CoopStack

The engineering for self-hosted software is largely solved. Excellent open source tools exist for email, file storage, project management, and communications. The reason most small cooperatives and nonprofits still rely on corporate SaaS is a product problem, not an engineering problem.

Self-hosting fails for small organizations because nobody has done the serious UX and product work to figure out: what does a 20-person worker cooperative actually need? What configuration is sensible for an organization without a dedicated sysadmin? What does the onboarding experience look like for people who did not choose to become IT administrators? These are hard questions that require extensive user research and iteration, and they’re questions that don’t get answered when the people building the software don’t talk to the people who need to use it.

CoopStack is primarily a product design and user research effort that happens to involve some deployment engineering. The deliverable is a bundle of configured open source software that feels like signing up for a SaaS subscription, targeted specifically at the operational needs of democratic organizations.