Eric Meyer: Hello, I'm Eric Meyer and I'm a developer advocate at Igalia.
Brian Kardell: And I'm Brian Kardell. I'm also a developer advocate at Igalia.
Eric Meyer: And today we have a guest. Val, please introduce.
Valerie Young: Hi, my name is Valerie Young and I work at Igalia also actually.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, so we asked Val to come on because, well, so recently Ethan Marcotte published a book called You Deserve a Tech Union, available from A Book Apart. And on a recent episode of the ShopTalk show, he was a guest and he talked about it. It was a really good episode. And so if you've actually never thought about things like tech unions before, it's certainly worth a listen because Brian and I, in discussing this, came to the point of unions are generally pretty good. They seem fundamentally necessary under capitalism because there's this huge imbalance in power, especially when you have a bigger company. Unions and collective bargaining can help balance that out, but it's not like a complete power balancing because of the extreme power imbalances that can occur. But there's also another way to go about it, which we were thinking about. What about having a co-op like Igalia. Igalia is a co-op, it's worker owned, and we don't have shareholders. Or, if you prefer, the shareholders are the workers at the company. And there are other co-ops. And recently Val organized a talk and a panel on co-ops at the FOSSY Conference. And we have those online, which you could check out. But we wanted to have Val come on and talk about co-ops and what they make possible and all that sort of thing. So Val, let's start out with, for someone who's not familiar, what is a co-op in this context?
Valerie Young: Yeah. Well actually co-op can mean a lot of different things, and I think it does mean a lot of different things to different people. It means different things in different places. It can mean a legal structure or it can mean just something about the relationship of the people contributing to the project. So co-op at Igalia means something specific. It means cooperatively managed by the employees. So we all organize the company as we see fit together. There's no CEO or bosses or managers. And like you said, in a way you could think of it as we're the only shareholders of the company. Sometimes co-op means that all of the employees are shareholders, but you still have a hierarchical structure. It's not cooperatively managed, it's just cooperatively owned.
Eric Meyer: Right. And at Igalia, everything is collective in a sense. You may be not assigned, you may work on a team as part of the WebKit team or the compiler's team, but there isn't a single person who's in charge of the team and says, 'This is what everyone else is doing.' The team decides together, hashes out what needs to be done and how are we going to do it. And sometimes we'll decide that other new things need to be done, stuff that isn't necessarily client work. It's just, 'Hey, if we do this as a team, then we will be able to do better work in the future.' And it's like that across the company, which I think is a little weird for some people because they expect right... 'Who's in charge? Who's the president?' It's like, 'There's no president.' 'Okay, but who's the CEO?' 'No, there's no CEO.' 'Well, the founders.' It's like, 'Yes, we have people who co-founded the co-op, but they're not...'
Brian Kardell: Special.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, they're not at the top of the pyramid. They're some among many.
Brian Kardell: I would say maybe they're well-respected. Sure. But at Igalia even everybody is paid equally because I know a lot of the things with the union case are talking about trying to do some kind of collective bargaining. You're bargaining with the company on behalf of all of the employees or a big group of the employees at least to exercise some sort of collective power. But that's not even a necessary thing at Igalia because we are the collective power and also we don't have per person salaries. We have everybody receives the same salary.
Valerie Young: Right. Yeah. The way that Igalia is cooperatively managed does eliminate the need for a tech union. And you could imagine though a company called a co-op that just has cooperative ownership might still need something like that, or maybe the ownership organization does by being an owner, you do have some say in some final decisions, which acts in a way like a tech union. There's some check on power by the owners of the hierarchical decision-making structure that already exists.
Eric Meyer: Okay. Like you said, there are co-ops that are hierarchical, which to me is a little weird because this is the only co-op Igalia is the only co-op that I've ever been a member of. And so it seems to me how do you have a hierarchical structure? How does that work? But like you say, that exists. Did you have any people from companies like that on your panel at FOSSY?
Valerie Young: Actually, so at FOSSY, the Free Software Conservancies New Yearly Conference, which happened for the first time this last year, we had seven representatives from seven different cooperatives, tech co-ops specifically come to give a talk or participate on the panel over the course of a day long track about cooperatives. So just I guess there is a lot of overlap between free software and people who like co-ops just from reaching out through our networks to seeing who could come to this conference with a few months notice? And I can't say that I'm an expert in every single one of those co-ops, although my impression is that for sure there was a huge bias towards cooperative management, not just like a ownership structure.
