 Cooperatives democratically run organizations in which members have an equal call on assets and on any surplus. And beyond their own organization, members are committed to the wider community and to supporting other cooperative businesses. In other words, cooperatives create community wealth. Cooperatives are also an international movement committed to the principles of the International Cooperative Alliance. And their origins just lie just down the road for those of you who are joining us from Lancashire in Rochdale, of course. So for all these reasons, cooperatives deserve our attention as we seek to build back better from COVID. In this first webinar, our focus is on cooperatives for workers in the digital and creative economy. We know the sector has boomed during the pandemic, as so much has shifted from the physical to the virtual realm, just like the webinar today. But as share prices have rocketed to the benefit of shareholders, how has the digital workforce fared? Does company profit translating to improve pay terms and conditions for workers? Or would a different cooperative model of doing business offer workers greater autonomy? A fairer share of the fruits of their labor and a sense of being part of an international movement committed to transforming how we live and work? To provide some answers to these questions, we have with us today the three wonderful speakers who are all digital professionals and members of cooperative businesses which sell tech and digital services. John Evans is a co-founder of Code Operative, a non-profit service co-operative of freelance software developers based in the northeast. Code Operative bridges the gap between freelancers and the businesses that need them. Our second guest is Mark Porter, a founder member of the Preston Digital Foundation, a unique collaboration between staff, graduates, current students and freelancers at the University of Central Lancashire. The foundation provides innovative solutions to real-world problems and is a worker-owned cooperative. Our last speaker is Polly Robbins from Digital Co-op Outlandish, which runs a co-op working space called Space4 in London. Polly is also part of Code Tech, a national network of cooperatives that sell tech and digital services. Code Tech aims to create a better technology sector in the UK that focuses primarily on worker, customer and end user needs rather than on generating private profit. Before we start, a couple of bits of housekeeping. As Alina has said, please could you keep your cameras and mics switched off and your name and organization displayed on the screen. I will record today's webinar which will be edited and posted online and we'll let you know when it's available as soon as possible. Each speaker will talk for around 15 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of questions. So do put your questions in the chat and I'd invite our speakers to respond to them or I can prompt them as well and pick up questions as they come in at the end. Finally, just before we get into the heart of today's event, I want to say a big thank you to the Lancashire Forum Creative, who have helped promote today's event. Lancashire Forum Creative is a leadership of business development program that is tailored to meeting the learning and development needs of Lancashire's creative and digital small and medium sized enterprises. So the programme director is going to say a couple of words about the forum before I ask John to begin the webinar. Thank you, Laura. Thanks very much, Rachel. Afternoon everybody, great to see you. I'm going to quickly share my screen so let's show you a couple of slides. I'm really not going to hog the mic for too long because the main event is what you're all here for. Oops. Right. Okay. So, yes, thanks Rachel. So, as Rachel said, Lancashire Forum Creative is an SME leadership and development programme. And we are our participants are all from Lancashire and they're all creative and digital SMEs. We're currently funded by the EIVF, the EU, so all the assistance is free at the point of delivery for the people who we work with. I think I even see a few familiar faces in the list here so it's great to see you again if you've worked with us before. I'm going to say a little bit about what we do. So, yeah, I mean it's basically about bringing SMEs together and today is all about cooperation, cooperatives and in the digital world. And we have over the last three or so years, we've worked with more than 125, or we've in fact assisted more than 125 SMEs from across the county and that includes co-ops and social enterprises and so on. But we do, you know, we're here to address isolation because running a business, running a small business. People often talk of feeling isolated and definitely more than ever now with the whole COVID situation and working from home and being kind of separated from the people we work with. So that's something very important and that's something we've been trying to address through the forum. And the work we do, we aim to increase productivity to address the isolation to enable people to develop their businesses in the right way for them. It's really about starting conversations and building relationships which can then lead on to collaboration and cooperation. So everything has to start with a conversation and what we're really excited about doing is bringing people together and laying the ground for great things to happen. So the way we do it, so everything's based on social learning. So we really value the expertise and the experience of the people we work with. So everything we do kind of is based on a peer-to-peer learning approach with some expert and kind of academic input as well. But it's really, really valuing the knowledge that the SME leaders hold. So we do all sorts of exciting, creative and innovative things. We've done like a serious play. We have to see other companies who show us how to do it properly or kind of all we get to see behind the scenes if you like. Obviously less of that's been going on during COVID but everything that we do, we're trying to do online as well. So we've been doing design sprints, we run action learning sets, again, kind of really tapping into the peer-to-peer learning side of things. And the other side of things we do is our think tanks. And so this is where we collaborate with people from industry, from academic colleagues from across the university, from other organizations. And some examples of this are our coming think tanks. So these are very much a collaborative approach. So shameless plug here, but some upcoming events that you might be interested in are technology toolkit examination. So we're looking at if the tools that you're using are right for you and, you know, if there are anything else that you can be using. So that's the 11th of May. And these are held in conjunction with Digital Lancashire, these ones. Then we're going to be looking at ways to collaborate, which obviously is a personal topic for today. So that's first June and then looking at what the future might hold. That's on the 29th of June. So these are all in conjunction with Digital Lancashire collaborating with them and bringing in various experts to enliven those events. And then also final shameless plug is the array festival, which is being held in Lancaster. And so again, this is an online festival this time round. And we're looking enough to be working with the outdoor clothing and shoe company, Innovate, who are based up in Kendall. So they're going to be coming along and telling us all about their innovative practices in terms of marketing and new shoe design. So that's my shameless plug. Thank you for giving me that time, Rachel and Alina. So yes, our email address if you'd like to know any more. Thanks for UCLan.ac.uk and we can tell you lots more all about it. So I'll hand back to you guys and have a great afternoon. Cheers. Thanks very much, Laurie. That was really helpful and I'm sure a lot of interest in many of the events you were presenting there. Well, without any further ado, I'd like to hand over to John to begin today's webinar. Hello, I'm just going to grasp us out there. All right, so thanks Rachel. Thanks everyone else for coming. So my name is John, I'm from a co-op called Code Operative. We specialize in making apps and websites generally for charities or the co-ops or someone who wants to improve the world. We generally make the big thing we seem to make is like mapping software. So if people want to declare an emergency or explore land around them and land on a ship, we do things like that. I am mainly a front-end developer but also do some project management and some business development. Right, so what is digital co-op? So essentially a co-op is a company where the workers own that company and the decisions are made by the workers themselves. At the core of it, it's a group of people who've decided to