In our monthly co-op days, our members spend time away from client work, thinking about bigger-picture stuff. We take the 10,000-foot view of our work together. Last week, at the start of a new year, we came together to discuss how we feel about our work and the state of the world.

We’ve thought about adjacent things before — in 2021, for example we came up with the Spirit of WAO which led to us defining five focus areas in 2023. Last year, we shared our “even overs” in which we outlined how we value, for example, work/life balance even over profit/surplus, learning even over efficiency, and documentation even over speed.

There are plenty of people who, right now, think that a “wait and see” attitude is the right orientation to the world. As our former Mozilla colleague Geoffrey MacDougall has pointed out in a recent blog post, those people are wrong. It’s time to roll our sleeves up and get shit done.

Hamming Questions

Based on what we’ve discussed before, we pondered what our Hamming Questions might be for this year:

Mathematician Richard Hamming used to ask scientists in other fields “What are the most important problems in your field?” partly so he could troll them by asking “Why aren’t you working on them?” and partly because getting asked this question is really useful for focusing people’s attention on what matters.

After some time thinking alone, we came up with a range of potential Hamming Questions. Discussing their various merits, we realised that a useful way to phrase them is in the form:

“If [X] how might we [Y] instead of [Z]”

We’re still pondering and thinking, but here are three questions we came up with to sharpen our planning, especially given that 2025 is the UN’s International Year of Co-operatives:
  1. If we want a future that respects people and the planet, what stops us from using worker-owned approaches instead of repeating old power structures?
  2. If every person’s talents and skills matter, how can we spread open ways to recognise and reward them, instead of sticking to formal qualifications alone?
  3. If AI now shapes so many parts of life, how can we think systemically about community-led digital literacies, instead of letting Big Tech set the agenda?

As you would expect, we’ve got some priors in each area: an email-based course on how to set-up a worker-owned co-op, our work around Open Recognition, and our new site on AI literacies.

Next steps

Are these the kinds of questions YOU are pondering? Do you have access to funding to help us convene people around these issues? Does your organisation need some help coming up with your own Hamming Questions?

Let us know, either in the comments below, or via email: hello@weareopen.coop