 Okay, let's get started. Okay, hello everyone. Thank you for coming. This is Co-operative Drupal, Growth and Sustainability through Worker Ownership. My name is Finn Lewis from Agile Collective and this is Business Track in case you thought otherwise. My contact details up there on the Twitter and do you feel free to get in touch on Drupal.org or by email if you have any questions either now or later. Hopefully there'll be plenty of time for questions here today. I love Drupal, as many people here do, and I also love co-operatives and I've been involved in both co-operatives and Drupal for about the same time since about 2006 when I first set up a worker co-operative as a Drupal company or actually back then it wasn't a Drupal company but it became a Drupal company rapidly and my love of both has evolved very much in parallel over the last 10, 11 years. So my motivation for speaking here today was really to share my knowledge of the co-operative model as a business model and hopefully inspire at least one of you to consider worker ownership as a viable alternative because I think there's perhaps a lot of assumptions, mismatched assumptions around what that might mean. So hopefully through this we can uncover some of the realities and demonstrate that indeed it is. So firstly if anyone who doesn't know what is a co-operative, this was the best definition I came up with that wasn't very long, co-operatives are businesses that are owned and run by their members who have an equal say in what the business does and a share in the profits. In about 1844 a group of interesting looking gentlemen set up a co-operative in Rochedale and they were then known as the Rochedale pioneers. This was the first sort of known example of what we modern day co-op. It was a grocery store where they shared the profits back to the people who spent money in the store. They established seven principles of co-operation by which this store was run and these principles have since been adopted by the wider co-operative movement and the international co-operative alliance. These principles are very much around democracy and autonomy and openness and you can google them online if you don't already know them there's some great detail but there are seven of them and this leads to many different types of co-ops so there are producer co-operatives, people who make wine or farmers who want to share the production and rally together to be able to get to markets in a more consistent way. There are grocery co-ops as previously mentioned, so consumer co-ops that share the profits with the consumers and the consumers are very much the members of the co-op who benefit. There are housing co-ops where people club together to buy a house and people might come and go as different members of the housing co-op over time but have a sustainable form of affordable accommodation and there are worker co-ops which is what I want to talk about today, bottom right being an example in in the UK about 150 strong wholesale food co-operative which is owned and run by by its workers. So you know just sum up in a nutshell a worker co-op is democratically owned by its member workers, is democratically controlled by its member workers and it democratically benefits the member workers. So what's all this got to do with Drupal and the Drupal community? Well I think quite a lot and I mean I think even this morning's keynote around sharing and how you know we are at a community of people who share with each other is very there's a lot of synergies I think between the co-op movement and the Drupal values and principles. I mean to start with Drupal is based on the GPL which has some very key core freedoms with the values of the open source free software, of the freedom to be able to run the software, to study the source, to share again sharing is quite a common theme today and to improve the software and this bubbles up into the community in general. I think I've seen over many years of talking to people and businesses people are very open and sharing in this community and if we look at the mission and principles on Drupal.org there's a page which mentions that we believe in open source innovation, globalism and collaboration which I think ties in very nicely with the co-operative principles and defines one of the values of collaboration supporting open and co-operative information sharing. You know we have the word co-operative right in there so I think co-operation is in built into the Drupal community and in many ways I'm kind of surprised to see fewer co-operative owned companies within the Drupal community and just why I think it's important to come and talk at these things and share the fact that it's a reality and it's a possibility and it's definitely viable. So to summarise I think there is a strong cultural fit. It's all about people both co-operatives are about people and the Drupal community is about people and it's about people contributing and it's about people benefiting and this I think goes the synergy I think is there very very very very strongly. They're not exactly the same owning a business is different from contributing to open source but they go very well together in my eyes. So benefits what are the benefits of working in a worker co-operative? Firstly I think it's important to note that a worker co-op is just a normal company it you know or it can be it can be other things to you but in our case it is we you know it's a normal company we've got normal employee benefits we are on payroll we can have pensions we have sick pay maternity pay etc you know all of the normal things you would expect in a working and vibrant company but on top of the employee benefits we also have co-operative benefits that those benefits being that we own the company that we can share in the profits of the company or decide how to how to reinvest the profits and we control the company. So one small example of that which means we can extend our employee benefits in our case at agile collective we all have company bikes because we thought that was important for employees to have you know a decent form of transport we like bikes basically so but the point being we can we can control what the benefits are and change you know the direction of the company. Other things we decide around who to hire you know whether to grow what kind of clients we might want to work with or might not want to work with so this control and ownership is you know a wrapper around everything else but it is a normal company we do get paid normally as it were. Other