work together and everyone sharing in the proceeds of their work and then everything else is downstream of that. So the legal company rules and the clients that you have, the other networks, the organization is part of all flows from the central thing of a group of people who've decided that they want to work with each other and share in the output themselves and decide exactly what they want to do and create their own boundaries for that. So it's a very simple idea. There's a long history of co-ops in this country. Most co-ops are people are familiar with our consumer co-ops where people are buying together rather than selling together, but it works in a similar way. Just because it's simple described doesn't mean it's like simple in practice. So when you, the person who makes the decisions, it's everyone and as you add more people it does get more complicated trying to accommodate preferences and what people will tolerate. And when you're a worker in a normal company, the boundaries are quite strict. What happens is what people tell you what happens. You can negotiate a bit with your boss or your teammates, but you don't have very much control over it. The framework is quite limited. You can choose where you can have a choice in like who you apply for and where you want to work, but not much in terms of like once you're there, you have to stick quite strongly to the hierarchy that's in place. Co-ops generally manage this by breaking the tasks up and then assigning it to like individuals or people or groups and try to generally try to rotate the roles. So there'll be some kind of framework people interact in whether that's, you know, formally and explicitly written down or whether it's sort of implicit and it's kind of an oral culture. Again, another decision is up to the co-ops. Cool. So here are the promised benefits. So not having a boss is great. There's no sort of, there's not really sort of an arbitrary, I don't know, arbitrary time to come in or arbitrary sort of dress code that you have to have. You still have responsibilities to the people you work with and you have to sort of set your boundaries in and work on the boundaries with other people, but that is pretty much the best thing. Like I don't have to imagine the psychology of a person who sort of has control over like the way in my livelihood, which is extremely freeing if you've been in those kind of situations where you don't have much autonomy over what's going on. The next part is about that sort of an individual level. The rest of it is about the group. So it's basically the freedom to be with each other, to experience other people's sort of authentic selves in the same way that you're displaying your own. And then of course, the biggest benefit is that you own the company, so you get to keep the money that you make. You get to decide how to use it along with everyone else. And there's not an owner somewhere that is sort of extracting the value, so you can either earn more money, doing the same job, or you can earn the same amount of money and do less work, which are both attractive options, I think. So that's more about corpse than this is about how does sort of digital and corpse fit together. The reason it's a good fit for this moment is that in most digital companies have a low capital cost relative to labor. So if you're already freelancing the capital cost is quite small. So you've already bought the equipment that you need. And most, most technology, at least in the, at least in the sort of business world I exist in is open source and available to use and install the sort of bottleneck is like expertise right which is the sort of thing that we're providing. The other thing I would say is that the trend for technology has been towards things like the agile methodology where the way the work is done is supposed to be sort of without without a hierarchy of status of people who are like sort of ranked by importance deciding things it's about like analyzing the the problem itself and then allowing that to determine the work that gets done. So if you don't have if there isn't rather than having a sort of formal like an ownership system where there are people who are, you know, who are materially obviously more important and trying to sort of match that together with a system where the only important thing is the work you can start from that position it makes it it makes it very easy to do agile in my in my experience. Transparency the the co-op aspect I think moves moves you towards being transparent about about uncertainty with clients think I think it makes it easier to do that because you are you're sort of there's no there's no benefit within the co-op in hiding information really and so revealing it at strategic times the within a co-op the there's the because the material interest of everyone is sort of presumed to be the same. There's not the sort of antagonism between and the like an employer and employee. You get used to sort of sharing information in a free way and saying this is how long we expect things to take the work is the work right it's this complicated it'll take us this long therefore it costs this much. The other transparency is around like, like skills and like projects in terms of like if if if this does this team have the skill, rather than sort of lying or sort of faking it faking it so you make it kind of thing. There's no incentive for a project manager to say yes my team had my team has the skill and the cop if it doesn't because everyone. Everyone is in trouble if that if that happens. It's you have the incentives are basically aligned with sort of a more transparent and open way of working. Cool, so I'm going to do some some of the challenges that I've come across in my corp things and then I will cover some more cover some more ground so. The challenges so this is about clients so basically how do you how do you find clients in your digital corp I mean it's the same way as similar kind of ways people find clients in normal companies right so we used to go to a lot of events. That was that was one way we haven't been able to do that we haven't found it to be as productive at the moment because it's not it's hard to do crosstalk and meeting people like we used to. And people people people don't be at the the in person aspect seems to work out seems to work out well quite important. But like starting any business you find clients based on what you know the history of the people you've already you've already worked with. And sort of normal marketing rules apply. Although what we what we've tend to found is that the, the co-op that the co-op aspect is a selling point. If you can lead with the lead with the transparency and lead with, you know, the people that the people that the people that you work with or higher standards are going to be happy, you know, working on the project. And, you know, you can you can trust them there's no sort of like coercive relationship or anything happening. It does it I found it does relax clients it does make it easier to talk to them. Other cops are very sort of friendly and opening with sort of the how we're sharing how they get clients for example we did. We joined in a bidding process at the start of this year and the information about how to join those join that bidding process and work on it and like sharing tips on it all came through this sort of community that we're part of. Yeah, so it is it is it is mostly like running a normal company in terms of like finding clients but there's advantages to having to having co-ops one of them being that every it's everyone working there has an incentive to bring in bring in new clients right so rather than it just being the, the contacts of the owner or the sales team or whatever you have everyone working there is able to be an ambassador for the for the court. There's like sort of resolving differences so this is about disagreeing right so the, the one of the key skills is being able to disagree with people in like a productive way. And to express the sort of figure out for yourself what you want by yourself, and then we have a group of people and so I tried to negotiate and navigate away to something that everyone can, if not be happy with at least live with for the time being. And this is, this is not easy, and it relies on skills that you might not have had to use before in in a company but that's part that's like the flip side of the autonomy is it coming with like responsibility right so the stuff that managers are typically doing like negotiating with with a team or the managers or trying to create sense out of the difficulties of reality is the stuff that you have to do or, you know, get to do like this is, this is why it's exciting to run a business or to what people get out of being an entrepreneur is to a lot like long term see the effects of your actions and sort of build on what you've already built on before, and, you