Ciao Bocoup

Today is my last day as the owner of and Founding Principal at Bocoup. Please join me in congratulating the six new owners of the company: the Bocoup Workers Collective! The Collective has taken over leadership and operations. The Collective has prepared a post with FAQs and a group statement to answer questions we’ve gotten about working with Bocoup going forward.

Operating Bocoup over the last 15 years has been a privilege. I am indebted to so many current and former employees, clients, and partners who have taught me how to design and build software, organize open source communities, and shift technology standards and legislation. Perhaps the biggest lesson, and the final one, which I am still learning, is a lesson about power: what it means to own a company, the tyranny of employment and labor exchange, founder’s syndrome, the problem with abdicating responsibility while holding power, and many other related lessons. I am grateful to the Collective for working with me through this power shift within Bocoup.

In that same vein, I am encouraged by this team’s power-literacy as an engineering team, which is not something I see a lot in this field. Most engineering teams hoard ownership, control and decision making. This group works to map and shift power, internally between team members and externally with community partners. I am looking forward to learning from the special types of work this Collective will contribute to disability tech and community-accountable tech—especially during this period when marginalized communities, and values like inclusion and racial justice, are more prominently under attack.

It feels more important than ever for companies like Bocoup to live their values through worker agency, ownership, shared power and democratic control, and to reduce employer authority over the decisions that impact the livelihood of workers. Going forward, the Collective will operate using more horizontal decision-making structures, rooted in multiple years of training and development led by Sheila Moussavi and informed by the prior cooperative leadership experiences of Bocoup’s Engineering Manager, Chris Cuellar.

This team has a range of histories at Bocoup, with some folks going back to the beginning of the organization, and others holding leadership positions for the last couple of years. This is an extremely strong and deep engineering team, responsible for authoring major parts of Test262, WPT and wpt.fyi, contributing to widely used open source projects like jQuery, Grunt, Scratch, and p5.js, and landing changes in web standards and browsers impacting billions of people who use the web.

They are now working on hard technology problems in the assistive technology automation and testing space, building interoperability for assistive technologies through projects like APG and ARIA-AT. If you would like to build software with this team, which I highly recommend, you can email hello@bocoup.com.

Bocoup also previously offered an advising workstream, providing strategic, operational, product, and organizational design support to clients. The team that led that workstream now operates a new consulting practice called Darya Projects, and have provided support to a range of partners, including Scratch Foundation and OpenRefine.

If you are looking to build a resilient, accountable organization, I also highly recommend reaching out to them at hello@daryaprojects.com!

How we got here

I always wanted Bocoup to be a co-op. We discussed the idea before starting the company. I participated in multiple conversations about how to cooperatize over the years. For various reasons, including that I needed to learn more about power and de-centering myself in the process, it’s taken 15 years to make that vision a reality.

Bocoup was founded on a deeply held belief in the politics of open source— as a means of “democratizing” access to the value associated with technology. From 2009 to 2015, with this ethos, we made major contributions to open source projects, and helped design how web browsers work. These tools and features are still used today, and have impacted how we use the web.

After seven years of operating as an open source-focused company, in 2016, people started to ask: “open for who?” This question led me to apply to the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard to explore open source ethics. As an affiliate at Berkman, I met a brilliant group of people, who I spent five years with, as part of the “Ethical Tech” working group. We began to sketch an open source ethics with more specific principles, and in 2018 I wrote them down in a never-published document called Social Source.

That year I also met Sasha Constanza-Chock who invited me to the Allied Media Conference in Detroit. I attended a digital consent workshop in the Design Justice track, where I learned about radical digital consent experience design, and community-accountable-and-owned technology development. Bocoup immediately signed the Design Justice Principles.

That same year, we decided to transition our focus away from open source and toward inclusion, accessibility, and social justice. I hired a team to lead the complex and nuanced work of transitioning Bocoup into a company that operates by these values. The team, under the leadership of Sheila Moussavi (now a Principal at Darya Projects), implemented systems and practices around our values, including inclusive and transparent annual planning and reporting processes, justice-oriented hiring practices, a four-day work week, a decision-making framework for selecting the projects and partners Bocoup would and would not work with, and multi-modal process designs for many other aspects of the business. This work taught me that strategic operations are a key part of building inclusive and just ways of working.

The team also started an internal working group model for advancing topics including climate justice, accessibility, harm repair, and transitioning to a worker-owned co-op. They wrote two posts about the co-op transition process over the last two years (part 1, part 2), documenting the diligent, inclusive and values-aligned way the team, including members of the Collective, was moving through the process.

It hasn’t all been smooth. Like many organizations in our industry, we’ve experienced financial hardships in the past few years, which meant letting extraordinarily talented team members go. I am grateful to each of them, and honor their immeasurable contributions to the company’s success. I also am confident that the current formation of the Collective is strongly positioned to lead a sustainable organization well into the future.

Aside from the members of the Collective, there are hundreds of people who have contributed to Bocoup’s journey since 2009, as employees, clients, vendors, and colleagues. I trust that you know who you are and hope I have sufficiently thanked you individually over the years.

I have been preparing for this transition alongside the Bocoup Worker Collective for the past year. This spring I am looking forward to resting, getting back to my art practice, and supporting my neighbors and the community organizers that I collaborate with.

Drop me a line if you’re interested in collaborating, or just want to share what you’re up to and how you’re doing.

Ciao Bocoup,
Boaz