Eric Meyer: Okay.
Valerie Young: But I could maybe think of a few counter examples, a slight counter examples.
Eric Meyer: It makes sense to me what you said that cooperatives are popular in the open source space, right? Because a lot of open source work is very collaborative. Is that sort of the sense that you get as well is that, well, this is how we develop our code. Why would we not run our companies the same way?
Valerie Young: Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, I've been a cooperative enthusiast for a very long time, and my introduction to the whole idea was through free software when I was in college, free software and hackerspace was the first example that I saw of flat collaborative structures, and it totally blew my mind. And I was all in and here I am now.
Eric Meyer: Indeed.
Brian Kardell: There are lots of non-tech cooperatives too, right? I mean, there's a long history in many different permutations of things. Like in Vermont, I think the power company is a cooperative, the telecom I think is a cooperative. There's lots of different...
Valerie Young: Yeah, there are a lot of co-ops and there could always be more. But I think given our culture and economic history, there's a lot of pressure out of familiarity or funding structures to make or property structures or legal structures to make a regular hierarchical firm. Even a nonprofit meets a CEO or the structure of a nonprofit somewhat defines a hierarchical structure from the beginning, you'd have to use loopholes to make a nonprofit a cooperatively run organization by its employees. So there's a lot of pressure and familiarity with hierarchical organizations to create hierarchical organizations, which is why I think that the free software case is very interesting because it was people's first example of what it was like to collaborate as equals among a group of people. And I think that a lot of people found that experience transformative. So not just me.
Eric Meyer: So we all know that working in a free software project is not always puppies and rainbows and picnics.
Valerie Young: Yes.
Eric Meyer: Working on free software projects has a little bit of a reputation of being a little bit difficult. Does that same thing happen in co-ops?
Valerie Young: Yeah. Wow. Yes. So I think that there are a lot of known difficulties with free software projects. And even over the course of the time that I've been involved in the free software community, which is just really a decade and a half since I was in college, I've seen a lot of growth and reflection. Again, like I said, I think that free software projects are a lot of people's first opportunity to collaborate in such a non-hierarchical way. And I think you need some structures and norms, and there's ways to do I right and there's ways to do it wrong. And since everyone's doing it for the first time, they had to learn as they went. I saw this happening, really, I saw the introduction of code of conducts that don't just talk about egregious cases, but also norms of communication that just make the whole process run more smoothly. I saw a structure created where it was a lack of structure and a lack of clarity about who should have what kind of access to what kind of thing. So I saw a lot of growing up happen in that area.
Eric Meyer: So how has that sort of thing replicated within co-ops in your experience?
Valerie Young: Yeah. So in cooperative projects, there are a lot of ways that you can fail. And there are some, I think, really important things that you need to succeed when the cooperative project is a free software project or a business or a cooperative living situation. And maybe it would be interesting to go over what I think from my experience are some failure cases.
Eric Meyer: Please. Absolutely.
Valerie Young: Sure. So one failure case, and I think this is the one that people first think of when they're like, 'Oh, a co-op, how could that possibly work?' It's a cooperative project that has too little structure or no structure, because we're only familiar with hierarchical structure. You're like, 'Hey, make a co-op.' And they'll be like, 'Oh, that sounds confusing and messy, and how would anything get done? And who will make decisions?' And too little structure. So too little structure, of course, you're not going to get anything done. And in fact, you have a serious potential for just replicating the existing and unequal power structures that exist in society. The people who are most privileged end up informally getting the most power when you don't have clear power structures or clear decision-making structures.
Brian Kardell: Can you illustrate that for us a little bit? Give it something a little bit concrete?
Valerie Young: Yeah, sure. Well, I feel like the best concrete illustration of this is an essay called The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Friedman, and it's about the women's movement in the seventies, and they are trying to create an anti-patriarchal organization of women, and they throw out structure completely. And what she saw was that the people who naturally have the most access to resources, the tightest, the most free time end up being the de facto leaders of the group. And it's completely transparent to anyone else why anything is happening the way that it's happening. So it's a good essay to read, I think. So that's failure option number one, and failure option number two is too much structure, especially from the very beginning. A co-op, it's not something you can just dream of idly. It's something that, especially as you don't have familiarity with, you need to figure out what works by doing. There's really no other option. So you can't really formalize it completely before you begin it. You have to start it with an open mind and also as the people coming and going will change, the people in your co-op will change. If you really want it to be cooperatively managed, it needs to be cooperatively managed by all of the people in the room at that given moment. So it needs to change because the people will change, even the needs of the people who started it will change. And my favorite example of too much structure is, if you were about to ask that friend is holacracy, which do you guys remember that phase?
