[arximboldi]

Hey! To you and Amiuba. I did get started into freelancing slowly. I had money saved when I quit my job and I took things slowly. I don't use freelancing websites. For marketing I use conferences, user-conferences and open-source. I am still in a good relationship with my last employer and I do freelance work for them too.

Wrt the coop, one of my motivations is this Spanish open-source coop which has been running for quite a while and does excellent work: https://www.igalia.com/

When doing research on the topic I found this document you may find interesting too "Technology freelancer's guide to starting worker cooperative": https://www.techworker.coop/resources/technology-freelancers...

[bigmanwalter]

Hey, I'm a freelance developer based in Montreal, Canada who is also incredibly interested in building out a freelancer/webdev co-op. Would love to hear more about your ideas and what direction you're interested in taking it :)

Also, any tips on how to find clients at conferences? I've been to a few but never seem to meet anyone who's actually searching for a vendor.

Most of my clients have come through my extended friends/family network.

Happy to keep this discussion on HN so that others get benefit from it, but if you want to take it private my email is [e-mail]

[CorporateTypist]

Wonderful idea, I'm in MTL too. Sounds like an idea for a slack channel.

[arximboldi]

Hi Eric!

W.r.t. the co-op, at the moment my ideas (or fantasies) are more about organizational stuff than the content (what we would work on). I am just gathering ideas, learning and keeping my eyes open waiting for all this to crystalize...

My motivation is to be able to work with other people in a democratic and (internally) non-capitalistic way. You are still playing in the market so there are lots of contradictions that you would have to assume, but I think there is a lot of progress one can make nontheless. For me Igalia, as I mentioned, is a source of inspiration because they have been going for quite a while and they are about ~50 people now and have a good business. They are also very democratic and flat (e.g. everyone has equal pay, something shocking but with very good rationale). They also do excellent technical work---for example, they have been the ones implementing a lot of ES6 features inside V8 and SpiderMonkey. If you want to read about them, Andy Wingo (the person I know from there) has 3-post series on the topic here: http://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/05/no-master

On a more political side, recently I read the Telekommunisten manifesto which also touches on cooperative models as a way to do social change for real: http://telekommunisten.net/the-telekommunist-manifesto/

In my student times I was very much into activism, but since I started working I stopped "having time" for it. I was also burned out from the energy and emotional sink that activism can be. I've realized with time that the workplace though has not managed to make me more conservative, if anything, it has made me more concerned about the issues of exploitation and alienation---even in "well-off" industries where workers often feel privileged just because of the (relatively) high salaries. My current thinking is that separating work and politics is one of the things that leads to activism and work burn-out and that, if anything, I should use the privilege of being an engineer to try build a democratic workspace for myself and hopefully others too. In the best scenario it could be an example and do some little good for the world, in the worst case I would have tried and learnt something about how the world works.

W.r.t. finding clients at conferences, I am really no expert, I have actually been freelancing less time than you :-) I don't consider myself an extrovert. What has worked for me so far is doing talks about open-source projects. Last summer, for example, I worked with a client that just watched the video of one of my talks and contacted me. Last week I talked with a new potential client that just some comment on Hackernews where I talked about some of that work. Doing open-source work and talking about it is very time-consuming, so it is not a silver-bullet for sure, but something worth trying if that scratches some itch of yours.

I still feel that I have lots to learn and am making lots of mistakes, but I guess this takes time... :-)

[bigmanwalter]

Thanks for the links!

I'm at a similar stage of gathering ideas. It seems that as software developers, we're at a unique point in history where an individual owning their own means of industrial-grade production is a possibility thanks to free software.

I come from a different angle as I was incredibly Liberal throughout my student years. But the working world shattered any illusions I had about achieving self-fulfillment as your typical software engineer.

You might be intrested in looking into Enspiral. They are a huge tech cooperative (~40 core members + ~100 associates) running out of New Zealand https://enspiral.com/ with some great ideas. They started out of individual freelancers grouping together to form an insurance fund and smooth out their incomes between contracts.

I've been thinking lately about how to initially build up a group's reputation and client pipeline. If you start with too many members without their own clients then I am not sure it would be sustainable. You could have initial capital investments from each member, but I'm less comfortable with that idea right now.

As for presenting, from time to time I will give web development workshops. I agree that presenting requires a disproportionate amount of time and energy but I find that it spices up my workload very nicely :)