Happy to give this a try.
- 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 isn’t particularly a big seller for 90% of our clients. Going to guess that there’s a typo in the second sentence here and its supposed to say “what” - but we just use linkedin, government databases, standard industry stuff really. What we’re 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 don’t - 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 you’re 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 we’re doing! We are trying to improve the ‘discoverability’ with the coop website, going to events, being better at marketing, but this is a new thing we’re 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.
- Cant speak to this.
Good luck!