Eric Meyer: Yep. Yep. Zappos.
Brian Kardell: I do not remember it, so can you refresh me?
Valerie Young: Yeah, sure, sure. Holacracy, I remember being very excited about it when I heard it because I was already enthusiastic about co-ops, and I heard that it was radically flat model and that a huge company was implementing at Zappos, but then the reports started to come out of massive disappointment. People felt like a cog in the machine. They didn't feel empowered. There was too much process. And reading the description, I actually hadn't read the book, but I think that the author is like, this is an operating system for a company and people aren't computers. It's a bit of a warning flag, I think, to try to implement something like that. But there's that example. It's very rigid, very role based, but in a very rigid way. And also I think one of its other failings is that it tried to make it so that people could work very autonomously, but that resulted in less collaboration and consensus building.
Eric Meyer: Oh, okay.
Valerie Young: Yeah.
Eric Meyer: So it sounds like it was an... I mean, I haven't read the book either, but it sounds like everyone's their own boss, do what's best for the group, and then everybody went and did things and there was no real checking in with other people to say-
Valerie Young: Well, actually-
Eric Meyer: Go ahead.
Valerie Young: It was even worse than that because everyone had very specific roles. You can only make decisions about these specific things, and it was very clearly outlined, so really was making you a little bit too much of a cognitive machine, like your predetermined roles, you're predetermined what you can make decisions about, and you can't make decisions about something that's in someone else's bucket.
Eric Meyer: Right. So mean, we can talk about how we avoid that at Igalia, so let's. Right?
Valerie Young: Yeah.
Eric Meyer: Well, we certainly have challenges every organization does, whether it's structured or hierarchical or not. I don't feel like that's a problem that we...
Brian Kardell: Definitely want us to go into a bunch about it, but I want to say that Val's talk is available online, and it talks a lot about how Igalia works. And so I know people who listen to this show inherently must be curious. So I would just like to point people to that as well that it is really full of lots of details about how Igalia works, probably more than we'll get into here.
Valerie Young: Right. And I do want to say that this discussion about too much or too little structure is not a lot in that talk, the talk really talks about the structure that exists and a little bit about how it can be changed or maybe not even that much about that. So this is a little even more abstract than the talk. So if you want an example of amount of structure that works right now, then the talk is pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. I say in the talk, but I've only worked at Igalia for two years and it's been around for 22 now, which is to say that I feel so appreciative of all of the people that have put in the long and slow work to evolve Igalia to where it's at now. It was functional at these other times, but it had to change as we grew and as the people changed. And so I'm so appreciative that Igalia has been responsive and that my coworkers have put thought to that at every new development.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. I mean, while we don't have a hierarchy, we do have foundational documents. We have agreements that the company has arrived at as a group to say, 'This is how the company covers travel on the behalf of the company, and this is what the sick policy is, and this is what this policy is and what all the various policies are,' the things that you would expect of a company. It's like you need to know. That's all written down, but it wasn't written down by one person. It was over time written down and modified, and we still, proposals will come up. In fact, I just voted on one recently.
Brian Kardell: What I think is a really interesting illustration of this in the abstract, this thing that we're talking about, about capitalism and unions and co-ops and where they work and how they compare: There is, a new law that your time off increases with your seniority, basically. So you have a minimum that you're supposed to get in the country, but then after you've been there for five years, you get another day. And it increases until you have maybe five more days. And in this model, any capitalist worldwide company that was faced with this would be like, 'What is the minimum thing that we can do? How do we make sure that our a hundred employees in Sweden or wherever it happens to be, are the only ones that get this benefit?' Right?
Valerie Young: Yeah. Also, I wanted to point out that this is an example of legal structures which are encouraging something more hierarchical than what a cooperatively managed company might want. It seems innocuous like, 'Oh yeah, of course you've been there five years, you should get one more vacation day.' But if you're starting from a co-ops perspective where everyone gets actually a very generous benefit because you've decided on it together. And the goal is equality, not to be able to rise up a ladder. So anyway, I think this is just a very clear example of how the legal frameworks work against a co-op and encourage against a co-op. And this is one of the reasons why we see so few, I think.
