Your post about Emilia Romagna was very interesting!
Have you heard of the agile companies. It's an experiment made by american
companies working for the defense department. They try to use Internet to
build a net of subcontractors.
We have in France the same kind of organization in the moutains with
people working in what we call "decolletage" (it has something to do with
mecanics). These people used very early our minitel system to exchange
orders. This region (Franche-Comte) was also the region were Fourirer (the
socialist) was raised. Hence a question : does this kind of cooperation
come from very far in the past?
The organization of our farmers would be interesting to study. They
mutualised a lot of things within cooperatives and were also early users
of the minitel.
-- Bernard Girard <bgirard@Dialup.FranceNet.fr>