I work in the software industry and would love to move to a worked owned company/co-op.

Does anyone know good resources for finding co-ops in Germany and/or Europe?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/20011741

Hi!

As I wrote in the title I'm looking for people interested in such an endeavor. I already tried creating such a project but due to internal disagreements it didn't pan out, still I am very interested in trying this out. Game dev is very susceptible to exploitation from capitalists which is very unfortunate given that means of production are essentially socialized already - we have FOSS software like Godot that is enough to create very elaborate projects and we can collaborate remotely so no land is needed either. This makes it I think a very fruitful direction to go, because costs of game dev are not very big and returns can be big if the game is successful. I know that there is a huge competition in game dev, but given that in worker cooperative nothing is siphoned by capitalists at the top I think it's not impossible to get to the level of subsistence on game dev, while being able to affect the culture and promote cooperativism among the general population and among video game creators. I don't have a specific game dev experience but I like solving complex problems and I am interested in doing a worker cooperative, I already did quite a bit of research during my previous attempt at this type of worker cooperative and I would for this coop to get inspiration from Igalia, Motion Twin and Sociocracy. At my last project people had issues that I am fine with anti-foundationalist philosophies so please consider that I like those and I like to discuss from those lenses. I am very good at self-directed learning and I could especially do stuff like coding, design, writing plot and characters, I could research some more legalistic side of cooperative but it would be nice certainly to have someone who has some expertise here. That still leave places for people interested in audio and graphics and I am very fine with redundancy in some aspects of the required "expertise", still I am a big believer in learning by doing and getting feedback and improving based on this feedback so I am mostly looking for people willing to learn, explore and collaborate to hopefully create something cool. I would like to create games such as Planescape Torment, Disco Elysium, Hotline Miami, FTL: Faster Than Light, Spec Ops: The Line, Portal 2, Undertale, Getting Over It, The Talos Principle, Vampire the Masqurade: Bloodlines, KOTOR 2. If you are interested in this project please get in touch, we may correspond a bit and see if we would like to collaborate!

I somewhat wonder about trying to release those games on FOSS licenses (still with asking for “paying” for them to support the creators), that would be “purer” from anarchist perspective than using proprietary license but this is not something I have thought about that much. The pro would be it being impossible to get the license stolen how almost happened to Disco Elysium creators.

I'm considering starting a co-operatively owned website for writers to share their work without any gatekeepers, and with any profits generated going to the writers.

Does anyone know of any good resources or examples of similar co-ops (or other types of businesses) that might make useful case studies?

Thanks!

I'm mainly looking for some software development type of job (preferably withing the game industry), but anything else would be fine as long as I get to make above minimum wage, as I'm currently below it, thanks to Hungary's half-assed "public employment" program (they hire people for government institutes for half the minimum wage in certain positions, in order to "give work, not money").

Unfortunately for me, in Hungary, we not only barely have any cooperatives, but also it's one of the countries that gave the term "worker cooperative" a very bad name after nationalizing them in the 50's, then no longer running as such. On top of all of this, I also don't have a college degree (mandatory for most developer positions, since besides having big names on your resume as past employment, is the only metric the Hungarian HR understands), I face discrimination due to being autistic (they read it as "not confident looking, thus not skilled", once they also asked my brother if I bite people for no reason), etc. I'm more than willing to eventually relocate, but first I would need to spend some money on my health too.

"The Case Against the Employment System," and for Workplace Democracy

https://ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/case-based-on-ordinary-norms.pdf

@cooperatives