benefits which are more sort of external to do with the perception of worker co-operatives there's some research done by somebody at Leeds University in the UK one of one of the points of which he summarised as worker cops survive at least as long as other businesses and tend to have much more stable employment therefore a lower staff turnover and recently there's a you go survey that actually was just published this month which surveys you governs a big pollster survey organisation in the UK I believe and 58% of people polled said that they think employee owned businesses are more trustworthy so we've now got some external evidence that actually the perception of worker owned businesses is another benefit to perhaps our sustainability and our growth and how we can go on to do more business in the future. Another another stat from that survey is that 44% are more likely to apply for a job at an employee owned business which I found interesting and that 41% are more likely to buy products or services from from worker owned businesses. Now I find this really interesting I didn't haven't seen this data before today actually but it does add to the kind of other reasons for having a worker owned business other than your own direct benefit as a worker owner there are external benefits to marketing and to growth and sustainability I think but let's talk about challenges because I think that's probably where the interesting information lies you know we have been doing this well I've been in working cards for 10 years and in agile collective since 2011 when we started it so there are many challenges we have more individual responsibilities as worker owners making decisions can take a little bit longer when there's lots of you making the decision finding the right people to join can be tough and as you grow communication becomes an ever exponentially growing you know burden and and so management structures may need to evolve alongside that so we'll just pick out a couple of those to talk about in a little bit more detail communication and decision making being a key one as mentioned you know with lots of us communication takes longer and decisions perhaps a harder to make so we have started using an online tool called Lumio some of you may have come across this it's developed by the Inspiral Network in New Zealand and this allows us to take our decision making online and run it asynchronously so it may take you know a couple of days or a couple of weeks to to discuss and come up with a decision a member decision for the members of the co-op um the the voting model for proposals is very much based on the consensus model where you can agree disagree abstain or block um how you choose to interpret this is is very much up to you in in your obviously decision making algorithm or whatever um this may result in something like this where you know nobody blocked one person disagreed four people agreed and three people abstained so general agreement in the proposal with a certain amount of sort of whatever so like like I say you can decide how to use that uh it's a very interesting piece of software actually it also does polls and sort of scheduling to help you find out when you can have meetings and and such and it's open source you can self host it or you can use it as a service from from themselves uh from from Lumio um the other area that I wanted to pick up on is management structure there are 12 of us now and they started with six of us so as we've grown the this kind of flat communication structure has expanded until uh members meetings were quite busy and long and arduous to some extent um especially when you're trying to do them very regularly to to decide lots of key uh important decisions so we have moved recently this year to a sort of committee based structure where three of us are on the coordinating committee and that the coordinating committee will take the uh the operational decisions on a day to day basis and a week to week basis um very much guided by the members input on an annual basis on a quarterly basis where we have members meetings to to to guide the strategy of the company in which direction we're going um this is quite new for us so so it's kind of early days but in the six to nine months that it's been going it's been great it's actually freed up lots of time for people to uh get you know get on with more client work essentially and less internally focused work um so this kind of management structure I think is something that's important to consider depending on what size of organization you are and I think as organizations grow to uh like the size of LEAP for example in the swiss company which has 160 people then you start to see that there are um you know so the the 12 to 15 number of people seems to be like a nice natural size of of a of local groups so it may be that that this evolves again as we grow pay pay structure this is a a an interesting area because a lot of people assume that all cooperatives get equal pay flat pay um and that's not the case some people do um in our business I think that is difficult um just to be able to attract people at the right level um experienced developers and to do for world tend to expect a certain amount of pay and people who don't know anything you want to come in as juniors you know would expect a a different amount of pay so at the moment we have a a banded pay structure but we are exploring the idea of coming to a a flat pay structure with some kind of a sort of on ramp up to that but um it as you can imagine there's lots of discussion around that um and these kind of discussions are often best facilitated by external people um in our case in in in the uk we have co-ops uk which is the development body um and they're they're yeah very good at facilitating such such decisions um so yeah the title of the talk was growth and sustainability because I note that generally the business track is very much geared at growth and sustainability uh they they always seem to go hand in hand um one thing I'm interested in is is is whether growth is necessary so we are 12 people maybe we just want to stay at 12 people and that's fine for for a cooperative model where um where perhaps uh growth is the motivation for growth is maybe not so much profit driven as it may be in a company where you have uh people who you know a small number of owners and and and more workers um but yeah there are other motivations for growth as well so firstly that you know that's slightly different perhaps in a co-op but I think the things