Brian Kardell: But in Igalia, we can propose effectively how to deal with that situation and because everybody gets a vote, we don't have shareholders like this abstract shareholders that we are trying to generate a profit for. Like... That's us. So we say, 'Wait, that sounds like a really good quality of life improvement. Why shouldn't everybody get that?' Right? So yeah, maybe let's just do that.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. And that's the thing about a collective, a cooperative is that someone could have proposed, okay, well, for the people who are in that country, they get that and we're going to keep everyone else the same. And that could have been a proposal and then everyone votes on it.
Brian Kardell: I mean, somebody could have proposed that we leave that country.
Eric Meyer: Also true. And there might've been a proposal. Let's not ever hire someone from that country and we won't do work there.
Valerie Young: That's against the Igalia norm.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, it is.
Valerie Young: Igalia, one thing that feels so special about it is that we decided to be an international company, and we just adopt the complexity of someone living in a different place.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. It does lead me though, the concept that someone could have proposed, let's just not do anything in that country anymore, does lead to something that co-ops can do, which is the collectively decide to take or not take certain work, which is something I know has come up in the tech union context. There have been people who have said, 'Well, one of the advantages of a tech union is that if Google had a tech union, a strong tech union, then maybe the union could say, 'We're not going to take any lethal defense work contracts, and if the company takes one, then we go on strike,'' which it could be stated as, 'Look, anything like this will have us go on strike sort of proactively.' But a similar sort of thing can happen in a co-op. Someone can say, 'I propose that we not work with Raytheon, or we not work for governments that are actively engaged in genocide or whatever, or that we don't ever take work from companies whose logos are primarily yellow.' Any of these could be proposed. Whether or not they get approved by vote is a whole other thing, but that sort of thing can be done. And it's like a distorted reflection of one of those things that tech unions are great for this. Like, 'Well, here's how we handle it in co-ops.'
Valerie Young: Right, yeah, it's true. And it's funny to use absurd examples, but Igalia does have a shared values document that you sign on to. I mean, you don't actually sign a paper, but you're agreeing with when you start working at Igalia, and as you go through the process of becoming a partner, you have to prove just by nature of your being that you are aligned with those values. And so we have a lot of shared values about free software and other really righteous normal things in my opinion. But we all know that it would be silly to propose let's not work with a company whose logo is yellow. We have an idea of what the company's values are. And I just want to say that's something that's a little different way of being at a Igalia. I don't feel like we feel blind to the rest of the company. We have a strong intuition, and when we are making a proposal, we're not making a proposal by ourself in a vacuum. We're making it really collaboratively with other people. And that's really, I think, a very different way of thinking about decision-making. It's not like this hostile thing. I mean, of course, sometimes decisions are a little bit contentious, but most of the time it's just about finding the solution to the problem, not proposing two different solutions that then need to be battled out.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, that's very true. That's another thing I guess I wasn't clear about is that proposals, I don't think I've ever seen someone just pop out of the woodwork with a proposal. There was a discussion before there was a proposal to vote on, and the discussion may have been lengthy and possibly contentious, people being very clear about their positions and where they're coming from and other people saying, 'Okay, I hear where you're coming from on that. Here's this other place I'm coming from.' And there's just a lot of emails possibly. And then as long as the consensus is we should open this up for a wider vote, then there's an actual poll that's opened, and there are thresholds for various kinds of polls that are defined, but you have to get at least a majority. And some of them are more than a majority, and there are some kinds of votes that there has to be above a threshold vote yes and below a threshold voting no, which is a much lower threshold. They're not always just simple majorities. So for hiring decisions might be a different set of thresholds than changing the vacation policy or whatever.
Brian Kardell: Maybe we can use another example of this, which is that effectively the way I like to describe this is we do contract work and that brings in dollars, and we have an agreed upon budget and how that works. A certain amount of that will go into our savings in case there's rough times or whatever.
Eric Meyer: An amount of savings which was collectively agreed-
Brian Kardell: Right, exactly. But then the rest could just go right to us, just split it number of employees ways, and that's how it works. But that's not entirely how it works. Igalia actually is one of the founding sponsors of Open Web Docs, for example. We give money to all kinds of different causes in things. We have a corporate social responsibility commission that we collectively decide to give a nice bit of money to different causes like environmental causes and things like that. And those are things that we collectively decided to do and actually funding work that we just think is interesting that no one else is funding. Every time somebody proposes one of those, it is effectively asking all of your peers, 'I would like you to take home a little less in your paycheck because I think this is an important thing. Can we all agree to do that?' And honestly, it's very encouraging to me how much we managed to do like that and positive in a way that I think that it feels more positive than if Apple or Google, whatever they do. It's done in a completely different way and it impresses me less, even if it's several orders of magnitude more money.
