Labs.

Guerrilla Media Collective

The OG DisCO LAB is Guerrilla Media Collective (or GMC, Spain/Berlin). Created in 2013, GMC is an activist communications collective and agency. The DisCO framework emerged out of GMC’s lived experience, and GMC has served as its testing ground.

Guerrilla Media Collective is a feminist translation cooperative with a strong focus on the commons. It is an international group of professionals dedicated to preserving the art of translation, using the cooperative model as a tool for providing sustainable, dignified and ethical work to those in the knowledge sector. Advocating for free and open culture, they’ve been pioneers in licensing their texts with the Peer Production License since 2013.

Guerrilla Media Collective cares for the humans that work on their translations and promotes the use of cooperative models as a fair and solidarity-based alternative in a sector so often plagued by precarity. The articles they translate are selected with intention and care, always with the permission of the author, and they translate them pro bono to make them accessible to a new audience free of charge.

In addition to their translation work, they document all of their organizational processes and results achieved that may inspire other activists and ‘game changers’ to take action. In this sense, Guerrilla Media Collective is a laboratory for creating governance models, a testing ground where we translate (pun intended) the principles of cooperativism and other sources of inspiration – the commons, P2P methodologies, feminist economics, alternative value models – into reality. This experimentation and activity ended up being the catalyst for DisCO.coop.