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Ask HN: Examples of tech worker cooperatives?

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Re: Ask HN: Examples of tech worker cooperatives?

#91

Post by loomio »

I'm a bit late to the party but I wanted to mention that in addition to being a tool created to support the kind of collaborative decision-making that happens in cooperative models (which they are using it for at CoLab, as solarlion kindly mentioned already) Loomio [0] is itself structured as a cooperative with 12 worker-members and growing.

Loomio is part of the larger Enspiral ecosystem (as te_chris already mentioned), which is a network of startups doing business differently, with a social good focus and also upending internal organisation. We're innovating new ways to do core business processes in collaborative, distributed ways. Loomio is an example of that for decision-making, and we're also doing the same in budgeting, strategy setting, governance, and more.

We're quite passionate about the cooperative model and collaborative process design and are happy to talk more in-depth with anyone who is interested.

[0] http://www.loomio.org [1] http://www.enspiral.com

Re: Ask HN: Examples of tech worker cooperatives?

#92

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

jboynyc wrote: post #54
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #41

I have thought about this a lot lately, but couldn't find anything in Munich, Germany where I'm based. If anyone's interested, it would be nice to have a chat.

I just took a look in the Genossenschaftsregister (GnR) for Munich and came across a few coops in the IT sector (e.g., http://www.7-it.de/genossenschaft/mitglied-werden.html ). Not sure if they fit your profile, but it might be worth taking a look: https://www.handelsregister.de/rp_web/mask.do

Thanks, didn't know there was such a public database. Seems hard to search though, there are no tags or categories or something.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of tech worker cooperatives?

#93

Post by _delirium »

jawns wrote: post #60
platz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely there must be some difference between a co-op and a private company without shareholders (i.e. funding can't be the only difference)

All private companies have shareholders. The shares they own are just not publicly traded shares. "Shareholders" is, in this context, the same as "owners," and all private companies have owners. So, what's the difference between a coop and a private, for-profit company in which everyone who works for the company owns the same portion of the company and gets an equal say in decision making? Not much practical differen…

> So, what's the difference between a coop and a private, for-profit company in which everyone who works for the company owns the same portion of the company and gets an equal say in decision making?

Initially that would be effectively the same, but in a coop the equal ownership by all employees (and only employees) is also supposed to stay that way through employment changes: if a person quits the company, they don't take an equity share with them, or they'd become an outside investor. Instead the company is equally owned at all times by the current employees.

It might be possible to write up a complex contract that does that with regular shares, forcing people to hand them in if they quit the company (and prohibiting sales), but since regular shares are considered property there are a lot of pitfalls around making that work (if it's even possible), along with opportunity for shareholders to challenge the structure. A coop structure avoids that issue by not having regular equity shares in the first place.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of tech worker cooperatives?

#94

Post by flinty »

jawns wrote: post #38
stronglikedan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the informative post. I'm new to the idea, and I have a question. You say that the decision making process is democratic. Couldn't that be dangerous? The majority is not always right, or even informed enough to make a correct decision. An executive hierarchy puts this process in the hands of key decision makers, who are supposed to make the correct decisions to protect the company's interests based on thei…

Well, remember that just because a company is democratically controlled does not mean that its member-owners cannot elect an executive hierarchy of its own. But when the votes are cast for that election, it will be the member-owners' interests that are being reflected, and not outside investors' interests. To give an example that's more to do with worker cooperatives, suppose the member-owners are discussing whether…

How much is the shareholders voting on decisions in a democratic way different than the employees voting on decisions?

Re: Ask HN: Examples of tech worker cooperatives?

#95

Post by jboynyc »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #92
jboynyc wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just took a look in the Genossenschaftsregister (GnR) for Munich and came across a few coops in the IT sector (e.g., http://www.7-it.de/genossenschaft/mitglied-werden.html ). Not sure if they fit your profile, but it might be worth taking a look: https://www.handelsregister.de/rp_web/mask.do

Thanks, didn't know there was such a public database. Seems hard to search though, there are no tags or categories or something.

Searching for "IT" turned up some results.

Re: Ask HN: Examples of tech worker cooperatives?

#96

Post by jboynyc »

justizin wrote: post #69
jboynyc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How the heck have these IT coops gotten started, then? I can't tell you on the basis of empirical knowledge of concrete cases, but in theory (e.g., Elinor Ostrom's work on the commons) you need some lower-level guarantor of trust (such as a shared culture) for higher-level institutions that can solve these kinds of collective action dilemmas to develop.

right. all being techies is not enough of a shared culture to accomplish anything outside of typical employment.

Or maybe it's the wrong kind of shared culture, the kind that locks people into collective action dilemmas rather than helping to solve them...

Re: Ask HN: Examples of tech worker cooperatives?

#98

Post by nickbauman »

nimblegorilla wrote: post #84
nickbauman wrote: post #42

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…

Are you the same Nick in MN? I know a small IT coop in St Paul. Funding a bench doesn't seem appealing to me. Too many people at contracting companies view it as vacation time. Otherwise I think a coop sounds cool.

I am Nick and I am in MN. Who are you? I don't know anyone personally who thinks of a bench as vacation. I think anyone who hits a bench knows they're one step away from the streets.

Could have a rule that your dues increase somewhat when you hit the bench, encouraging you to get off as soon as possible.

There's always the Mondragon as an example, which I've heard good things about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Re: Ask HN: Examples of tech worker cooperatives?

#100

Post by foobacca »

I work at Aptivate - http://www.aptivate.org/ and while technically we're still a not-for-profit company with two directors nominally in charge, for a number of years we've been effectively running as a worker's co-operative with decisions made by consensus. You can read a fuller description of our internal processes at http://aptivate.org/en/about/how-we-do-things/ under "Management and Governance".
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