Valerie Young: Well, yeah. This is actually something that I think leads us to why we are doing this podcast right now is that we were having a discussion in Igalia about our responsibility towards the planet and climate change. Are we doing enough? I know we're just some random tech company, but what is a role that we should be playing or could be playing that we aren't playing? And one thing that was discussed in that discussion was that when a company is cooperatively managed, it tends in our experience from Igalia to make really altruistic decisions together because it's all out in the open where humans, I think, are overwhelmingly interested in the happiness and success of not just themselves, but whoever they're surrounded by. And we're an international company. We have people all over the world. We care about everyone at Igalia, we care about everyone in the world with the impending climate crisis affecting pretty much everyone. And so we're looking for ways to help this problem that you can't really look for when you're in a hierarchical company, even if you wanted to. You have so few levers. You have so few visibilities into the structure and where money could be donated, how compromises could be made for the sake of climate change. You have to leave it all to the people at the top who are regularly, their hands are tied between the things like short-term profit, and perhaps what would be their own personal altruistic-
Eric Meyer: Yeah, shareholder demand.
Valerie Young: Yeah, exactly.
Eric Meyer: Which in our case, since we are the shareholders, the demand is coming from inside the building.
Valerie Young: Right. Yeah. So essentially, I guess just to summarize, I think the more co-ops, the better off the planet is, the more empowered people are to act on their altruistic instincts.
Eric Meyer: So I mean, I guess that would lead to a question. What would you recommend to somebody or some buddies who are thinking about forming their own co-op? Where would you tell them to start?
Valerie Young: Wow. Hard question. Okay. So there are a lot of resources for starting cooperatives that are available. It depends on what kind of cooperative you want to start, but like I said, the legal structures are somewhat at odds with the goals of a cooperative corporation. But if you're starting one just with a group of friends, you can easily find information available online, lawyers who specialize in these bylaws that are draft bylaws. There's the Sustainable Economies Law Center in the Bay Area that has a lot of resources about this specifically. And also I would say find other co-ops also and learn how they're doing it. Because like I said, we've had very little experience and we can only in our lives overall. So you really got to learn by talking to people. Also, I think, one, in my talk, I talk about the four essential ingredients to a successful cooperative. There are things like equality, trust, shared goals and values and mutual respect and appreciation. But if you're starting a company, you need to make sure that from the very beginning with your comrades have shared goals for the company. And you can't solve every problem at once. A company can't solve every problem in your life. You got to figure out how does this company fit into our lives and what are the goals of this company? And yeah, I think that's good. That's good. Maybe.
Eric Meyer: It struck me as interesting that you would find information on co-ops at a place that wasn't called the Cooperative Law Center, or it's the Sustainable Economies Law Center.
Valerie Young: Right. Yes, that's true. The Sustainable Economies law center is focused a lot on various social justice issues. They're also actually cooperatively managed, even though they're a nonprofit.
Eric Meyer: There we go.
Valerie Young: And I think that their interests are trying to figure out how to create a more equal world given the legal structures that we have. And it's a little bit swimming upstream in some cases. But yeah, it's just like we're talking about. I mean, capitalism isn't a very sustainable economy in a lot of ways. So how is it that we create more sustainable economies? You're right, the name is the same as the mission of Igalia, which is that a co-op is a more sustainable system for a better world.
Eric Meyer: Right. That's one of the founding principles, although I don't know if it's been written down in exactly those words. I would absolutely take that as a guiding principle that by working together, we work better than working in a hierarchical structure or working on our own.
Valerie Young: Yeah, totally.
Eric Meyer: Because you can absolutely, if you're running into a problem, you can reach out to other members of the collective and be like, 'Hey, can anyone help me with this?' Or 'Does anyone have experience here or any pointers or anything like that?' And you have a whole bunch of people to draw on the same way that you hypothetically do, at least in open source, where you say someone opens an issue that says, 'This is a problem,' and somebody can come in and address it and solve it. Yeah. So you said that there was a whole day track at FOSSY at the conference.