know, reflect and grow as like a, you know, a human being. And being a cop does, it means you cover more perspective so in my, in my, in my experience, it's slower to make decisions but decisions are generally a higher quality because you brought in, brought in more people who can like sort of talk about their experiences and spot spot possible problems or things that might go wrong. My only tip would be try to set a time horizon at the start of discussing decisions and say like right, we want to make the best decision for the next three months or we want to make the best decision for the year, or something like that. Just because it limits it to thinking about sort of out there out there scenarios and like extremely long term problems that you can sort of you can deal with later on. And if you try to stick to sort of the material reality as much as possible so rather than saying is this is this fair and is this going to be just and, you know, environment like worthy or morally good, you know, forever, trying to say can we deal can we live with this for the next three months like is this going to make the people in this room and potentially some other stakeholders are in this room is it going to satisfy them to do to do this. Yes, the another one is sort of if it is everyone's responsibility sometimes it can end up being like no one's responsibility for some of them sort of more boring things like dealing with taxes or regulations or filling in forms or answering a difficult a difficult email or whatever. In general the only solution is this is sort of communicate about it and make sure that people have people make sure people have the information. You check, you know, check check in with each other quite regularly and just make sure that people people know what's going on. They have an interest in not making everyone do it. And this is part of the part of the boundary saying I mentioned earlier. The final one is about culture so it's like how if you're you collectively are in control of the culture right as a as a whole as a group. This is the starting point for the corpus is this group and how you interact with each other. And even if there's you know various interactions for their organizations like projects that go projects that become difficult or I don't know some people leave or join the group or whatever. The culture is what determines like whether it is working or not I mean even if you have a very, a very strange legal situation from your from your company rules or something that the end result it is it is the culture that determines what happens. And the things that the way the tools like legal technical tools are used to communicate or get things done. Come come from the culture that you have initially and it can be challenging if you don't pay attention to it and it can sort of advance out of your control and then from an individual perspective. If you have a co-op that is more than you know, more than two people or more than three people, you don't really have a lot of control over it. As it exists, you can control what you put into it, but you sort of you do have to have a lot of trust in the people that you're with. So part of it is like making sure that you start with starting with people that you trust makes it a lot a lot easier and a lot less risky and making sure that people are like sort of depositing into the into the culture over time or like building up a reserve of good times is quite important. The first thing we've discovered during COVID is that lockdown made doing social events very difficult and if without most of people, most people's interactions became just solely about work with each other. And that means that they because they sort of start to associate the other people with just disagreements rather than we've like, you know, it's a full, a full human being with like other ways that you can connect with them like maybe I disagree with the back end developer over, you know, how we're managing the API or how we're like dealing with the data system that we're using. But I outside the court like we have a lot of shared interest that we both like video games or that all that kind of thing. But we're not, we're not talking about that we're really sort of seeing through an argument all the time. So that is something that needs to be managed for a minute can be quite annoying. However, there are people who can help you manage it right so a lot of networks out there to join and people are in my experience have been very generous with their time and helping other co-ops. And because we don't see the sector as sort of adversarial more, more co-ops. Eventually does mean like more clients coming more clients coming in as well because the the role of a cop is to sort of generate clients and generate the business like sort of highlight the business model and sort of move things in that sort of cooperative direction, right? So what the community wealth building thing is about. And there are a lot of the lot of co-ops. There are a lot of networks out there. There are a lot of co-ops of co-ops out there. So this is the International Cooperative Association. There's a codec that police will be talking about. There's fact in Auditina. There's a variety of co-ops and sort of organizations in North America and Happy Dev in France and that sort of thing. And yeah, in general, if you if you don't make too big of an ask and just sort of checking regularly and so ask for tips, ask for help. People are very willing and capable of giving it to you. So it's worth it's worth getting in touch. They're not very good. They're not like guarded with the information and skills. Cool. All right, so I'm going to I'm going to take questions now deliberately given quite because my scope is quite wide. I thought I would try and take a lead of what the things are to talk about from this. So if you have a specific question, that's great. If you just have a topic you want to hear more about, that is great too. Rachel, can you let me know how much time I have left for this? Yeah, we've got about 10 minutes for questions and there've been two in the chat. Shall I read those out? Yeah, it'd be great. So from Peter Hargreaves, do the workers have equity? Is it one person, one vote? In which case, would new entrants have equal say as those who are well established in the cooperative? Cool. All right, I'll do a question in order. So do the workers have equity? It depends. If you the way my my corp is private company limited by guarantee. So there is an equity to be had basically. The corp doesn't have shares to sort of buy and sell. However, there are corps that do work that way. So you can have a corp that every member owns one share. And then those shared that you can't sell the shares, but you can sell the shares back to the corp. And then people leave when you leave. Or you can, if you want a corp could have equity that grows in value. But some corps say the equity, the share that you have will always cost £100. So you have to buy in when you join and you get that money back when you leave. And that serves as that that the reason to do that would be to have a sort of have a chunk of capital at the start that you can that you can use to invest in. And is we one person one vote, it can be so you can, if the corp besides, you know, that's how the that's how we want to run our system is a sort of majority votes. So if you can do that, if you want to use a sort of consensus or consent based decision making where it's like one where it's rather than, you know, having a sort of first pass the post style vote you can have, does does that is there anyone who would block this from going forward like can everyone tolerate this. So the normal the corp model works best when, when it is sort of equal so when everyone is putting in a similar amount of work and getting out a sort of similar amount of thing. Yeah, and then appears final question, would new entrance have an equal set of those that were established. And so what we do is we have a kind of probationary period so we generally work with someone for about three to six months on a project before we would offer them. So we have a sort of associate member status. And then if we, if we sort of trust people with this person makes reasonable decisions, then we'd invite them to be a full member. At that point they formally do have an equal say to those that were established but the informal aspect is like making sure they have the confidence to to bring up their ideas and challenge people when they want to do that. Hopefully that's helpful, if you want to, if I missed anything out, feel free to ask again as well. Karl, Anthony, how balance the main benefits of agile practices with the inherent design by committee style of a cooperative model. It's quite easy just we hand out roles to people. So on a project is you can just go this is action someone and go right this person