What a rollercoaster ride the last five years have been for the founding members of We Are Open Co-op! From an idea floated in a Slack channel, we’ve grown to a sustainable business working with organisations ranging from the very small to household names.
We’re a collective of independent thinkers and makers helping charities, ethical companies, government departments and educational institutions with sensemaking and digital transformation.
WAO members live and breathe our collective values, choosing to work with those striving to make the world a better place. We’ve seen members come and go, but we’ve stuck to our mission putting people before profit.
We’ve helped so many different organisations with so many different things over the past five years, that we felt it was time to update our original mission statement. While open principles and practices do, of course, underpin everything we do, we’ve found that organisations often come to us with problems to solve.
Therefore, our new tagline reads: Making sense of complex problems while spreading the benefits of open. Because that’s what we do — helping organisations reduce complexity, untangle knotty problems, and generally get underneath things that others would prefer to gloss over.
You’ll be pleased to know that we’ve updated our website, something that we meant to do at the same time as updating our logo last year. As ever, client work takes priority, so we’re pleased to be able to launch it in time for our fifth birthday.
Highlights from the past five years
There have been plenty of good times, from our meetups and global travel (in pre-pandemic times!) to technological experiments and collaborating with others.
We asked WAO members to name something that they look back on with fondness and warmth. Here are their responses:
Bryan — “Looking back, it’s clear that every project we jump in to is different, which suits the creative energy of the co-op. I loved travelling to Washington DC to run some micro-credential workshops. I’ve also really enjoyed our recent work with Catalyst, visually tuning in to the voices of our Charity cohort.”
Doug — “Among the many things I’ve enjoyed over the past five yearsis working in solidarity with other tech co-ops through CoTech. I even went ‘on loan’ at one point to help one of our sister organisations out with some product stuff! Mostly, though, I like turning up every day and working with friends and colleagues who I respect and trust.”
John — “Seeing CoTech develop from tentative early steps into an active network has been hugely rewarding. London (20mins by train) has seemed a world away for the past year but I can just about recall stimulating and productive trips to the likes of Kyoto, Bucharest, Winchester! in the before times. All memories that are marked with the humour, candour, and camaraderie that have got us this far, and that we’ll need for whatever comes next.”
Laura — “It’s hard to pick one thing about WAO in the last five years. John and I went to Japan on a co-op job. Bryan and I were almost late to one after getting a little lost in a forest in Scotland. Doug and I presented co-opy things in Canada and then made faces at a bunch of sharks. All of us imagined a better world at Wortley Hall with CoTech cooperatives. The stuff we do is meaningful professionally, but also personally. I guess my highlights are the times when those things come together.”
We’re in this for the long-haul, so we’re looking forward to the next fifty years of WAO, never mind the next five!
We’ve just expanded learnwith.weareopen.coop which is our place for free email-based courses on a range of topics, the archive of the Learning Fractal newsletter, and now… a library of tools and approaches that we use on a regular basis with clients.
You’ll find templates and tips for facilitating mainly online sessions, which we honed during our work on various Catalyst-funded projects with charity cohorts.
Tao of WAO
Although it’s not ready quite yet, Laura and Doug have been working on a new podcast about the intersection of technology, society, and internet culture — with a dash of philosophy and art for good measure.
This is despite the fact that Doug and Laura can’t agree on how to pronounce ‘tao’ (is there a ‘d’ in the pronounciation? who knows!). What we do know is that we’ve produced a couple of episodes, and we’ll be releasing three of them simultaneously in the next few weeks.
The Tao of WAO will be available at all good podcast outlets, and probably some sketchy ones too. For now, though, why not subscribe to our SoundCloud?
Finally…
We’d be remiss not to mention the support that WAO members get from our Company Secretary and collaborator, Hannah Belshaw. Over the last few years, she’s gone from helping us with the financial side of the business, to getting involved as a UX designer on some of our projects.
Thanks, Hannah!👏
As we always endeavour to help our clients understand, there are things you know you know, and things you know you don’t know. There were plenty of things in the green and yellow parts of the above pie chart when we set off on this journey.
However, it’s always the the stuff in the red bit, the things you don’t know you don’t know that are exciting and scary in equal measure!
We’re already looking forward to our tenth birthday celebrations, for which we’re very much hoping we’ll be able to meet up in person…
Get in touch if you think WAO might be able to help your organisation. We’re friendly and have recently learned not to bite.
Discussion