[hankish]

What a brilliant idea! Me and a bunch of other folks have been working for the last 18 months to create just such a professional collective, with the goal of expanding it massively. Lots of laid off workers are joining and everything is cooperatively-managed, self-organizing and transparent.

It's a combination of a professional network, a full service consultancy, a skills academy, and a startup incubator. We've got 105 members at the moment and are growing every day.

We've got more info here if you're interested >> https://wiki.quorum.one/blog/what-is-quorum1

[huhtenberg]

To be very blunt - do you not have a concern that companies tend to shed less skilled, under-performing and generally not terribly useful employees first?

We had the same idea after the .com bust, though at a somewhat smaller scale. In our case however everyone got laid off. The startup I was in burned through its money, failed to raise more and was closed down by the VCs. All developers and several project managers then gathered for beers and decided to start what you have - a co-op of sorts. The idea was that everyone would fish around for gigs and share them with others, under a (naive) assumption that some people would get more than they could handle, e.g. the PMs.

Sounded good in theory, but in practice just two devs out of 20 were qualified enough to bid on projects that paid enough. The rest just kept sitting things out. Two months in, the whole thing fell apart.

Ultimately, the incentives are just not there. If there are two people of different professional levels, there's no reason for a more skilled one to associate themselves with another person. So the dynamics of the co-op is that it keeps shedding most qualified people, making it less and less competitive. If you managed to figure out this aspect - chapeau. But it's an extremely hard nut to crack.

[hankish]

I think you're absolutely right that not everyone is equally employable right off the bat (though most folks can, with time and effort, become super valuable team members). It's very important to be up-front with that somewhat harsh reality and to bake that directly into your organizational design. When done correctly it becomes a benefit rather than a weakness.

Our group is 18 months in and going strong. However, the structure is based on a decade of thought work from some of the founding folks, so we've been very intentional with the design.

Some of the keys to our approach have been:

1. Our main focus is on "professional empowerment" (learning, networking, experience building, etc) not getting people paid work. We do happen to get people paid work, but we set the expectation up front that it's a network first and a consultancy second. We can guarantee professional growth but not necessarily immediate employment. Of course, the bigger the network grows & the more brand awareness we build, the easier it gets to staff people quickly.

2. We use gamified incentivization mechanics to recognize and reward anything that benefits the collective with actual cash and longterm passive income: mentoring/coaching, bringing in business, building internal tools, working on products we're incubating, etc.

3. We're very focused on membership diversity in terms of role type, career stage and interest. We've got members with full time roles who are only in the group to coach & mentor, long term consultants looking to staff juniors on projects, juniors looking to get their first experience, entrepreneurs looking to exchange mentorship for help with their startups, etc. There's a network effect that starts to kick in when there's enough different sorts of folks involved. That is absolutely critical to longterm success. But it also requires a lot of patience.

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As you say, this is definitely an extremely hard nut to crack. That's part of the reason why we're putting a lot of effort into developing the model and offering it to other community-centric organizations to incorporate into their own orgs. The more orgs which adopt these sorts of models, the more data we'll have on what works and what doesn't.

[andrewjmg]

quorum honestly looks fantastic. thanks for this!