Finding personnel for a tech coop start up

Any advice on how to start a tech coop, specifically in terms of pro-actively finding like minded folk for whom being involved in something that is purpose driven trumps financial considerations, or at the very least is of equal importance? I think I need to be looking fairly locally as meeting face to face on a regular basis will be important. The idea is that in addition to outside commissions we would be working on our own platform with income streams. I do wonder if the CoTech membership are a rare breed. Is money the primary driver within the industry or is there a growing community of coders who are looking for purpose in what they do?. Basically if so, other than here, where are they?

Hi Simon, this speaks to me directly of the need for a platform cooperative around employment, skills and recruitment. Not exactly sure of the scope, but I’d like to flesh out the details with others.

I would encourage you to advertise locally. Use your job centre, maybe use something like https://www.meetup.com/ which looks to have a strong tech community. If you’ve got a story to tell maybe your local media might be interested in doing a piece.

Thanks Graham, good advice. I think I just need to get it out there, & Simon, we need to explore our common thoughts whenever you wish.

I would definitely recommend getting involved in your local tech scene, hackspace, co-working space etc. There are lots of techy people on the left who are looking to do interesting stuff in my experiance. The majority of the people in our co-op were all in the same union already.

The hard bit is the “sweat equity”, i.e. the unpaid labour that will need to be done before you can start working for clients. This includes your registering costs, finding clients, internal infrastructure, workflow etc. If you can do this stuff as swiftly and professionally as possible then people will be interested and I bet most start-ups barely get off the ground.

Which programming languages do you use, @justsimon? We met each other through the London Ruby community for example - perhaps there’s some technology specific meet-ups or conferences near you where you can meet potential collaborators?