is UX designer you go off and work out with the client like what you want. So I'd say defining. If you don't want if you don't want to sort of default into a design by committee style, or even if you if you have someone who has very strong opinions and you don't want them to sort of dominate the proceedings. Just make sure you define it at the start and say here is here is what people are responsible for. And here is here is where I would like the decision to lie so let's say I want, I would like these two people who seems to know the most about it to go in bring back a proposal that we can either accept or reject rather than rather than having everyone working on it all the time. Use your time. Yeah, so doesn't I wouldn't say I wouldn't say it's an inherent thing that the court model presents but it's. Yeah, it can't it can't happen. I have a question about code operative itself. You've only got a couple of minutes so I don't know whether you really read it. So how long has it been going now. Two years start well side nearly nearly three we started the group formed in July 2018 and then we legally incorporated and I've had clients from November 2018. We have nine full members and four associate members at the moment. And how has this changed a lot of the court. Yes, we started with four full members and now we have more than that. Why don't we use the dot corp domain. We've learned a lot about cops as we as we started. There's two reasons for the first one is we didn't really know that dot corp like existed. When we started. Gator council gave us a startup advisor who hadn't really worked with course before. So it's a good idea. I, the other way and it does it does cost more than a dot code at UK domain. If you want, I think in my head I decide the coast and so it works for me. Yeah, as a decision that we get we haven't we haven't sort of refactored that we might decide to go for that in the future. But for the moment that's that's where we're at. Cool. Thank you very much you've you're exactly on time you've you and you've covered a huge amount there and I was particularly interested in some of the things you're saying about the the link between transparency and ensuring that the cooperative is because you don't have those issues about pretence pretending to the boss or whatever you can actually work in a much more transparent much more professional way so they're really really interesting insights there. So thank you very much would like to pass and pass over to Mark now Mark Porter from the PDF in here in Preston. Thank you Mark. Good afternoon. I've obviously got one of my co conspirators buried in the crowd. So, Andrew, do you want to flip your camera on because hopefully he's going to wingman me ably as usual. Yeah, give us just a second. So this is proper teamwork here. So it's a highly coordinated group of people. Hey, obligatory hat. Andy. So it's really interesting following on from John because I would classify us as a park bait co op at the moment. We're in a transitory period. And I think Rachel was going to be talking about the sort of level of support that the council has been giving to co ops locally impressed as part of the Preston model because my other hat. I'm one of the directors of the Preston cooperative development network so I sort of am very embedded in the co op culture locally and and also between between the two roles it's a sort of a portrait gamekeeper sort of relationship. But I'm very, very interested in developing co ops as a way of supporting local business and an alternative form of employment and more of that in a minute. So Andrew here is a member of the PDF as well. I'm one of the fellow directors. So probably some of the points that John was making before was saying I'm fairly familiar but I think we're in a different point on our journey and I'm hoping at the end that Polly will be. Polly I think he's more more of an established and polished co op at this at the moment so I'll leave that there so there'll be some echoing things so I will try and share my screen. Successfully. Yes, he can. Cool. So working. Yep. Cool. So same thing. We're a co op. And we specialize in digital services, which is no surprise from the webinar title, but we are a little bit different because the way we came into being and what we do is very much product of our environment. So the title, some of you in the industry and that is a little bit of a play on words for a certain American software companies digital document format. Nice catch here memorable, but it was really a case of trying to describe how have we were as a company and digital but also making the most of our title so we've we are a foundation and one of the things that John was talking about and has really part of our story it's quite tricky to become a co op because it's although it's a well established business model. And as Rachel said going back over 150 years when you start talking to the government and other regulatory bodies it suddenly becomes something that's not normal. So we actually when we were going through creating the sort of legal entity we actually had a bit of a battle on with companies house, because they said we weren't a foundation. And we say well we're going to be a co op and one of our things is that we are not for profit. And also, we really really do want to actually give money away and again at these sort of concepts in quite alien to them so we don't actually took us about six months right in the beginning of COVID as well so we had to put in forms and one of the things we discovered about starting a co op in the UK is is still a paper based process and it's only become a digital process because of COVID and lockdown. In fact, we ended up duplicate we have a spare co op because of those circumstances. So we really started out trying to create a co op because of the ethos but we found that the journey has been quite challenging. And this is where I can flip back to my PC DN hat and where is the one of our goals is to make becoming a couple lot more straightforward. So our story is about essentially working as a university. In fact, the thing with Polly it was in fact outlandish that gave us the idea of creating a co op based around the the state of the talent pool in Preston and Laurie introduced us and mentioned digital Lancashire. Well again, I'm very familiar with that organization and I talk quite a few of them. So we've sort of been embedded in the digital industry within Lancashire for quite a while and what happened was that we have people coming out of the university who don't necessarily want to have conventional employment. They don't necessarily get the job they want or you know there is there is some development of their personal skills and circumstances that means that conventional employment probably doesn't suit them. So this has been an ongoing thing. My background is teaching and we basically used to do a lot of projects within the university and lots of student projects and then students would leave and then the clients would come back and go like well we'd like more of this is terrific. So we had a really good talent pool that we, you know, there was still wanting to stay local but maybe there wasn't the job opportunity so it sort of came up over a period of time I'm taught enterprise modules. So I taught commercial modules where we worked as a small agency so out of that, and I'm meeting with a couple of outlandish members and thought well let's do a co op. There's no ball from there so as soon as we mentioned we were doing this we got we ended up with a lot of people going well actually you know what I'd like to do that I'd like to work flexibly. You know there's quite a few members that still work within the university on a full time basis and these one of them but this we got asked for so many different bits of work, and we wanted sort of a little bit more autonomy with some of the work as well and obviously we wanted continuation of this for people that had already had projects done within the university. So that's sort of how we came to being. And the other thing about that is, you know, if you're going to work for yourself, you want it to be equitable I'm my previous life I've been a company director for a traditional company in manufacturing before I became an academic. So it's sort of my background in sort of conventional business and one of the things I wanted to do, if I was working for myself again is do it differently. And so it's sort of been sort of this really interesting evolving journey and like you say you start down the road of can I, how do I do business differently. Well the car model came on who's who wants to work in it. But also part of it was really to try and give something back to the local community so the backbone behind this is trying to to retain local talent and also give back locally so this is sort of that sense of community from the Preston