If you’ve been following us for a while, you might know that We Are Open Co-op is a collective that believes in bringing our whole selves to work. We get together and talk about our feelings and about our worker-owned cooperative. Over the years, we’ve had extremely productive co-op days that have resulted in things like:

• A site to collect our AI focused think pieces, frameworks and strategies:  https://ailiteracy.fyi 
• A portfolio page to round up some of our work in Digital Credentialing: https://digitalcredentials.fyi 
• A place to make our favourite community building tactics easily accessible: https://communitybuilding.fyi 

We’re makers and while we’ve managed to share much of what we make, we spend less time promoting ourselves than we probably should. We aren’t natural marketers, and platforms such as LinkedIn have soul-sucking algorithms that prioritise shinyness over depth.

So, without further ado, this is a promotional post to say that we have upcoming capacity for interesting work. Hire us! 

At the moment, we’re helping Amnesty International UK build an online community for their activists and we’re collaborating with Skills Development Scotland on a potential national system for Verifiable Credentials. Both of these projects are complex, interesting and belong to organisations that are actively trying to help people. 

Other projects we’ve worked on this year have involved helping MIT’s Digital Credentials Consortium host a summit for their network in The Netherlands, carrying out research for the BBC on how they can approach AI Literacy education, and publishing a report on the environmental impact of AI for Friends of the Earth.  

While we were thinking about what to write in this post, we reflected on why these projects feel right to us. Beyond the specific themes involved - we usually work at the intersection of learning, technology, and community - we also talked about these cross-cutting attributes:

Strategy 

WAO loves helping organisations figure out the strategy stuff. We are great at helping organisations develop and refine big visions and then figuring out the practical and tactical ways people can achieve those visions. Through our theory of change workshops, strategy sessions and participatory methodologies, we’ve helped all kinds of organisations dream big, achievable dreams.

We believe in proactive planning, even in reactive situations! For example, when we helped Greenpeace International develop their crisis comms training programme, we were helping to establish a community of practice that could react to potential future critical incidents. When we worked with Friends of the Earth, we researched and wrote a nuanced article that helped them thread the needle between AI and environmental activism. With the Digital Credentials Consortium, we helped them establish a community-focused engagement plan that reflected a complex network of organisations. 

We are great at seeing the big picture and developing practical strategies that help bring those visions to life.

Advocacy

It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has read any of our other posts that we have opinions. We really do. We are internet people who have been working at the intersection of technology and society for our entire careers. We have a lot to say about privacy, decentralisation, open source, environmentalism, education and so much more. At this moment in history, we are still working to create technology that respects our rights. 

It’s not always easy, but we firmly believe in modelling the behaviours that you want to see in the world. That means being open and honest and helping others understand what’s at stake in regards to our data, the environment and our futures. We believe in solidarity, not charity and are organised as a cooperative aligned with the International Cooperative Alliance’s identity, values & principles. The spirit of WAO page on our wiki further describes our philosophical bent ;)

Work that has real impact

We have been lucky to work with clients and on projects that are looking to positively impact people’s lives. This is the kind of work we love. Real impact for us means that at the end of the day, the work we’ve done has helped empower, educate or encourage people to live their best lives. As we said at the beginning of this post, we believe in bringing our full selves, and we believe in helping others do the same. Real impact comes from communities and connections with real people.  

Projects where we have a lot of agency

As our website states,  we don’t just think outside the box; we shred it (and then recycle it, obviously). Our services include consultancy, workshops and training, project and product management, research and development, community building, and everything in between. That means , we have yet to meet a pre-established set of KPIs that can handle our general awesomeness. We prefer projects that allow us to stretch our wings past meaningless metrics and foregone conclusions. We work in partnership.

What we do at WAO:

• Collaborate with organisations on sensemaking, digital transformation, strategy, product and generally making their work awesome
• Work openly because that’s how innovation happens and the world becomes a better place
• Adapt our work to the realities of your organisation, because humans are messy
• Share our networks, ideas and brains with your organisation. When we go, we like to go big.
• Collaborate with empathy, understanding, and humanity because life is hard and no-one likes jerks.

Find other people if you want to…

• Hand over a spreadsheet of unnegotiated deliverables and expect us to get them done like you’re a teacher and this is our homework. 
• Keep us in the dark about what’s going on in your organisation as though you’re our parents. 
• Require sign-off for every small decision by someone outside the project team as if we’re not grown up enough to decide what needs doing.
• Argue about paying us what you agreed (or pay us late every time). We’re arguably inexpensive. This isn’t a flea market, and we’re not haggling.
• Treat us as taskrabbits, data entry clerks, or otherwise insist that we’re merely “consultants”. This ain’t Deloitte.

Responsive clients

Finally, we’ve been quite fortunate to have found clients that “get” us. We love working with people who are also bringing their full selves to work and who aren’t afraid to change course when new information comes in. We know authenticity when we see it, and we appreciate honest, reflective responsiveness. We don’t know everything, and it’s ok if you don’t either. Together we can figure it out.

So, do you have an upcoming project that you’d like to talk to us about? Schedule a free 30 minute call and let’s see if we can work together. 

All images in this post are licensed cc-by-nd Bryan Mathers for WAO