Valerie Young: Yep.
Eric Meyer: Do you know is that going to be a thing every year or was this special for this year?
Valerie Young: Well, even organizing a track, it turns out it's a lot of work.
Eric Meyer: Yeah, sure is.
Valerie Young: And I personally don't think that I will organize it next year. However, the co-ops that attended were very enthusiastic, and a lot of people who attended were very happy about it. And some of the conference organizers themselves, and someone might pick up the torch, specifically Agaric, a co-op that attended, they said that they would like to, so hopefully they do.
Eric Meyer: Let me bring it back around to tech unions. So one of the things about unions is that they tend to become hierarchical. And actually it seems like a lot of the past abuses that unions perpetrated were rooted in a hierarchy. So maybe a thing that tech unions should think very seriously about is being cooperative unions rather than being hierarchical unions.
Valerie Young: Yeah, yeah. So there is a term for this in unions. It's the rank and file strategy. It's to have more democracy in the union itself, so more democratic control of the union by the members of the union. And the phrase for that is rank and file unions as opposed to these stodgy, old hierarchical unions that I think are, unfortunately, well, definitely like unions have been dragged in the dirt because some powers would benefit from them not existing.
Eric Meyer: That's true.
Valerie Young: But there is also, unfortunately, been a lot of corruption and a lot of opportunities to drag unions in the dirt when the organization is very hierarchical, which allows for corruption.
Brian Kardell: I wonder if I can ask all three of us, I'll share my own, but if I could ask the two of you. I had a career in corporate America. I didn't work for co-ops before that. And when I was coming to Igalia, it was like, I have no idea what to expect. I was honestly a little afraid. It sounds incredibly overwhelming. I can't imagine how it could work because... Do you know what I mean?
Valerie Young: Yeah.
Brian Kardell: Because the only time that I see anything that was trying to make group decisions felt like they didn't go very well a lot of times. I just can't even imagine how would you even make that work. But I knew some people who worked here, and they tried to allay my fears a little bit, and I knew that they seemed like pretty well-rounded people and people I trust. So I came here and it was really intimidating, and it took a while for me, honestly, to figure it out. And we have done a few things to try to make some of that easier. I think part of it for me was also because I came in a role that didn't exist before, and we didn't know how that was going to work. Hopefully Eric's was a little bit easier, but yeah. What was that like? I mean, there are still things to this day where I'm not sure I know the right way to do that, and I have to go ask somebody. But yeah, can you talk anything about that? Do you feel like you're very comfortable in it now? And what were your impressions? I want to say though, that for me, I can't imagine not being in Igalia now. I would not want to be somewhere else. I'm all in on it. I like it a lot.
Valerie Young: Yeah, this is a great question. And I enjoyed hearing your answer actually. And Eric, I'd like to hear yours too.
Eric Meyer: I mean, it was a little scary coming in, not scary in the being terrified, just in the like what do I do? It was very uncertain. Who do I talk to to find out what I need to do?
Valerie Young: Yeah, no, I was curious because I have had some experience in co-ops in the past. I mean, both of you have had experience in standards and free software projects and alternative organizations that aren't just a hierarchical firm. So even though, Brian, you say came from corporate America, I think you still actually had some intuition for what things are like in a consensus group, like CSS and the W3C.
Brian Kardell: That is why I thought you couldn't run a company.
Eric Meyer: Real, too real.
Valerie Young: All right. You know what? Actually, you know what I want to throw back at you just now I'm idly curious is that now that you've been at a successful working flat organization, do you feel like you have insights for the CSS Working Group, ways that it could change structurally to be a more effective flat organization?
Brian Kardell: I think standards have a similar fail mode to the one that you described. And I don't know that I think that that's necessarily a failure mode as much as it is the limited success that we're constantly learning from and trying to do better at. So what I mean here is standards are set by the people who show up and do the work. And it's a lot of work and it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of effort. Generally speaking, that is overwhelmingly bent toward people who are paid to do that job. And some organizations pay an awfully lot to an awfully lot of people to do that work, and thus have really a lot of influence. I don't say that like it's a negative. Do you know what I mean? I'm thankful that somebody is paying, because somebody's got to pay. But I think that the system in which we've set up is fundamentally flawed in that way. That is really-
Valerie Young: Fundamentally unequal, I would say.
