I currently doing some research into worker cooperatives since I am hoping to start up my own cooperative in the future. I want to ask some questions regarding the structures and struggles a lot of cooperatives face so I can get a better idea of tools that would be needed in order to improve the ways of working for cooperatives. I am wanting to create software specifically for worker cooperatives as a cooperative so I have some questions set aside to help me get a better idea of whatās needed for most cooperatives.
Is discoverability an issue when it comes to finding workers to join existing coops and for garnering clients for the coops? That are the current tools being used to find talent and for connecting with clients/customers?
Is it common for worker cooperatives to be very reliant on tools offered by corporations, if so, what are the most common tools that are being used that could use a cooperative alternative? Specifically business tools like task management, documentation, payroll and jobs board tools.
For people that are wanting to form their own worker cooperatives, is it a common issue for them to struggle to find suitable talent to start a new cooperative and are there existing tools that are being used for finding people to join in on the cooperative?
For governance and structuring of the cooperatives, depending on the structure of the cooperative, are there common polling tools used for determining who could best represent the workers as managers and for deciding on larger decisions collectively? Along with these, are there set structures people can follow for guidance on how to legally structure their business for different types of cooperatives like hybrid models that combine a consumer/worker cooperative model together.
How common is it for different cooperatives to work together to tackle more complex client requests (IE, needing a website, mobile app and back-end solution all at once) and is the discoverability between the cooperatives good enough to facilitate this cross cooperative collaboration?
What are the main hurdles to acquiring funding and what are some of the most common ways for cooperatives to get funding initially to start their shared business? Are most banks willing to give out loans and are there structures in place for majority worker owned coops getting outside investment?
Feel free to answer as many or as little of these questions as you want. Contributing to the thread will help me better realize what gaps there are in the market that I could try to best fill as I come up with ideas for a new cooperative.
Not really - we advertise in the way that anyone looking to hire/find work would. A big part of that is through our networks, which happen to be other worker coops. Being part of a co-op isnāt particularly a big seller for 90% of our clients. Going to guess that thereās a typo in the second sentence here and its supposed to say āwhatā - but we just use linkedin, government databases, standard industry stuff really. What weāre trying to do with CoTech is to better be able to source clients and work on projects collectively, so plans are in motion to do something a bit more intentionally.
Yes definitely. This is an ongoing convo. Some coops do it better than others. We donāt - would be nice if we would. There are already decent alternatives for what we use the most (Docs, Nextcloud, Rocket, etc) - as a web dev agency we build out our own tools. Its hard to have clients adapt to non corporate tools.
Not our situation - But starting a new workers coop is a challenge is always a challenge if youāre coming from the corporate/nonprofit workforce because its just a different way of working. Depending on how early you are in starting something up, would recommend using your networks of people you know to do this - starting a coop leans on relationships and idk how well it would work otherwise. The tools I know of are message boards like this and the one for workers.coop.
We use sociocracy and it feels like implementing some larger tools removes a bit of the humanity/cooperation from it that you get when chatting something out. Maybe this would work better with large coops. For our worker coop (15+ people) its a flat structure - no bosses, which id also generally recommend.
Thats what weāre doing! We are trying to improve the ādiscoverabilityā with the coop website, going to events, being better at marketing, but this is a new thing weāre pushing more. Otherwise we regularly collab with other coops based on what skills we need - we dont collab with non-coops. We just do this through the connections we already have.
Hi Duder. We are planning to cover this topic (āStarting a Tech Worker Co-opā) in our next podcast (The Limeleaf Podcast - Limeleaf Worker Collective), trying to give hope and constructive advice to the many laid-off tech workers out there. Iāll post to this board when itās available (most likely at the end of February).
Here are some thoughts in the meantime (from a US perspective).
Our co-op has only four members, so we donāt bring in many new people. We created a job board for co-ops (https://apply.coop) last year. It got decent traffic from job seekers, but zero interest from orgs with open roles. Itās tough to compete with the big job boards like Indeed and LinkedIn because they have so many visitors, so we changed apply.coop to a co-op directory instead.
Again, weāre so small, we just vote by a show of hands. Weāll also cover legal structures in the podcast.
Very common. We love working with other co-ops! Organizations like Patio.coop (we are members) are trying to make it easier for co-ops to collaborate.
We havenāt taken any financing, but have heard from others that itās difficult. In the US, thereās still a stigma around co-ops. Theyāre just hippy grocery stores, etc. Grants are one option, but the dollar amounts are usually pretty small. In my experience, most take loans from orgs like https://cooperativefund.org/, or their local credit union. Weāre starting a new project (a member-owned web hosting co-op) and will try the crowdsourcing route. People will be able to donate outright, pre-pay for hosting services as non-member customers, or pre-buy memberships.
I hope this helps! If you want to get on a call to discuss, let me know.
Nope, to be honest most dont even know what a co-op is, its like a nice bonus when they find out.
We look for the best software for the job as a key priority, while idealy it would be coop owned there is so much software that does not meet our needs or our clients. For example we would love to use meet.coop but its not stable enough and one of our members is deaf so canāt use screen reader functionality so we use google meet or zoom.
It should be easier as long as peole are paid market rate. I would always question why start a new one if there isnt the collective of people there looking to create one when there are so many co-ops already out there.
We are a small team of 5 and have alot of team meetings and collective decisoon making, I imagine thing are very differnet with big teams.
We have done some of this but would love to do more. A common challenge is client budgets when we know its lower than anther agencies day rate. If working with another agency we would always consider co-ops first.
Plan the bsuiness without external funding is my advice, if the initial money isnāt there and the work isnt lined up I would say is it even viable. Personally I would invest in the same way you would starting a non co-op, if its small scale utilise British business bank loans and founder investment. Banks dont like lending to co-ops in our experience despite them being more resilient espeiclaly co-op bank. They wont even give overdrafts very easily. There are no shares so its very difficult to get investment and for them to offset their risk. For start up models who want to scale through investment I would say the coop model isnt the best option.
I donāt really have clearcut answers, but Iām working with a collaborator on a project that is asking very similar questions. Iām not allowed to link, but search for the thread titled āSeeking Cofounders for Platform Coopā.
I really appreciate all the answers you all gave for me on this! Every bit of information is valuable as it helps me really understand what would be in demand for new software.
also, @ixxie I would more than happy to talk to you, though my availability this week is limited so I would be open to talking sometime next week if that works for you. Currently I have just started my investigation by sending this same set of questions to other cooperatives and cooperative organizations via email, so I could try to aggregate some of the information from the responses I received and we could go from there.