Membership/admission decisions
Harry "Outlandish" Robbins
Public
Seen by 104
A place to discuss individual applications from potential CoTech members (co-ops).
Discussions about changing/defining/refining policies should be had on Discourse and then brought here for ratification
Chris Lowis (Go Free Range)
Mon 9 Oct 2017 11:11AM
[Go Free Range] We don't feel we have enough information about ownership and democratic processes at Developer Society to make a decision. Happy to revisit when there is more info.
Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative)
Mon 9 Oct 2017 12:04PM
Their site looks great, hope someone from their co-op is able to make it to Wortley Hall, vote changed to an abstain as Graham's questions appears not to have been answered?
Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative)
Mon 9 Oct 2017 3:06PM
Their site looks great, hope someone from their co-op is able to make it to Wortley Hall, they are clearly a co-op and it would be good to hear more detail from them regarding the way they work.
Graham
Fri 13 Oct 2017 8:16AM
Changing my vote to agree, on the basis that we now have real information on which to base a decision. Thanks Harry for posting the documents.
Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative) Mon 25 Sep 2017 6:10PM
I don't want to be pedantic but at Webarchitects (one word, we are not legally Architects), the workers have 50% of the votes, clients and partners have 25% and investors have 25%, see our rules for the full details...
Having said that I think this thread is a great idea -- these things should be transparent and clear :thumbsup:
I don't think the coops.tech site links to the Workers Co-operative Code and perhaps it should (I 'm not sure I even knew this document existed...)?
Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative) Mon 25 Sep 2017 7:13PM
I created a table on the wiki to list all the members co-ops and their types, it would be great if other could help complete it and then keep it up date :slight_smile: Also best follow up discussion on this on the community site so as not to derail this thread.
Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative) Tue 26 Sep 2017 9:30AM
Graham asked:
Re: Developer Society: do the workers have a controlling interest?
The document the FCA has available to download for £12 might answer that, note that they are a Community Benefit Society (rather than a Co-operative Society) and this is usually a legal form used by community co-ops that need to raise shares, eg a community pub or wind turbine or something, it'll be interesting to hear about the details of their structure.
Sion Whellens (Principle Six/Calverts) Thu 28 Sep 2017 5:12PM
"Outlandish is not technically a worker coop" - my view is that a worker coop can be made up of self-employed people or a mix of emloyed and self-employed (including through service companies) if they identify as such and the primary coop relationship of the members is around decent work. CICOPA and Coops UK prefer to define worker coops as strictly employee, and freelancers as consortia (like buying groups of family businesses, farmers' coops, etc) which I think is too rigid and certainly outdated given the changing nature of work.
Link to the Worker Coop Code: https://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/uploads/attachments/worker_co-operative_code_2nd_edition_0_0.pdf
I would also suggest that we require prospective members to share their top level document of incorporation (articles if company, rules if society, partner agreement if LLP, etc) to see how far it embeds coop ownership and control principles.
Harry "Outlandish" Robbins Thu 28 Sep 2017 5:30PM
Fully agree @sionwhellens - the key thing is that it is a business owned and controlled by its workers which adheres to co-op principles.
Graham · Mon 25 Sep 2017 4:53PM
Re: Developer Society: do the workers have a controlling interest?