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tech-coops
Learning & Reference2018–2026
hng / tech-coops

tech-coops

A list of tech coops and resources concerning tech coops and worker owned cooperatives in general.

Learning & Reference
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
24Distinct people
30Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.3KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A list of tech coops and resources concerning tech coops and worker owned cooperatives in general.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year30 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-03-02 19:43:21 UTC to 2026-03-13 13:31:17 UTC.

02462018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 2 submissions, 4 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 1 submissions, 6 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC624
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC716
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Tech coops list 🎉 To celebrate 1k stars on GitHub this list now has a website version on tech-coops.xyz A list of tech coops and resources concerning tech coops and worker owned cooperatives in general. Contributions to this list are very welcome. Just clone this repo, edit this file (README.md) or edit it directly (open it and click on the pencil icon on the upper right) and create a pull request. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md before creating a pull request. What are worker-owned tech cooperatives? A very general definition: Worker-owned cooperatives are business enterprises that are owned and governed by their employees. All worker cooperatives have two common characteristics: 1) member-owners invest in and own the business together, and share the enterprise’s profits, and 2) decision-making is democratic, with each member having one vote. – community-wealth.org Tech cooperatives are worker-owned cooperatives that operate in the information technology industry. This list focuses on tech coops that are providing software development and consulting services. Tech cooperatives could be a solution if you feel alienated by big software corporations and startup culture or you feel alone and in search of solidarity as a freelancer. Table of Contents Coops North America South America Asia Europe Oceania Worldwide Networks of coops Resources Information on tech coops and coops in general Talks Mailinglists Chat rooms Tools Products created by tech coops Jobs and contracts References to this list Coops North America Coop Business Areas Region/Country Notes Agaric Web development, tech consulting USA / Nicaragua / Germany Worker-owned collective building online since 2006, lately contributing to the Drutopia platform for grassroots groups. Baseline AI consulting Quebec City, Quebec, Canada Baseline is the outcome of a collective will to share resources, to give ourselves greater visibility and to pool common expenses and risks, while respecting our individual needs. CanTrust Hosting Co-op Hosting, personal cloud, and IT consulting Vancouver, BC, Canada Started in 2009, provides community-focused web hosting at affordable prices to clients, many of whom are like-minded social economy organizations. Caravan Web Worker Cooperative Web design, Software development (Python) Montreal and Quebec City, Canada Catalyst Cooperative Open data engineering / analysis for energy & climate policy Distributed / Remote, North America C4 Tech & Design Web Design, Business IT Services, Computer Repair New Orleans, USA ChiCommons Last-mile ISP, Consulting Chicago, USA CoLab Ithaca, NY, USA "CoLab’s mission is to contribute to a new economy of justice and cooperation while bringing clients beautiful, cutting-edge technology." CommunitySoft Cooperative Gather software and services for sharing resources in Cohousing communities Michigan, Minnesota, Vermont, Wisconsin, USA Started 2015 comp.coop Services and consulting Brooklyn, NY, USA comp.coop is a brand new worker-owned tech company seeking to disrupt the VC model that keeps cooperatives and worker-owned businesses from accessing the technology they need. Started 2024. Cooperatus Project management, tech consulting, web development, graphic design, virtual assistance Western US and Georgia, US Cooperatus is a tech worker collective providing a range of freelance support and services from hybrid book launches and websites to interpersonal communication and cybersecurity consulting. Coop Symbiotic Contact, membership, donation and case management with CiviCRM, SaaS and custom development Montreal, QC, Canada Founded in 2014 Design Action Collective Web design and development Oakland, USA DWG Product development and implementation East Bay, CA, USA Dojo4 Web applications and design Boulder, CO Electric Embers Hosting San Francisco, CA, USA FullSteam Labs Web application development, UI & UX Design USA Future Club Game development USA Gemify Software Development, UX Research and Design San Jose, California, USA Worker-owned tech co-operative developing affordable solutions for small businesses since 2019. Hypha Worker Co-operative Digital coaching, (decentralized) web design, and development Tkaronto (Toronto), Ontario, Canada Founded in 2019 with the mission to help organizations and communities redesign their relationships with digital technology. Informal Systems Distribute Systems and Formal Verification Tkaronto (Toronto), Ontario, Canada Working towards an open-source ecosystem of cooperatively owned and governed distributed organizations running on reliable distributed systems Interstitial Technology Full-stack engineering - design, development, firmware, electrical, mechanical engineering USA/Canada Focused on technology with positive social impact KO_OP Game development Montreal, Quebec, Canada Koumbit Hosting, Websites, Sysadmin Montreal, Quebec, Canada Lab148 coop Immersive space, coaching from conceptualization to production for artistic installation with digital technology, libre software development and use Montreal, Quebec, Canada Lab148 is a working cooperative founded in 2023, whose mission is to foster collective participation in multimedia installations. Lichen Community Systems Digital accessibility, community-led design, development, and creative technology Toronto and Vancouver, Canada Lichen is a non-profit studio dedicated to growing the practice of community-led design. We do this by researching transformative technologies and methods, developing accessible tools, sharing our work through art and education, and supporting cultural change within organizations. Ministry of Velocity Agile transformation, security, branding, service design, research, development SF Bay Area and Southern Oregon Limeleaf Worker Collective Software engineering, Product development, IT consulting Saratoga Springs, New York, USA Focused on independent businesses, social impact startu
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

