Tech-coops Alternatives

tech-coops reviews and mentions

• Tech Coops List
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Feb 2024
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2023
• Ask HN: What are ethical companies like Patagonia and some digital counterparts?
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Dec 2023

  Environmentally, a lot of this in the digital realm is just greenwashing, where they buy CO2 offsets of debatable usefulness (a whole different discussion). And moving things from the cloud to on-premise is likely to be climate negative, depending on where you want to draw the particular boundaries (like is it some secondhand server sitting in an office that's already being cooled for regular use anyway? do we exclude that from an analysis?). Here's one sample lifecycle analysis from a Stanford test: https://sustainable.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj26701/f...

  Patagonia is pretty legit (especially once they became a nonprofit, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62906853), but I'd say they're the exception more than the norm.

  B-corps are a good starting point (see mtmail's comment), but even then they should still be individually evaluated.

  On the labor side, tech co-ops are a (small) movement: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

  In general tech companies are too capitalist/VC-driven to be truly concerned about labor matters. And devs are so highly paid compared to most fields of work that there's not a strong drive towards collective organizing and unionization, but that's slowly changing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionization_in_the_tech_secto... (Kickstarter, Activision, Alphabet, etc.)

  For physical products, there are certifications like USDA Organic, Fair Trade Certified, FSC (for wood/paper products), but none of those are as powerful as their proponents would like them to be. They're still generally better than nothing, but depending on what you're trying to optimize for, you can find flaws in each of them.

  In general I would say well-intentioned efforts at ethical sourcing and manufacturing cannot overcome the drastic differences in labor and costs of living between countries; for you to be able to buy a can of coffee at $10 with organic, fair trade, shade grown etc. certifications, that means something has to give. That usually means some farmer is growing and harvesting them for pennies a day. Fair trade pays more than non-fair trade, but it's still not much. Direct Trade is an attempt to improve that further (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_trade), but AFAIK there's not a third-party certification for it, so you're pretty much taking companies at their word. There is rarely transparency about just how much different parts of the supply chain are getting paid, and how each part of the chain handles their environmental practices. It's a tragedy of globalized capitalism -- and arguably its backbone, cheaper sourcing == higher profits -- so inherently at odds. I suppose you can get entirely US-grown-and-roasted coffee (Hawaii?) but there's not much transparency in the labor chain there either, i.e. are they just importing ag labor below a livable wage.

  There are small tech orgs actually dedicated to on-the-ground local sustainability, like https://www.appropedia.org or https://www.opensourceecology.org/. These are pretty legit but tiny in scale.

  If you ever really want to evaluate the whole supply chain of something, there is an ISO standard for "lifecycle analysis" https://www.iso.org/standard/37456.html and you can usually find reports on Google Scholar for whatever product/service you're curious about. It usually won't be pretty, and the answer almost always boils down to "we don't have enough data about how country X makes thing Y, and how much of what they report is truthful vs greenwashing, so we're going to assume Z"... but it's a starting place.

  -----------

  The above are my opinions as a web dev primarily working in renewables, with an undergrad in Environmental Science. I'm not an expert (in anything), just sharing my thoughts.

• Open Source, Cooperative/Non Profit Cloud Services
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Oct 2023

  https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

  The only one I'm personally familiar with there was Electric Embers. A nonprofit I was volunteering for used them for years, but they were way overcharging. I moved the nonprofit to Wix instead and they saved a lot of money and time that way. I met someone who used to work for that co-op and they told me it'd basically been taken over by one or two long time partners and the newcomers became second class citizens.

  At the end of the day, a lot of these agencies just look like generic web boutiques, selling commoditized labor on someone else's infra. If that's the scale you want, it's probably doable, but with a lot of management and time spent teaching employees. If you're looking to scale it up to an international provider, I don't think it will be easy.

  Still, if you want help, I'd love to pitch in. Best of luck!

• Startup Incorporation for Founders
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jun 2023

  Not the OP but a quick search reveals: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

• Anyone Else Noticing Lower Salaries?
  1 project | /r/ExperiencedDevs | 12 Apr 2023

  You mean like an employee-owned company? Or a tech co-op?

• Software startup coop - how would it work?
  1 project | /r/cooperatives | 5 Apr 2023

  There are a good number of IT worker co-ops in the US and elsewhere. Y'all'd be in good company. Here's the current list: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

• Worker cooperative examples in engineering field around the world?
  1 project | /r/cooperatives | 26 Mar 2023

  Here is list that may interest you https://github.com/hng/tech-coops/blob/master/README.md

• Ask HN: Where are laid off employees gathering?
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Feb 2023
• Mercedes-Benz workforce to receive record profit-sharing bonus
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Jan 2023

  It seems like being employee-owned might be a prerequisite for that, but I'd love to see examples that persuade me otherwise. There are tech co-ops, which are worker-owned: https://tech-coops.xyz/

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