[defrost]

Yep, that's the US (sadly) where apparently any form of social policy, general cooperation, long term planning, etc. gets torn down under the guise of equating to communism.

Weirdly, CBH is almost equivalent to a US style company in many ways - just that the major shareholders are all equal voting co owners with skin (well, land) in the game.

Which is very different to what an IT / programmer collective might look like - the assets are the intangible skills and knowledge that members bring to the table.

We (Australia) also do Men's Sheds which are often co-op type structures - place for blokey types to hang and build stuff as they get older - some of their projects can get largish in scale.

* https://mensshedswa.org.au/

* https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/mens-sheds/about-mens-she...

There's certainly room and scope to drag a few NAS boxen and community services (photo archiving, free to air public broadcast mirroring and on demand streaming, drone mapping and GIS path maintaining, etc.) into local area Men's Sheds.