When I wrote the piece for Shareable, I tried to give CS the benefit of the doubt. But, as I said, I have very little trust in any sort of self-enforced notion of "corporate responsibility." If CS is determined to grow and do good and is for now ahead of the enforceable law, then hopefully they can be a major force in pushing B Corp legislation forward. But structurally, a program that relies on a for-profit to regulate themselves, well, we know how that ends up... Malcolm Harris Shareable.net On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 10:28 AM, robin <[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 1, 2011 at 6:01 PM, Michel Bauwens < [email protected]> wrote:
thanks Robin ...
in theory, a B Corporation is not such a bad thing, no, as it is and remains dedicated to a social good?
I don't know. I haven't researched much into this B-corp thing.
Though there is something interesting here in my opinion, which is that CS will be employee-owned. But how this will relate to voting-power we don't know yet.
The employees will have more voting power than the two investors, but how the division will be and how much they can vote for (if it is only the board or example) is publicly unkown.
And we don't know either how the shares are distributed among the employees (equally among employees or not, etc).
As always has been the case with Couchsurfing, there is more we don't know than what we do know :s
The 5-year sage of Couchsurfing purposely misinforming the community continues: Couchsurfing: "This structure legally allows us to put our ideals before our profits." (try to read that sentence again).
And yet Couchsurfing is not even a registered Benefit Corp (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcorp), but still a normal C-corporation
http://www.bcorporation.net/index.cfm/fuseaction/company.report/ID/5e086197-...
Corporate Structure: C Corporation Ownership: Private
See als: B Corps is Not a New Legal Form
http://charitylawyerblog.com/2011/01/15/b-corps-is-not-a-new-legal-form-by-k...
See also the discussion on the CS-group http://www.couchsurfing.org/group_read.html?gid=45507&post=10059584
Robin.
-- Life happens at the level of events, not of words