Ask HN: Examples of tech worker cooperatives?

I tried to form a worker cooperative for IT workers a few years ago. I thought the idea of providing health insurance, 401k, business insurance and even a bench would be something my fellow engineers would be interested in since it was better than going it alone. As long as they knew that what they paid into the coop was going straight to the support of each other. Economies of scale and all.

But to do it you have to put up some cash to create that umbrella. The IT workers (my co-workers in many case) I spoke with were not willing to do that, preferring to take the higher risk of being a lone freelancer to participating in any kind of cooperative system.

I think people in the tech sector have a belief that they will always land on their feet and as hard as times can be, they want to maximize their earnings over everything else. And they mistrust organizations in general from both a pragmatic perspective and from being somewhat misfits themselves.

How the heck have these IT coops gotten started, then?

It's not really a tech workers coop.

Every co-op is different. Co-ops in general value the "wisdom of the crowds" and may be more proactive in seeking opinions of every member, but there are still hierarchies in place that have final decision rights.

This is how a lot of co-op living arrangements work. Everyone has a say, but the final decision is made by someone whose job it is to manage the health of the house.

By the way even companies can adopt some of these ideals without being a full-blown co-op. I have worked in several organizations where decision-by-committee is highly popular, and in each case, there are processes to prevent deadlock or processes for override if something starts to go badly. Usually these processes are triggered by very senior level individuals who have decision rights, or by regulatory experts (e.g., someone in Legal).

I've been exploring this space since 2010 and always wondered what it would look like if a tech co-op got as big as Facebook, Amazon, Google, or Apple.

I created an evolutionary economic model called Producism, which includes building an ecosystem of cooperatives and b-corps, alternative currencies, and other concepts. I wrote a book about it that's free to read online, http://producism.org/manifesto (updated version coming late May).

Our startup, Producia (screenshots of upcoming new version https://angel.co/producia), is implementing this new kind of economy on college campuses and local communities as a real-world social entrepreneurship game, that challenges players to kickstart and grow meaningful ideas into impactful businesses. We are a hybrid cooperataive (worker & member-owned) and instead of following a pure democratic model, we use the "Better Means Model" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdcAxGGRafc).

As far as raising funds for our cooperative, we are taking a creative approach. First, my founder and I are turning ourselves into startups, literally, and doing a similar deal like the music businesses "360 Deal", where investors get a piece of everything we do. We are also going to create a sister company (benefit corporation) that will offer a white label version of our platform to enterprises. We are pursuing an equity deal for that. So in all, it'll be a mixture of a royalty and equity.

If anyone has any questions or wants to learn more, feel free to email me at drewl at illvp dot com.

Cheers!

Checked their archive site. Looks like they are now part of fictivekin.com. Not sure if they are still a coop.

http://web.archive.org/web/20130731083708/http://analog.coop...