From my perspective, in answer to “what is driving the expansion in employee and worker ownership”, the two main motivations, 8 years ago, for Webarchitects to become a co-op were:
- In order to formally embed our existing values in the rules of our organisation, we had been developing, working on and hosting progressive websites since 1998 but were going through a hard time and needed to almost start from scratch.
- In the hope that we would get to work more with other co-ops, in our experience this is something that only really started to happen after some years — people should be aware that this takes time, but it is worth waiting for
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I have no suggestions for the second question.
For the third question I think of our two biggest problems have been:
- Getting enough work, this is an ongoing issue.
- Lack of access to capital.
Yes! See this thread, which of the sessions are you speaking at?