that are the same are sustainability um in order to sustain ourselves uh we do need happy workers we need sorry we need you know we need job satisfaction we need to uh be able to maintain our um ourselves we need to get paid we need to have a work line um and uh and so all of these kind of sustainability goals I think are probably very similar from a worker owned to a non-worker owned company um and doing my research with other worker cops that we know one thing that came up was um one cop's goal was to get big enough that any one of them could just disappear for a year and that the whole company would carry on and so I thought that was interesting they're about six seven people at the moment they don't feel that they can do that um I think our sides have about 12 people we can um and we have done and it's been fine so so that's you know they're a good they're a different perhaps yard sticks or measures by which you might consider yourself sustainable um and I think that's something we review quite regularly as well so talking of reviewing regularly you know do we want to grow is something we ask ourselves and each other um and one of our uh 2015 I think survey before our visioning weekend 80% of us did want to grow and by 2016 80% of us did not want to grow so during that time one person had joined I think um which is quite a small you know and it's not no just you know it's nothing on that particular person but it was interesting that a small amount of growth can change the culture quite a lot uh within within a team of you know 10 11 people um and that can you know take a little bit of time to uh to to balance out so so we don't want to grow for growth sake we want to continually check whether we want to grow and you know at the right times we do and we will um another thing about growth is generally you know the motivation to grow to be able to take on bigger projects and to be able to do more interesting work perhaps um one way we've addressed that recently is by scaling with other co-operatives um principle six of the co-op uh principles is co-ops working with other co-ops it's very important that we try to work as much as possible with other co-operatives um and in our line of work um we're lucky enough now um that there are many other technical co-ops uh in the UK we've recently formed something called co-tech which is a network of 25 co-ops um taking the number of people working there up to about 160 and vastly you know diversifying the the resources that we have to pull on um so this results in collaborations and people taking uh you know some people taking on projects and then subcontracting to other co-ops in the same way that might happen with with you know non-worker owned companies but um the fact that we're all co-ops really does bind us together and and allow us to be very open and transparent with with everything on that so another way that we can grow and scale without necessarily growing our own company because again the motivations might might be slightly different so how can you guys work for a worker co-op um so that's one of my motivations is to inspire at least one of you to consider that um if you're not already working for a worker I should probably you'd probably all work for co-ops don't you sorry I should just check that at the at the beginning um assuming you're not um first way is to start a co-op I mean if you're a freelancer or somebody you're planning a change in your business uh you're also to start a new business um you can start a co-op there's lots of help out there from co-ops UK or co-ops Europe there's this starter.coop website which gives you a lot of the tools and answers a lot of the questions you might want to to to start a co-op of business for which you just need two people a business plan a commitment to the seven principles of co-operation and you're good to go obviously you need you know dedication and hard work um second way is to convert an existing business to a worker co-op um which until I sort of did my research I didn't think was perhaps such a popular thing um but it is and there is also a lot of support out there for people who are considering that because it's it's not without its challenges um but a couple of examples in the UK include uh cooperative web who um recently I'll say recently within the last few years acquired another company which was 31 people strong and kind of mutualised it and gave the company back to them so they kind of converted an existing business into a worker owned business uh not quite overnight but um anyway it was a success story another one is Outlandish uh who specialised in data visualisation in London and they've reached recently also uh mutualised and become worker owned the third way is of course to join an existing worker co-op um and within the Drupal community there are quite a few these are ones that I could immediately lay my hands on um at our collective ourselves point blank and grease agaric across North America and Nicaragua and possibly other places and and more in in Spain and South America I believe um on the slides I did put links to all of those in case you wanted to get in touch with any of them um and as our collective is currently looking for another member just in case um but but yeah what's what's the reality for for me like working in the worker co-op um I guess work-life balance is is something that I always have trouble with and tend to either do too much work or too much life but um but you know it's it's good to have that control to be able to adjust my my working patterns you know as I need to sometimes I do need to work more um for for various reasons and sometimes I need to work less many of us in our collective work four days a week some people work part-time some people adjust that um over over time so having that control is I think really important to me and I don't think I could uh could could really give give that up um I do have a say on how the profits of our company are spent uh currently we tend to reinvest them rather than do an actual profit share but we're always looking at that as a as another way of you know sharing uh you know incentivising or or you know if we make it when we do make lots of profit then um sharing it is is an option um and I have a control in the direction of our company which is again critical um the types of clients that we do the types of projects that we do um all of this you know adds up to the all-important loving your job and I do love my job um I do say it not every day but probably at least once a week