a Mastodon instance: https://www.loomio.org/g/ibncxoDR/social-coop

Really enjoying mastodon, and am involved with the project @ntnsndr mentioned above. If we win the #buytwitter vote, the design thinking going into that project can probably be excellent grist for the feasibility study. If we don't, then we have a #PlatformCoop landing pad for everyone who was inspired by the vision of a co-op Twitter and disappointed by its ownership class' priorities... :)

Agreed. I'm thrilled to see social.coop emerge as part of this effort. Depending on the outcome of the vote, we'll find a strategic way to incorporate the two.

Happy May Day, birdies!

After Twitter published our proposal a couple weeks ago, #BuyTwitter got featured in dozens of articles and hundreds of tweets from an incredible range of groups – the Pirate Party, Union Square Ventures, Anonymous, and more. I'm grateful to all of you for adding to the energy and helping channel it into real outcomes: new analysis, a webinar, an FAQ for skeptics, a website, and more articles.

Now, we have 4 weeks left in our home stretch. Voting closes on May 22 at Twitter HQ. Before then, we have a lot of options to boost our chances of winning: targeting shareholders, boosting our web and social media presence, planning a Bay Area meetup, writing a coalition letter, and more.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, at 11am Pacific let's talk about how we win, and what feels most worth doing.

RSVP and add to the agenda here: https://goo.gl/forms/K39KKlWLnNNNIxcW2