Hey all - glad to be part of CoopTech! Thought I’d drop a line in here to tell you guys a bit about us and what we’re up to.
We originally formed in mid-2018 as four freelancers from the campaigning world who were looking to form a co-op (though we didn’t originally conceive of it in such terms until later, but we always ran ourselves democratically!) and bid for bigger pieces of work.
Now, our focus is entirely on building big, ambitious tech for progressive political campaigns and organisations, taking on rapid turnaround jobs and focusing on just the stuff that makes change happen, without getting caught in the weeds.
There are four of us (and we’re in the process of bringing onboard another partner) with experience ranging from running the Labour Party’s election technology department in a general election, to building the tech that backs 38 Degrees sending over two million emails an hour (though your inboxes may not thank us for it!), to setting up a workplace organising network with 1.2 million members from scratch.
One of the big things that we’re currently working on is enabling democratic organisations like trade unions and political parties to keep operating despite the Corona restrictions. Most recently, we developed a platform to let the National Education Union carry out their conference online, rather than in-person, with over 650 delegates able to vote and make binding policy for the union at a virtual conference. We’re now rolling that out to quite a few other unions, and looking to expand it to other organisations as well.
But we also think it’s important that progressive organisations don’t become inward-facing during the crisis, so we’re also developing and expanding our phone banking software, Ringround. It came out of the Keir Starmer leadership campaign, where they used it to contact 300,000 Labour members over the course of the campaign. We’re honing it and building out a bunch more features, with the goal of scratching our own itch as campaigners and creating everything a campaigner could need in one place when it comes to telephony.
Really interested to hear what all of you guys are working on - and we’d love to connect with other co-ops working in similar areas, particularly where we could swap tips or support each other in terms of software development resource from time to time.
Looking forward to meeting all of you when the restrictions allow!
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(plus other contacts at most of the media unions).