Cooperative Q&A Document

Cooperative Questions
Date: 10/8/2013
Current: 11/3/2013
Draft: 5

In my mind and I hope in your’s too, I have a ton of questions about how we should proceed with our blind hacker cooperative. So, as I do, I started this file to gather our questions, our responses there to and to make sure we are reminded to answer them in the future. I’m using Markdown syntax in this document as that will make it easy to toss it online somewhere where our founders can have easy access to it.

How To Assign People to Projects

Inevitably, we will have situations where we have more qualified people than a client needs on a contract, how do we decide who gets the work from within the membership?

The Name

The only name proposed so far is “MC Squared” which some don’t like as it’s a reference to two of our more prominent members which seems to create a situation that may not be compatible with the notion of a cooperative.

How about “Cooperative Of Print Impaired Technologists” or COPIT for short?

Membership Dues

We need to raise some funds to launch the cooperative. We’ve now learned that it needs to be either a “C” corporation or an LLC.

This means that cooperative members will each own an equity share in the corporation or LLC. For now, we’ve agreed that a $100 buy in should allow us to have enough cash on hand to get the thing started. The $100 figure may change, though, as we learn more about what we need to do to get this thing started.

This adds a follow up question as well:

Today, the cooperative has no value. We have no assets, no clients, nothing but a list of people who want to be part of this thing. These people are joining the cooperative as charter members and taking on all of the up front risk. In a year, assuming we’ve had some success, we will have assets, clients, reputation, good will and other things on which a CPA can find real value.

How then can we expand the team moving forward?

Let’s say we launch with 20 people as members at $100 each. We’ll have launched the cooperative with $2000 and the money in the bank, before it’s spent, is our only asset. Our incorporation or LLC status will be an asset and anything we buy, a web site, hardware, whatever will be assets. Along with our personal reputations, these are all of the convertible assets we have.

So, in a year, if we’re successful at all, we’ll have greater value. We will have money in the bank, a reputation as an organization, a web site, a mailing list and all sorts of goodies we don’t have today. Thus, if the charter membership requires a $100 investment to join an organization with no current value, what should people who join us in the future pay to join an organization with actual value in the future?

it makes no sense to keep the $100 figure around in the future if new members have the same voting power as the charter members. The charter members will have, through cash and labor, increased the value of the organization, hence, new people should pay more to join.

So, how do we formulate a graduated equity buy in fee? I’ve never done anything like this and have no ideas how to solve this tricky problem.

What things can cooperative members provide each other?

• Mentoring
• Team Building
• Easy access to someone not on a project who may be able to help with a specific problem

What services should CoOpCent provide for our members?

(Obviously, some of the items on this list may sound a bit “pie in the sky” as we haven’t an organization, let alone funding for such yet but I’d like to capture as many of these as I can in a single place and we can prioritize later.)

• Contract review/legal advice
• Withholding taxes and central financial record keeping. This is often a difficult spot for those new to contracting and it’s something we can provide with relative ease and little investment.
• CoOpCent can help members with health, life an other insurance needs. Again, this is something we can provide at little cost that would be useful for our members.
• CoOpCent can help members with their retirement funds. This is a little more tricky than insurance as it requires working with an investment company to get things going. It’s, in my mind, more of a nice to have than a requirement.
• Server and technical infrastructure can reside within the central cooperative. Each project manager can decide how it should be used on their given projects but we can centralize all sorts of stuff so we only need to do maintenance in a single place and the like.
• A shared hardware pool for testing can be gathered by cooperative central for use by multiple projects for testing, development, etc.
• The central organization can provide travel and other expenses for members seeking professional development.
• If we grow to a reasonably large position, we can provide a “rainy day fund” for some of our most productive members.

Cooperative Governance

When can we expect a cooperative governance proposal?

This is Susan’s primary task. She will tell us when to expect it when she’s further along with her research.

Who can join?

Should we keep this cooperative exclusive to blind people?

cdh: We’ve already added a couple of people who do not self-identify. This question has been answered.

cdh: I don’t think so. Almost everyone we have involved now is blind but I’d like to make anyone welcome if they share the core values of the cooperative. Of course, we’ll need to write these values down someplace but that’s another task for the list.

What about people who do not self identify as having a disability?

cdh: I’d like to include some of our sighted friends who share our values. Specifically, my UK based friend, Alastair Somerville (a tactile graphics specialist) would be a terrific guy to include. He’s entirely behind our mission, smart as all hell and would make money for us.

People I’d Like to Invite in the Future

For various reasons, confidentiality being foremost for now, there are some people whom I’d love to have on board but I’d prefer waiting until we’re closer to having something real before we talk to any of these folks. I don’t know some of these people too well and, therefore, my level of trust regarding secrecy is low. Others on this list are people who may be valuable to the project but with whom some of us have some unpleasant history and we may not want to recruit them too aggressively if at all.

• Brett Lewis (former FS, Stanford MS in CS, based in Eastern Washington state)
• Chris Meredith
• Marco Zehe
• Ken Perry (full time at APH, terrific hacker, looking for extra work, very close to Sina so secrecy could be an issue at start)
• Mick Curren
• Jamie Teh

People We Shouldn’t Invite to Join

• All current FS employees would be a problem if the new CEO at FS decides to prosecute their NDA and NCA in the same manner as did Lee Hamilton. This would cause incredible problems for any contractor we work with from within FS and, given their track record, it could cause legal hassles for us as well. If a current FS employee approaches us, the best we can say is to come back in two years after leaving the mothership.