30 sources
solardev·Jul 25, 2024
> There's a reason why a union with a presumptive whole crew who could start a competitive business never ever does it. Nobody wants to be the owner. I think there's another reason: It's really hard for worker-owned cooperatives and ESOPs to raise capital, because by definition only their employees can be owners. If a bunch of unionized minimum-wage grocery store workers wanted to start their own grocery store, they could all pool their savings, but it wouldn't get them very far. Tech is one of the few sectors in which this might be able to happen (high-paid employees starting their own startup), but I guess culturally tech is too capitalist and too cutthroat and selfish (as in almost never civically minded) to make this common. Nonetheless there still are some: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
In Employee-owned company vs. Corporate Structure
solardev·Dec 28, 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) (edit: on the environmental side, I mean. Labor-wise, they're still not great. See sibling comments discussing this), but I'd say they're the exception more than the no
Read the rest
rm. 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.
In Ask HN: What are ethical companies like Patagonia and some digital counterparts?
solardev·Dec 3, 2023
Wouldn't this be a more complex version of an existing structure, the worker-owned cooperative? https://www.usworker.coop/clinic/startups/ I think the difficulty for both those and your proposed structure is the difficulty of fundraising, when outside investors can't just invest capital without labor. There are lots of rich people and institutions with more money than time. And conversely, not every employee/potential co-owner would necessarily want equity in lieu of a stable salary. It also gets into managerial complexity when co-ownership might also imply some degree of democratic decision-making because everyone is not only a worker but also an owner. It doesn't necessarily mean that everyone owns an equal share, but hiring and firing become more complex, and traditional company hirerachies may not be as common. There are a few tech co
Read the rest
ops: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
In Ask HN: Can all-owner firms avoid labor law complexity FTW?
solardev·Oct 13, 2023
I had the same idea, and would love to help with something like this. However, there are significant barriers to capital investment/fundraising, at least in the US. For a small web hosting coop it's not a problem since that's mostly labor, but it'll be hard to scale infrastructure (data centers). You'd just end up being another AWS reseller, I think? Some existing tech co-ops: 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
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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!
In Open Source, Cooperative/Non Profit Cloud Services
tra3·Jan 3, 2023
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that lawyers are primarily solitary and software projects require a team? Do I have that right? Law firms still have a hierarchy: there are senior partners, junior partners, articling students, etc. From my lay understanding the business is still organized around "a lawyer" being the top of the food chain. > Similarly, law firms are organized very differently from tech companies and it's a function of their products / markets / business models / stakeholders / general situations. It's hard to disagree there, purely from a historical perspective. Google was started by a bunch of developers and it looks like a traditional corporation now with layers and layers of middle management. Perhaps this is the most efficient type of an organization for a large software maker. One interesting alternative a
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re tech coops [0]: > Worker-owned cooperatives are business enterprises that are owned and governed by their employees. All worker cooperatives have two common characteristics: 1) member-owners invest in and own the business together, and share the enterprise’s profits, and 2) decision-making is democratic, with each member having one vote. [0]: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
In Books for Software Engineers in 2023

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