A document to help you start a tech cooperative

Post by stefek99 » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 9:29 AM UTC

sriharis wrote: post #35

If someone is interested in doing this in India, here's our LLP agreement: - https://github.com/nilenso/cooperative-agreement . We've also written and talked about it a bit: - https://blog.nilenso.com/blog/2014/11/19/huh-a-software-coop... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7K3E1Q_MBk

Post by bisRepetita » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 10:53 AM UTC

andreareina wrote: post #44

nathan_f77 wrote: post #42

This is so awesome: https://feeltrain.com/blog/hello-feel-train/ I've had the same ideas over the last few years, even the hard limit on the number of people. It sounds like they are just doing some paid consulting work and sharing profits. But what I would like to do, is that everyone only works around 10 hours per week on consulting work, and we spend the rest of the time working on our own app or website ideas. Th…

They're a consulting shop, so it would be natural to say that people who leave don't share in the future profits. For your idea where considerable income is expected to come from past work, I'd say it makes more sense to have ownership of the app assigned to an ad-hoc company that owns just the app, owned by the people there at the time the app was written. The coöp might take a hand in marketing the app and performi…

Post by icebraining » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 11:30 AM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #9

josephg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't this effect be much stronger in a worker-owned cooperative? Having an equal 20% stake seems much more motivating to me than the 0.4% that you might get as an early employee of a traditional tech startup, even if the shares diminish after you leave.

By this logic, worker-owned cooperatives can and should be expected to out-perform traditionally structured businesses. Do I interpret correctly? If that's true, then why do you think traditionally structured businesses generally out-perform cooperatives? People have tried.

Post by quickben » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 11:52 AM UTC

tacostakohashi wrote: post #56

marricks wrote: post #17

Back in 19th century USA, during industrialization, the idea of working for someone came across to many as a form of wage-slavery. Going from farming or trade-skills to factories working, one gave up any control in their own worker rights and planning of their business. It seems fundamentally unfair that in most industries you don't have any real share of the company, or any say in the direction of it. People who con…

A huge proportion of the workforce are employed by listed, publicly traded companies. Those workers can use their salary to buy as many shares as they want on the open market, and also sell those shares whenever they want. The fact that people tend not to do this very often tells you that people don't actually want to have any "real share of the company, or say in the direction of it".

Post by deobald » Tue, Apr 18, 2017, 1:05 PM UTC

wz1000 wrote: post #52

sriharis wrote: post #35

If someone is interested in doing this in India, here's our LLP agreement: - https://github.com/nilenso/cooperative-agreement . We've also written and talked about it a bit: - https://blog.nilenso.com/blog/2014/11/19/huh-a-software-coop... - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7K3E1Q_MBk

I checked out your website and I really like what you are doing. I'm a student in India and would love to work with you. I mainly write Haskell and other functional languages like Scheme/Racket and some Clojure.