Brian Kardell: Yeah.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. I think this is a strong point of contrast between a co-op, like Igalia, and the standards body, like any working group really. But Brian and I know the CSS Working Group best. So it's a feature of the landscape that if big techco can pay to send five people to a working group or a bunch of working groups, and that's literally all they do. They do that work. That's what they do for big techco, then they will have an outsized influence on what the working group does. What they take up, what they don't take up, what they advance, what languishes, those sorts of things. And yes, Igalia does have several working group representatives, but so far as I'm aware, and Brian and I would probably be the ones who would be like this, that is not our sole job. We have many things other to do. Being on working groups is just one of those things. And it's not even necessarily the biggest thing that we do. No one working group takes up the majority of my time or Brian's time.
Brian Kardell: Yeah, definitely not.
Eric Meyer: Standards work certainly could. But Brian's on how many working groups are you on now? One of which are you're co-chairing or-
Brian Kardell: Well, Val is also a co-chair of the ARIA Working Group.
Eric Meyer: Oh, that's right.
Valerie Young: Yeah.
Eric Meyer: I'm sorry, Val.
Valerie Young: But I love the ARIA Working Group. We're very nice.
Eric Meyer: Right. Yeah.
Brian Kardell: But surely you see this in there as well. Right?
Valerie Young: Yeah. Well, I mean-
Brian Kardell: Who can afford to participate.
Valerie Young: Yes.
Brian Kardell: And at the end of the day, it comes down to who is going to do the implementation work and somebody has to fund that work. So to your question about do I have things that I think are lessons, takeaways, yes. But I don't think that they're for the CSS Working Group. And I don't think that the CSS Working Group itself is a bad working group. It is actually quite a functional working group. I think the bigger problem is the whole ecosystem around it. And what I would like to see, this is not a secret, I've said this a number of times, but think that it would be really critical for something like the ability for companies entering a working group to pull money, not all of the money, but to pull money and then to say like we do at Igalia every year, we have a budget that we propose and approve, and we just automatically leave a percentage of people slots open. That is for us to invest should we choose to invest in things so people will propose things.
Valerie Young: Wow.
Brian Kardell: Why couldn't companies pool money and then collectively decide how to use that fixed budget. And I think that that would solve two entirely different kinds of problems. I know for certain groups, like in CSS Working Group, for example, the print community exists and publishing also, which I guess is print, but also e-books and things. And they constantly feel like they've been ignored for a decade or whatever because it's not anybody's priority. And they feel very specifically like that's Google and Apple ignoring them or something. Not that it's really hard to find the priority for that. And if the working group collectively was responsible for that, then I feel like they would feel, again, more collective and make different decisions, basically.
Valerie Young: Yeah, actually, I think that's a great idea. I'll support it. Yeah. Unleash the goodwill of the many, the collaborative goodwill of the many.
Brian Kardell: Yeah. So let's a little bit the nature of why we came up with the open prioritization experiment that we had. We're hoping to seed that. We thought, well, we pay tens of thousands of dollars to belong to the standards organization, but we could also pay tens of thousands of dollars to just get it done too. Because sometimes just we need somebody to do the work. We don't necessarily need more people to sit and talk about it.
Valerie Young: Yeah. That's true.
Eric Meyer: But I think we've wandered into the weeds.
Valerie Young: Yeah, no, I like that this... I feel like the questions involved and the solutions provided by cooperative ownership and cooperative organizational models and democratic control are applicable to so many spheres of our life. And so I like that, Brian, you took it to the W3C in this way. It's like the democratic control over the money that's donated to the W3C, at least in the small way, towards implementing some of the specifications that we really care about and some of which are more altruistic than they are business motivated. And I think that's a great, great application.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. And I think that's probably a good place to wrap it up. Valerie, thank you so much for joining us and talking about co-ops. It's been a great discussion.
Valerie Young: Great. I love talking about co-ops, so I really enjoyed it.
Brian Kardell: So just to wrap up, I want to say you could check out Ethan's book, You Deserve a Tech Union. You could check out his ShopTalk Show, and I would like to throw in maybe you also deserve a tech co-op.
Eric Meyer: Yeah. And we'll throw in, remember to check out Val's talk about Igalia from the inside, and also the panel with seven co-ops. Those are on Igalia's YouTube channel, youtube.com/igalia if I remember correctly. And they're relatively recent, so should be relatively easy to find. But I think if you search our channel for co-op, you'll find them pretty easily. So Val, thanks again.
Eric Meyer
Brian Kardell
Valerie Young