model. There's a rainbow bench there for a reason I haven't got the press release but that's actually our first community gift. So we have associated with Sue Ryder homes through personal contact and I'm going back to what John was saying, my most sort of small enterprises we rely on word of mouth. So a rainbow bench has been installed last week, I believe, and he was it was last week was it the week before. I think it was a week before actually. So we paid for that out of the digital work we've done our foundation status and so those of you who are definitely not local. It's it's a neurological care unit that's not part of the NHS so it's a it's a charity and they've just moved to a new state of the art facility. And it's pretty bear so we've we've donated this bench so that the patients and the visitors can have a place to go and it's also part of our thanks for people working in the NHS as well so that's actually our first tangible output from our co-op. So that's really what we're in it for we wanted a business model where we can, you know, work how we want and maybe Andy you want to you want to add why you joined. Why I specifically joined. Yeah. I mean, it gave us like a lot of freedom to do a lot more stuff as well as, you know, like we're able to expand our knowledge we're able to work on these interesting projects, like aside from what we're doing normally with work. So, like the fact that it was generally like a part time thing was quite an advantage for me, I think. Yeah, what's to say because I think the thing about us and maybe the other co-ops is that we're everybody works part time with it there is no full time staff at the moment and they say our journey is getting going with the co-op. So, going back to the common seat. Yep. One person one vote. We have a core membership. We have an associate membership but we're actually slightly different and we're working through the government so I'm going back to the OFS 10 support in a bit. But essentially, we want to attract students to work with us while they're at university. So we were again, this is an outlandish very we're a uni cube. So one of the things we have different in our governance is that we have a model for student representation. So in other words, if you are a undergraduate postgraduate as a group and come and work for us that you will have a representative voice just as you would do if you were a member of a course. So even if we're going to be working with students on projects, they will still have an input into how we run the show. So same thing as everybody else. The best thing about running a co-op and I think John was saying this as well is you get to work with people. You know, it's a wonderful way of finding out whether or not it's a good fit because it is a non hierarchical structure. So we like the model of being able to work together. The original founding members had already worked together on projects and we're attracting new members now and it's going to be the same model come and work with us. Are you good for us and are we good for you? It's a fantastic way of building a company and all the advantages that John said and presumably Paulie will echo after this. So we've currently got six, seven members. It's actually growing. I think we're acquiring somebody new this week. I haven't met them yet. But our other director Dom is on leave. So we are diverse in terms of skill set, but we're also diverse in terms of background and ethnicity. And I think that's a wonderful thing and one of the core attractions for us is we are not conventional and therefore there isn't that sort of predisposition to a particular group of people or you say the lack of hierarchy in that sense, the no boss angle is particularly attracted to people and also the fact that you get listened to. So currently our team looks like this and hopefully this slide will be very out of date within the next month as we will be gaining new members and again going back to we would like to do more things. We're getting asked to do different projects with different skills and therefore we would like to use our very flexible model to essentially get people involved. We also have a flexible payment model as well, which is quite interesting. So sometimes people want to work on jobs, but don't really want to be paid all the once for various circumstances. So we even allow people to do work within, you know, as as PDF members and then decide when they want to get paid. So we're playing with that sort of model. So what we've been up to, we're sort of a mid low end at the moment with the skill set. So we've been working on all the community projects from co-op. So with him lies, we've done virtual reality simulations for teaching materials. We've done user experience work for the student union. And we also work on some of the projects within the university to essentially help them build digital solutions where there isn't an option to go to a full external commercial company because of budgets or there is no in house expertise. So again, our projects at the moment are very diverse and part of our growth plan is to sort of work out where our specialism should be. But again, the flexibility of the membership model and the way the co-ops running means that we should be able to cope with that quite well. And we've got a lot of people supporting us. So I'm going to go back to the bit. We've been one of the co-ops through the OSF 10, which has meant there's been seed funding on top of support we've got from the hive, which means we've been able to get support in the things that we're not good at. So maybe like some of the other people go, we're good at the day job. We are very good at our digital skills. However, apart from myself, none of the other members have one run a company and two, none of us have run a co-op. So having support at an early stage has been absolutely vital for us. So we've got government governance workshops. Like John was saying, we need to know how to make good decisions in a non-hierarchical way so consensus opinion making. So we're currently planning some workshops that we all get the hang of how to do that and still maintain a good working relationship. So we know those are the challenges. Going down to the more mundane things like what's the business model? We're a company limited by guarantee. We need specialist contracts for working with the industry in the sort of products we're planning. And things like our new products are going to be, we're going to be flying some drones around as well. So we're really diverse in what we do. But the support for actually working out how to run the core business has been really, really important for us. And joining networks like Co-Tec and we're very quietly in the corner at the moment because we are part way through our co-op journey. We are very much looking at making sure that our business runs effectively by taking on enough work that we can cope with rather than promising the earth and then finding we're very stressed and can't deliver quality. So we're very, very focused on, are we a good business first? It's also then wonderful that we're a co-op because of all the benefits that we're going to be talking about. We've got the downsides, which is, you know, it's a slightly trickier business model than a conventional business. And obviously, you know, the ability to make quick decisions by somebody being in charge is gone. But I think that's an absolute positive from our concern because hopefully other people will do. Everybody volunteers. So even on the smallest jobs, I work as commercial director because that's my experience. I will go in and scope and work on the jobs, but the teams are self assembled. And if we've got a shortage of a skill, we'll use our network to get people on board. Or if it's way outside of our scope, we will pass it on to other people in the network, whether that's digital Lancashire, Co-Tec or whatever. So it's been really, it's been a very interesting year for us. I don't know if Andrew wants to add anything into that. No, yeah, like you were saying before about actually setting up the co-op, that's been like the main focus since basically the start of lockdown. I think it was just before that we were starting to get the ball rolling. Then obviously we're locked down, you know, it's been a bit of a slow ride, isn't it? Well, yeah, it's like anything else. It's made something that's quite a complicated process a little bit longer. But as I say, I think we are now, in fact, we are now scheduled in to actually meet up as a team for the first time in a year. The other thing about it is one of our members has actually got a full-time job in a conventional company off the back of coming in and working on a part-time project. And that's what they wanted to do. However, the good news is that she wants to remain a member of the PDF and help mentor other people. And if the, you know, the