Guild

A guild is a mutual support society of entrepreneurs who are skilled tradespeople. They have existed in almost every society, historically to train apprentices and regulate the entry of competitors into a new field.

A guild, like a consultant or faction or union, brings certain pre-defined ISO 9000-like job description templates into new projects, and so can much simplify the creation of a service model.

A guild may also enforce various levels of restriction over particular type of skilled labour in some context. This can sometimes amount to a monopoly. In the modern world, guilds mostly retain power in fields where there is a very strong reliance on some specific infrastructural capital. For instance, there is a strong Screen Writers Guild, and it retains its power largely because there are a limited number of movie screens in the developed nations whose activities are easily monitored and monopolized.

Free software also amounts to a kind of guild built around a common software license and its viral license and required reintegration. See bad copy problem for some of the issues that have arisen in that context.

See w:guild for more details.

Some guild or guild-like provisions for instructional capital management may have to be applied to achieve good distributed Consumerium maintenance. Distributed Consumerium probably can't evolve without some group of people strongly committed to breaking down Central Services into some globally distributable trades that people in developing nations can do for themselves.