Main Cooperative Document

A Cooperative of Blind Software Professionals Original: 10/3/2013 Latest: 10/16/2013 Status: Draft 3

NOte: Until this note is removed from this memo, please do not share it with anyone not on the distribution. This is an early draft so the writing will likely be pretty clunky and, more importantly than my reputation as a linguistic craftsman, the contents will likely change a lot before it is ready for a broader audience.

Introduction by Chris Hofstader

In September 2013, Mike Calvo and I had a interesting conversation about the community of people with vision impairment. Among the different subpopulations we identified within the community, we realized that young, well educated blind technology professionals had no representation in the major advocacy groups (NFB, ACB, etc.) and that it seemed like no person or group was even trying to speak to these people. While this population isn’t as bad off as those blind people who are both unemployed and without a good education, this group has needs that go unmet by the existing framework in disability.

A few days after our call, I had spent a fair amount of time noodling around with ideas for creating a structure in which this population can thrive. I talked to a number of young blind hackers, including Christopher Toth, one of the founding members on this effort. I found myself thinking of a cooperative business structure to promote blind programmers seeking to work in the contract services sector.

In my public role as a blogger,I get a whole lot of requests for introductions to programmers who understand accessibility. Even more so, I frequently hear, both directly and by proxy, from people who specifically want to contract with blind programmers. I guess this is to have at least a few people around who actually understand a project’s objectives if it involves accessibility to people with vision impairment.

Over the past few years, I have helped out some blind friends in the contracting world. If Mike Calvo and I combined our contact lists, we’d have the entire spectrum of people interested in accessibility and a ton of contacts with those seeking to employ blind contractors.

At this point in history, We have an interesting opportunity. We have access to the best blind technologists in the world and a contact list jammed with the sorts of people these talented young engineers can help dramatically. Meanwhile, most of these software engineers have no sales skills, have never written a formal proposal and haven’t the ability to even fully value their work in an hourly rate similar to that commanded by people with similar skill sets.

Why A Cooperative?

Most of our blind technologist friends have day jobs or their own projects that they need to work on. Meanwhile, all of those to whom we’ve spoken would love to get an extra 20-40 hours per month and some even more at rates ranging from a floor of $85 for big gigs with loads of hours to $250 per hour for single days to a week. These guys would benefit greatly from the added income and clients win as they have access to the best the blind technology community can provide.

As I mentioned in the introduction, these blind technology professionals currently do not have access to the clients capable of paying these handsome rates. That’s where Mike Calvo and Chris Hofstader come in. Also acting in a part time, as we see fit, way of proceeding, they can deliver the projects. I’d suggest that they share 10% of sales as a commission.

The blind technologists out there today also have no money to help pay for infrastructure. The cooperative, funded by a percentage of the sales (say 20%), can help pay for a web site, legal fees, travel to conferences for some members, sales costs (hopefully kept to a minimum) and those sort of things.

The win for the hackers is that they get to raise their billable hours and rates to that of a more elite sort of contractor. At the same time, though, they will also gain exposure to the clients and others to whom we can sell even more services in the future.

With a cooperative, we can bid on contracts that require a team as we’ll have access to a number of programmers who may want to participate in any given gig.

The individual technologists can opt in or out of any project at proposal time. This is only possible with a cooperative as, if it was a consulting company, everyone would be an employee and wouldn’t have the freedom to be choosey with their projects.

Why Not A Traditional Consulting Company?

In addition to the reasons given for a cooperative above, there are quite a few reasons why a consulting company with a more traditional corporate model is a bad idea.

Contract shops can be very fragile and establishing a persistent revenue model is often difficult. Our founders have observed numerous small contract services companies die a sudden death due to problems with a single client. We don’t want to put these hackers in a risky position as is the case for all start-up companies and we like that, in a cooperative model, everything is open, known to all members and is in such a way that they have all of the data available to make their own risk analysis.

If we wanted to do this full time as a contract company, we’d be looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars in first year salaries, a whole lot of legal costs for incorporation, business and board insurance and all sorts of other overhead expenses. In a cooperative we’re really a loose confederacy of self-employed individuals, we avoid the costs while providing the programmers with opportunities to make far more than they could with just a salary.

This also puts a whole lot of freedom into the hands of the hackers. These guys can “own” their own labor. In a sense, this cooperative will be an assembly of of self-employed individuals with minimal authority over them. It’ll be mostly democratic and, as all of its finances will be open to the membership, everyone can make his own decisions regarding income, risk, interest or anything else.

Some practical matters:

Can We Compete?

Let’s take a look at the other big time accessibility contract shops (none are a cooperative in nature) but we have TPG, Deque Systems, SSB/Bart, EZ Fire, and a few other smaller ones. Excepting the one man EZ Fire, none provide much to clients developing apps but, rather, focus almost exclusively on web stuff and 508 remediation. For all intents and purposes, the existing contractors do the same project over and over. We think our cooperative can succeed in web and 508 but, right now, CVAA is huge for apps and these other players can’t do that work as they haven’t the talent to do so. None of the other players are run by users so we can have that win as well.

As our team is loosely organized, if some members choose to, they can underprice the bigger players. The cooperative structure allows us to be far more flexible on pricing as the individuals can make their own bids. If we bid a contract at a lower rate and offer similar or better services, we can, over time, own this business segment.

Today, Deque, TPG, SSB and some others make nearly all of their money in government contracts. What we got that the others don’t is quite a lot. The federal government has set asides for minorities and people with disabilities. As we, with disabilities, are allowed to apply under both designations, we can fill two requirements unavailable to Mike Paciello and the other sighted white people who run such businesses.

Who Should We Invite to Join the Cooperative?

I would like to launch this effort with no fewer than a half dozen blind contractors. People we’d like to invite (in the order in which we thought of them, not preference):

• Matt Campbell
• Mike Calvo
• Christopher Toth
• Chris Hofstader
• Brian Smart
• Tyler Spivey
• Austin Hicks
• Vadim Backmativ (pronounced Bach Ma Teef)
• Mia Lipner
• Jimmy Watson
• Nolan Darilek
• Donal Fitzpatrick
• Alastair Somerville
• Cara Quinn
• Mallory van Achterberg
• Susan Hofstader
• Ted Henter

All but two of the people on this list (Susan and Jimmy) are technology professionals who, based on their individual skills, can perform any number of different technology tasks ranging from programming to project management.

What Sort of Projects Should We Attempt?

We’d like to start with application and “system” development. We also have some web people on our list and, perhaps, that’s an early business segment to look into as well.

Philosophic Motivations for a Cooperative

• This may be the first time a group of blind technologists have seized the means of production that governs their lives. This appeals to my anarchist soul as, in this model, the hackers “own” their own labor, have the freedom to make all of their own decisions and will exist with a minimum of authority.

• On the ancient Greek idea, “NOthing about us without us,” can be solved with this cooperative. We can offer clients not only hot hackers but ones who bring an intuitive user sensibility to their projects. We can say “nothing about blind people without the participation of blind people” and also provide the talented blind people who can help a client achieve its accessibility goals for the first time ever. I had thought EZ Fire would be the contract shop to fulfill this aspect of things but, alas, a single business failure cratered the company.