PDF grows to a particular size that we can support a full-time job, I'm sure she'll be back. And in the meantime, you know, we can use our vehicle as a stepping stone to other careers for people or you work within the PDF because that's what you want to do. So again, that's been sort of the fantastic part of it. And also the challenge is about how do you manage that level of employment flexibility and to maintain consistency and quality of service within the industry that we do. So, yeah, we're sort of, we're part way there with our journey. It's been good so far. We've delivered all our projects, mostly on time thanks to a good team effort and the rest of the world slowing things down. And really, I suppose that's the point where I'd like to stop talking and hopefully people have some questions. Thanks very much, Mark and Andrew. That's been really, really interesting. And I think all those links you're making with university and with graduates coming in and being with you for a time to get experience and then moving on, I think it gives a really good impression of the multiple roles of the cooperative can play. And with your links to the university, we can see how that's really shaped your offer and shaped your approach. So I just... Absolutely. We like a bit of complexity. I've got somebody asking for the contact details again. Did you provide them, Mark? Could you just pop those into your... Yes, I will pop those into the chat. Pop those into the chat. Have we got any other questions for Mark or Andrew? Ah, there we are. Polly, how does salaries work at the co-op? Are students and graduates paid at a commercial rate for the work they do? Oh, yes. Does participation fall into one of their forces? No, no, no, no, no. This is for real money. There's a lot of... I think that as an experienced team, academic, we get what's known as a lot of tire kickers. It will be wonderful for you. You know how the speech goes. This will be wonderful for exposure or your portfolio. And given the amount of money that students have to pay for being students, now we go, we would be much better if they could be paid and eat. So one of our rules is it's academic credit. So yeah, if you need to bring in a live project, you're either putting it towards an assignment, which you have to do anyway, but more or not, we'd like to pay you. And one of the other models we have is, we do have a pay spine and we pay more than the living wage, because again, our talent pool should be paid well. And because of the way that we are funded, again, I'm going to say completely plagiarised from our landish, is the fact that we would like you to be really expensive. If you are talented and we can get a market rate for you, the good thing, I suppose, is you would classify as a non-extractive working agreement. If we can charge more for you, you get more. So one of the things, even a standard internship within the university, we pay more than that. We would like you to work for us. Certainly with the rates that we've been paying people, even though it's part time, we are paying industry rates and we want to continue to do that. And one of the other things that we're integrating within our co-op is a proper professional development and mentoring programme, because again, there's a lot of demand and we've got experienced members and we've got junior members. And what we want to do is support people to actually grow their skills and their opportunities and their market value. So yeah, that's exactly what we want to do. We would like to charge as much as possible. So each of the members gets that reward. And as I say, one of the things we are doing, and we've started to do already, which is wonderful, is start giving some of that excess away in a very tangible fashion. Mark, we've got a couple more questions about your service offer. So what services do you offer? And then a specific question about do you offer services to support evaluation, research and measuring of projects? Done the moment again, it's one of those growth things. So we have an established talent pool, because we have the original members in who are from a sort of digital creative technology background. And one of the things that we're going to be doing as an exercise is looking at what is the demand for digital services. As you said, within COVID it's exploded. I'm actually middle of writing an article for a publication about the uptake of e-commerce. And one of the things we're looking for is, what services are needed? And obviously one of our flexible offerings is we'll see if we can find somebody who would like that sort of opportunity. And as long as we can do quality work and delivery as a normal company, we'll say yes. But it's part of our growing and review process is to look at the services. I mean, as I said, one of the ones that we're growing at the moment is we're going to have two qualified drone pilots for filming and other media work, which has very unrelated to websites. But again, that's the talent pool equipment and skill set we have. But yeah. Well, you might have answered the question from earlier on. What sort of work do you do? I think you've given us a sense of that. And who is a typical client? What is your USP? Well, typical client at the moment is one of the things we started off with. There's actually quite a lot of in-house work within the university and associated through PCDN. So like most startup companies, we're working with people who know us. And then sort of growing our client base. We've got, in fact, Andy, it's one of your contacts that's come back to us this last week, hasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So that's this contact that he's on about. Essentially, he gets a lot of other projects through that he's not able to take on himself. So he's going to be passing them on to us. So that's going to be quite a decent stream of projects, we believe. And this is it. In terms of how do you, we're trying to grow, it's a bit like search engine and optimization. At the moment, we're trying to grow organically through the demand. And again, because of the way that we're set up, we can be flexible around the amount of resources we put on a project or not put on a project. So as I say, because we're sort of coming to the end of, it's the end of our first financial year, actually at the end of this month. So we've actually had a test run for a year, under very weird circumstances. And then next year we'll be more strategic around the offering and membership. Well, thank you very much, Mark and Andrew. That's been really interesting. And I think because you're early in your journey, I think you've given us some insight into what it takes to set up a co-op in this sector. We will, at the end, I'm going to say a little bit more about the references that Mark made to the support that's available for Preston-based worker co-operatives if they wish to set themselves up. We have a program of technical support for those co-operatives as they seek to get on their feet. But before I do that, I'd like to invite Polly to talk a little bit about her co-operative and also about the work of Cotech, which brings digital co-operatives together in a co-operative community. Right. Hi, everybody. Thank you very much for the invitation to speak today. It's great to see some people here. So this is Polly Robbins, and I work for a worker called Outlandish. We're based in London, North London in Finsbury Park. We started as a straight-up business, as a company limited by guarantee. In 2007, I believe, and morphed into being a co-operative in 2016. We thought it represented our values much better, and in practice we had been working as a co-operative, but it just wasn't really enshrined in our legal articles of association. When we transformed into a co-operative, as many of you will know, one of the principles of co-operativism is that you cooperate with other co-ops, and so we started searching around at that time to find out which other co-ops existed in the digital sector, particularly workers' co-operatives, and we kind of suggested to those that we did find that we all get together, and that was back in 2016. We got together in Workley Hall, which is like a stately home, which I believe is now owned by the TUC, or Unite, outside Shaffield, and that was the birth of Cotech, so I'm here not to talk to you so much about Outlandish, but rather to talk to you about Cotech. So we're a network of workers' co-operatives, and we all sell technology or digital services. We started with about 20 co-op members came to that inaugural meeting, and we've now got around 45 members, so each one of those co-ops has anything between, I think, two or three to, I'd say, about 40 workers within it, so we're representing, I think, something around 300 workers, and that's across the UK, including Wales and Scotland, and in fact, I think Northern Ireland. So we have three main