Our goal is to make technology for community liberation.
We are a research and design studio and community, informed by transfeminist, anarchist, antiracist, antifascist, decolonial and abolitionist ideas and movements.
We create tools and processes that help us live joyful, connected and capable lives in communities free from oppression. We do it by working in partnership with people and organisations who share our social change goals.
As a studio of queer, trans, disabled and neurodiverse people, we prioritise projects which work towards the collective liberation of structurally disadvantaged groups.
We also run an online community, mostly based on Discord. More info at gfsc.community.
We have recently transitioned from being my solo consultancy to being a nonprofit CIC, and are curious to know what we need to do now to be considered a coop-y coop look forward to meeting you all and being more involved in the wider community here.
So at the moment we are just a CIC ltd by guarantee, and every employee is a director apart from one who doesn’t want to be.
Is that sufficient to be considered a co-op? Are there some stock primary rules we could adopt? I think we are very cooperatively oriented so it might be nice just to formalise something that already exists
Personally I’ve always tried to work cooperatively. I got in some big funding for projects we worked on and so had to take on employees. But I found I actually hate it - I’m much happier working with collaborators than employees but it’s quite a different relationship.
I’ve also spent half my life in activism, where we do cooperative stuff but without involving money. I’ve always seen having to have a business as more of an inconvenience, a cost of getting things done, and mostly it’s been a struggle to find people who actually want to collaborate vs just moan about things i’m doing they would do differently with little intention of helping out
thankyou, have put it on the agenda for our next directors meeting! its mostly how being a CIC director interacts with being a co-op member that’s melting my mind a little bit
look forward to meeting you all and being more involved in the wider community here.