um you know some days are tough but uh on balance I think you know three out of three out of five days uh uh uh you know days where I go home loving my job um and I'd love other people to be able to say the same thing I'd love people to be able to own and control their own workplaces and and create the work that you want to do so um so yeah like I said we are looking for new members we have a sort of job ad as it were at the moment but it's not just about the skills it's about members and people and good fit as well as um you know it's one of the the type of work that that we're looking to do so do share that around and tell people if if you know of anyone who's looking to work in a worker cop so that's about it don't forget the sprints tomorrow um especially uh if the first time sprinter um there is a core mentor mentor to core sprint um to help people get on board um I'll be there there's a first time sprinter workshop as well I didn't realise there were two different things um anyway uh come along tomorrow um but that's it for me thank you and any questions hi Finn thank you that was awesome um I have a question about you you mentioned that as your company grew from six to 12 or 13 and coming up with the structure where you have a committee of people who are sort of given the authority to make certain types of decisions how did you decide who was going to be in that group of people versus who was going to be not essentially a democratic vote um it was a discussion but it was more consensus really rather than you know blind ballot or anything there were a couple of people who were obvious um contenders based on the type of work that that they were doing I mean beforehand we all sort of had different hats as it were and so somebody would be doing mostly finance and somebody else would be doing mostly business development and sales and so having a few core people who were already in some of those roles to be sort of you know liberated from having to talk to everybody all the time and allow them to just get on with it uh made a made perfect sense um but it started off actually with four of us but then one of us suddenly had to be off site with a client four days a week for for six months so then it was just three and that's worked really well I mean they they meet regularly they're still doing billable work as well but a proportion of their time is just on the operational management side so um but the idea is that we'll rotate every six months we have a look does somebody want to step down somebody else want to come on and really share those the experience and the responsibilities I like that the idea it's not a fixed position but over time you kind of reevaluate indeed indeed yeah so you kind of do your time on the committee perhaps you know and uh I think that's important as well other worker co-ops do that they rotate their roles in and around the different jobs within the co-op to make sure that everyone has a better understanding of each other's jobs and you know even if it's something you may not immediately be the best at then I think learning that gives you a mutual appreciation of of uh you know yeah what other people do thank you thank you hi thanks for the talk what how do you deal with changes in qualification and commitment in the cooperative changes in qualification and commitment can you give me an example when somebody's you talked about work life balance when somebody's spending older uh more on the work and another one's always spending more on the lifetime does it reflect somehow in sure I mean people's situations change and and we're just up for talking about that and working out how best to to deal with that two of our two of my colleagues moved to Italy to see if that would work and that's fine they're now living in Italy having a great time you know that's mainly motivated by being close to great mountains for mountain biking and but the quality of the work is still great and we're all you know communicating through online tools and meeting up every three to six months you know I mean I appreciate some organizations that are totally distributed we're kind of half you know mostly centralized but then a few of us are distributed um but people's yeah life situations change and sometimes they need to go from a full time to maybe a part time job or maybe they want to take time off to go to study you know accommodate that discuss it and decide and how do you how do you get to to an understanding about share shares of the how big are the shares of the company and about payment types this is a this is a also a demographic process so there are no sort of equity shares in the company as such well I mean there are sort of one pound equity shares but it's you come in with nothing and you leave with nothing as it were it's just your your shares are voting rights in terms of how the company has run everything that is through pa y and there was no sort of uh yeah equity model as it were and then people get paid but in proportion to you know to full time if there's a full time equivalent if they're working less you know a few hours they will get paid accordingly just a follow-up question to the equity so technically how are you organized or how is the company organized so the company is a company limited by shares normal uk limited by shares company and there are two types of shares equity shares and member shares the member shares are the ones that carry the vote but we still have equity shares for some historic reason but we've never decided to use those the idea is that the equity shares could be used to raise investment but that investment does not carry any voting rights with it so very much separating any power that might be perceived to come with monetary investment into the company from the fact of the members and the workers owning and controlling the company so somebody owns the equity shares yeah that's right i'm slightly i think we've got rid of them now but when we started it we had six equity shares and six member shares with six of us i think we've got rid of the equity shares because we didn't need any investment and it just confused things but in another co-op as a startup where you might have wanted to have investment then the equity shares could be used in that way just doesn't doesn't then have any power in terms of governance thank you very much okay thank you i think we're are we out of time any more questions thank you very much and don't forget to go and you know give us feedback on the session because it's always useful thank you