ways of working together. John has touched on some of them. John, as you know, is also part of Cotech. So I'd say the first and foremost one of the main things about Cotech is that it's a business network, and we collaborate on projects, so that's like a really quite unusual thing to do. As co-ops, we try not to compete against each other. It's not really in our interests or vision for lots of co-ops to be competing for the same kind of work, particularly when that work comes from public sector bodies or charities and trade unions and that kind of thing. So we will try to kind of partner on projects. So for example, we might work with code operative when we need some additional skills or specialisms. We do a lot of peer-to-peer learning as well, which is just like a really lovely thing to do because, you know, as John mentioned, it's not always that you don't think, everybody's mentioned, it's not, in Mark's also mentioned, it's not always the easiest thing to do to set up a co-op. So where it's possible, we try to share as many learnings as we can. We also have a high level of transparency when it comes to things like policies and procedures. Anybody could say, oh, you know, I need a, you know, we're redeveloping opportunity and opportunity pay policy. What should we do? And we've got a kind of repository where we keep all of those things. We do a few circumvents. That's something which has been growing recently. So at the moment at our landish, we're working with three, no, sorry, four members of other co-ops. So that was partly because in the summer, we needed some extra capacity, like quite a few people, partly due to COVID and lots of parents, lots of people at our landish are parents. And so they were only working part-time but the schools were off and things. We just needed a bit of extra capacity. So we reached out to a couple of designers and also project managers from other co-ops and then are working with us on a common part-time. The great thing about that is that it means that we can, it means that we don't have that gap in our staffing. And it also means that other co-ops are now learning more about how our processes work. And so then when it comes next time to collaborating or part-time on a client project, we can kind of hit the ground running. They know about our processes. We know about theirs. We know each other much better in terms of the skills and interests that we have. And then thirdly, we collectively support the digital co-ops sector to grow. So for example, that would be providing internships to young people, working with universities, coming and talking at events like this and that kind of thing. So that's probably what co-tech is. I'm not going to read this out, but we really do believe that there is like an alternative way for the tech industry to work. I've recently been running a training program for people wanting to learn new digital skills, kind of basic digital skills. And I had a really great conversation with a woman who said, oh, it's so great to hit, read your website. I've only ever thought technology is something which is really exploitative, and I hear so much about Facebook and Google and all of this sort of news, stealing our data, spying on people, or dropping bombs on people and things. And she said it was just so inspiring to hear that there was an alternative vision for the tech industry, which isn't based around exploitation of workers and exploitation of users in the form of kind of data and that kind of thing. We really want to kind of show and demonstrate, not just through talking about it by fact, but actually kind of operating in such a way that it does provide workers with like a greater level of control over their working day and working life as well as like who their clients are. And also that our clients feel that they can really trust us, I think, is a really important part of being a workers cooperative. As John mentioned, everybody who works for that cooperative owns business and so we each have a vested interest in our business and our reputation because we're not just in one day and out the other and so if you work with the workers cooperative, then you're working with a business owner, you're always working with the top bosses if you like. And yeah, we just want to kind of demonstrate that another world is possible. It's not about exploitation. This is just a few of our, this is the co-op members and we work across like a whole bunch of creative and creative specialisms, so everything from design and development to kind of strategy and everything. This is just a few of the clients and many more if you go on our website. So as you can see, we work a lot with universities and educational research organizations. We work with NGOs and charities and public sector, that kind of thing. It's not actually represented very well on this slide, but we also work with with a lot of companies in Outland, every co-op has its own policies, but in Outlandish we actually quite like working for companies. We have a bit of a Robin Hood model because if you're always working with charities or NGOs, they probably already have some kind of ethical buying policy and so it's inevitable that the money that they spend is almost certainly going to get spent with some more ethical digital agency. Maybe they might not be straight up a co-op whereas if you're working with a pensions provider or something, it's unlikely that they will have necessarily thought about that when it comes to procuring their digital services. And so in Outlandish we don't work with any arms companies. We don't work with any kind of fossil fuels industries and we do it on a case-by-case basis. We turn down work with the home office and the foreign office but broadly we work with quite a large range of companies as well as long as they are more or less trying to do good stuff. And another thing to mention about Outlandish is we try to make a 20% surface we don't call it a profit, we try to make some of our projects. So not all of the money is paid out in pay to our workers. We keep trying to send it back and we try to invest that in projects which we think use technology to make the world a better place. So sometimes that might be doing pro bono work for our clients and sometimes it might be taking people on who know we can't charge out at very high rates but we want to train them up and particularly when that's about diversity and inclusion. So training up young female developers and that kind of thing to try and tackle some of the gender imbalance in the tech sector. And one thing that we have done which I'll talk about in a moment is setting up a co-working space which is one of the main projects that I do at Outlandish which is trying to stimulate the digital co-op sector. So as I've touched on it's really about being greater than the sum of our parts. Most of the co-ops are I think the top one is about 40 people but mostly they range from about 10 people or something. And I think I speak for pretty much all members of the co-op of the network when I say that we don't want to grow and grow when you think about startups in the traditional sense of tech startups there is always a kind of expectation that you want to be growing and increasing your turnover kind of more exponentially and buying up other companies and growing your team massively. Most co-ops don't really want that they like kind of being quite friendly with the rest of their members they like kind of having that personal touch and keeping that kind of culture of it being a small business. But at the same time that means that we previous to being prior to being a co-op we couldn't necessarily say oh yeah we know okay we're going to build this great website for you but we don't really know how to promote it on the Facebook you'll have to have different agencies do that. Whereas now with co-op with co-tech what we can do is we can each kind of work according to our specialisms and then partner up with other co-ops in line with their specialisms. So for example we worked on a big project for UNICEF where we created the data visualization and the data tools and another co-op worked on like the actual embedding it into a Drupal website because we don't specialize in that. We've also partnered up with other co-ops to do kind of comms and marketing strategy for a lot of the projects that we've worked on. And we collaborated on projects worth up to 2.2 million I think is one of the biggest ones so we're not all just you know tiddly little tiny businesses working on small projects we are actually trying to kind of get a bigger and bigger share of the kind of tech market. And yeah we cover a whole range of specialisms so of course Preston is one of you know leading the way in terms of trying to support co-ops and I think that there's a few kind of suggestions which you know it's not rocket science it's about training so for example one of