After ten years of creative cooperation, we’re announcing that We Are Open Co-op (WAO) will close its doors on our 10th birthday: 1st May 2026. This has been a carefully considered, collaborative decision — the kind we’ve always tried to model as a co-op.

But, as you can imagine, we’re a bit emotional about it, and it also feels a bit weird to finally say it out loud and in public. 

WAO is a strong, well-respected brand. We continue to have wonderful clients, meaningful work and good relationships with each other. People are finally waking up to the idea that flat hierarchies and consent-driven businesses are the future. 

In some ways, this is a continuation rather than an ending, as we’ll be carrying forward the cooperative principles we’ve practised into new systems and relationships.

So what’s going on?

Change. It’s the only thing that stays the same. 

Ten years of We Are Open has taught us that openness is less about tools and more about trust. We’ve collaborated with brilliant people, learned from our mistakes, and stayed curious together. That feels like success to us.

We’ve been running We Are Open Co-op for a decade now, and while we remain friends (and probably future colleagues), we’ve decided that it’s time to move on. As a cooperative, we’re known for a particular kind of work. As individuals, we find ourselves looking to expand in directions that impact each other as well as our cooperative: 

  • John is looking to get into a full-time gig that spotlight his gift for building relationships and trust.. Alternatively, he wants to work outside for a while.
  • Laura is taking a sabbatical starting on May 1st. She made no major plans because she’s not sure what happens when a person who has never stopped just…stops. She will write and wander and build things and try to figure out where she wants to point her big brain next.
  • Doug is eager to continue the good work of our collective, both on his own and with new collaborators. He will continue working with our current clients while also focusing more on helping organisations deal with complexity. 

Closing WAO thoughtfully and responsibly means that each of us gets to reflect on and celebrate what we’ve achieved without leaving any one of us with the current shared burden of responsibilities and accountabilities of running a business. 

Open Sourcing our work 

We’ve always worked openly. The clue is in the name! 

So we want to figure out what to do with all our stuff. We have so many artifacts and resources. There are truly useful things that we want to make sure remain open and accessible. 

That means we have some archiving to do. We’ve already started planning and implementing this, and will spend the next couple of months putting things in various places.

Here’s what we’re planning:

  • Websites – we’ll be using the Internet Archive’s wonderful Wayback Machine to ensure that our websites and blog posts  remain available. Here’s an example blog post so you can see how it works. 
  • Podcasts and other audio/visual media – these will be collated in lists on the Internet Archive. For example, we’ve  uploaded and listed every season of the Tao of WAO podcast.
  • Pages, courses, images & other resources – we’ll use GitHub repositories, pages, and wikis to share everything that doesn’t fit elsewhere. For example, we’ve already archived the wonderful visual thinkery that former member Bryan Mathers created for us. 

Helpfully, we recently renewed our domain for a couple of years, so weareopen.coop will remain our canonical link until September 2028. 

At the start of May this year we will upload a redesigned “We Are (no longer) Open” site that serves as an index page to help people find their way through our archives. 

But I was about to hire you!

That’s awesome to hear. If you have a project and want to chat about it now, please do get in touch. We may take on some new work in the next 10 weeks. However, projects that have timelines that extend out beyond May 1, 2026 will potentially need to have multiple contracts/agreements.

For future work, please get in touch with us individually:

  • Doug can be contacted at hello[at]dynamicskillset.com
  • Laura can be contacted at hello[at]laurahilliger.com
  • John can be contacted at hello[at]johnbevan.com