the members of COTECH is called founders and coders they're a completely free coding school they teach people for 12 weeks and I think that's going up to 18 completely free full-time course and how to become a JavaScript developer and then they have partnerships with a lot of employers so that's going to tech startups, other co-ops some government as well and they're also transforming into becoming an official apprenticeship provider and they're also trying to boost the level of digital skills within a city or a town or a region I think it's like really important it's only going to grow as a sector and it currently provides tech sector provides very highly paid jobs compared to a lot of other sectors so I do think that like trying to stimulate digital training programmes particularly when they can be free and inclusive to people who aren't traditionally well employed in the tech sector is really important business training and you know events like this there's a lot of training out there as far as I can see about how to run a startup or how to run even a social enterprise but they do tend to be more geared towards at least being like partly profit making and just trying to give people the training that's needed about how to run a co-op there is like a lack of that across the country and that's definitely something that codec can help with spreading the word doing events like this and affordable workspaces so I mentioned that we set up something called space forward and affordable work training and events space in north London I think we've incubated so we've been going for three four years now I think we've incubated something like eight co-ops and we also have founders and coders that code school I mentioned housed within the workspace so they are kind of submerged if you like into this kind of world of co-ops we also do a lot of events for the local people and beyond about what co-ops are and kind of the intersection of politics, philosophy and technology looking at things not always specific to the co-op industry but for example we did an event a couple of years ago which I loved which is about gender and LGBTQ issues where it comes to tech so looking at ethics and sort of AI and all that kind of stuff and so looking again at these kind of ethical questions which are really prevalent in the tech sector we're next so we want to keep on growing in terms of our members so if you hear of any co-ops that you think could do with support and being part of a wide network please put them in touch we also want to grow our turnover so we're always looking for clients and that's anything between 5000 pounds and 5 million pounds something like that we would like to see more and more co-optive workspaces incubator so like the space pool project that I've mentioned and there are a few popping up around the country including in Newcastle and Bradford and we'd like to see a lot more of that and that can really really be supported when it comes to if you work for a council or a local borough or if you are indeed any kind of property developer things like that it would be great to think about who could kind of be in that workspace and be generating a lot of value because another one of the co-op principles is that you invest in your local community so spending some money with a co-op or giving them some free workspaces likely to be reinvested back into the local community we'd like to see more business schools talk about co-ops so you know if again like if you are part of business school don't just talk about profit children companies talk about co-ops as well we're in the process of developing more formal training programs for young people and people who are new to the co-op sector and we're getting the young co-operators network which was set up a few years ago and is now somewhat fallen by the way so that's getting reinvigorated at the moment we're currently thinking about appointing a network coordinator for Cotech Cotech currently is quite decentralized which is great in some ways because it somehow reflects the co-op model where everybody has to pitch in to make it a success but we also think about in their new business development need for the Cotech network who would kind of be in charge of going out there and getting more business and further rating internationally and as Job mentioned we are part of a whole international movement which goes right around the corner so that's it for me there's a bit of information there for you to get in touch and yeah I'd be very happy to take any questions that you've got Thank you very much Polly I've picked up one question in the chat what process do you use to disseminate the work fairly across the cooperative so at the moment what we do is we meet quite regularly and we have an online forum and so we kind of get to know because it's still only 45 co-ops we do get to know roughly what specialisms are for each co-op and so we try to refer work when it's to the people that it's relevant to rather than just kind of putting it out there and broadcasting it because that can result in things not coming coming back or going quite to the right co-op or the client just kind of reaches a bit of a kind of impasse when it comes to somebody picking it up so one way is that we just do kind of direct referrals another way is that we have a discourse forum where jobs go up and the co-ops can kind of talk about who's most eligible for the work and who's most in need of the work we've just started using a platform which has been developed by our kind of counterparts in France who are called Happy Dev and they have created a piece of software called Hubble which allows you to build teams around a particular project so we've only just started using that but yes we try to as far as possible not compete against each other and if there are two organisations who want to go for the same work we try to go to collaborate and take on different aspects of that work together or look at it in a needs based way so which co-op actually needs that work first thank you have we got any more questions for Polly well thank you very much Polly I think again what you were saying about the community of cooperatives I think there were some really important messages there about the mutual support and trust and the personal relationships that operate between you as a community supporting you to collaborate rather than compete and I think there's a very powerful messages to take away from this afternoon because it is a totally different working culture and I'm sure for many of those listening that will have great appeal so before we finish I'm sure you'd like to all like to join me in thanking today's speakers for their inspiring contributions I would also like to thank everyone else who's contributed to today's events we've had a leaner particularly who's worked very hard to get us set up and various comms teams who've been broadcasting the message about the webinars and of course thank you to all of you who've joined us today and I hope you've found it worthwhile and an inspiring afternoon I did say a little bit about the support we have available in Preston for worker co-ops sort of start-up phase we have some funding from the open society foundations which provides up to 10 days of technical support for worker cooperative in those early days getting ready to launch so if you are impressed and self-revolved surely and you're interested in pursuing a cooperative project you do get in touch with us I think the leaner will put in the chat the email to get more information about that funding program and the other thing I just wanted to say is that we do have another webinar next week we're continuing the Preston model those digital theme but with a slightly different focus it overlaps but it's a slightly different focus because we're going to be talking about platform co-operatives how cooperative ownership of digital platforms is creating a more diverse and democratic economy and we'll be introducing some pioneers from the north west of England who are transforming platform capitalism into platform co-operativism and I did a little chat earlier with Zola from Mongolia I believe about the open food net and Lynn Davis who is the chief executive of the open food net will be presenting about that particular piece of software which is I believe an open source software and has been used in other parts of the world so Zola it might be well worth joining us for that webinar next week so once again thanks to everybody for a really interesting afternoon and wishing you all very well and if you wish to get into contact with us please do Alina's just put the email in the chat for the OSF funding but any other questions do get in touch or I think you have the details of the different speakers have been provided so you would be willing to follow up with any questions that you may have so once again many thanks and best wishes to all