Code-Operative was a co-operative founded in 2017 in the North East of England. The co-operative was closed in 2024 and replaced by SEPHEO.
Code-Operative's mission was to grant its members a greater degree of autonomy over their economic lives - both by exposing new people to the benefits of freelancing and in exposing freelancers to the benefits of mutualisation within the co-operative model, via a greater degree of security and autonomy in their work and via a support network. Our clients were tech-for-good, typically themselves co-operatives or non-profit organisations.
In 2024 its members decided to dissolve Code-Operative, feeling that the organisation (and in particular the legal structure) had served its purpose in the pusuit of the aforementioned goals. The purpose of this webpage is to serve as a history of Code-Operative, a retrospective of successes and failures to learn from in the co-operative movement, and as a sign-post to direct people to the diverse new efforts being undertaken as a result of Code-Operative's existence. In many ways this page is a celebration of our co-operative, written by former members.
For many of its members, it was their first foray into the co-operative movement (a business owned and controlled by its workers), and their first experience running a business. For more than 20 people, Code-Operative provided their first steps into the co-operative movement, and often the first steps in a technology career, providing them with the experience and tools they needed to go on to find their place in society, and improve their quality of life. It is a venture that we are immensely proud of.
Why SEPHEO?
Code-Operative was a great vehicle for learning and in particular exploring how the coop and coop-adjacent tech sector operated. However after a few years we found ourselves having to choose between 3 incompatible business models.
- Connecting our freelancer members to roles, like a recruitment agency.
- Bidding and managing projects like a consultancy.
- Selling automated services and products.
We sampled each of these models to various degrees, but to succeed at any of them required giving up the other two, because we needed to have a clear and simple mission to explain externally and internally what we do. Each model implies a different structure and different responsibilities on the part of the members, and we decided that choosing one was better than avoiding choosing at all.
Most of our income to that point had come from behaving like an agency and a consultancy, so selling products wasn't a strong candidate for the group as it existed in that moment. We decided against becoming a consultancy because there are already several tech coops that operate in that way, and we felt that they were already catering this need.
We decided to focus entirely on model 1, connecting members to roles with other coops and aligned organisations. It made the most sense to reform around this model, because Code-Operative had years of documents and history that was now irrelevant, and a few members of code-op weren't interested in being part of the next organisation. So we distributed the remaining assets of Code-Op and closed it, and opened SEPHEO.
SEPHEO stands for Self-Employed People Helping Each Other, and is in the process of providing a cooperative structure for the cloud of freelancers that orbit the various tech cooperatives in the UK and beyond. We act as a visible point of attraction for people who want to enter the coop economy, and as a trusted partner for coops to get people from. We want to ease the capacity problems that can plague small coop busineses by providing a collective solution. By aggregating the freelancers and coops, SEPHEO acts as a shock absorber, smoothing out the flow of work, making business development more predictable and easier to plan ahead for.
The goal is to stabilise and grow the coop economy by matching opportunities within coops to those eager to join the coop world. There are a lot of amazing people out there and we want to help you meet them.
Interested? Find out more and get in touch via https://sepheo.co/
The people who made Code-Operative a success
Code-Operative hosted the CoTech gathering in Newcastle in November, 2019.
From the original four founders of Code-Operative, to all of the people who helped to build the co-op into a success, and to all of our wonderful clients and fellow co-operatives, there are a lot of people to thank. Code-Operative was incubated by a rich co-operative ecosystem, and for the reader we wanted this website to attempt a sort of cartography of some of those excellent initiatives:
Former members
Excellent freelancers, experienced founders and administrators of co-operative and democratic organisations.
- Calum Mackervoy; co-founder of Code-Operative and an experienced full-stack web developer.
- John Evans; co-founder of Code-Operative. Co-founder of SEPHEO, and SpaceTube, among many other initiatives.
- Nick Stokoe; an active member in Code-Operative who deserves a special mention. Nick has over 25 years of engineering experience and is a co-founder of SEPHEO.
- Nick Woodfine; co-founder of Code-Operative who brought invaluable experience during the early part of our development. Founder of North East Game Developers Meetup
Partner organisations
- Happy Dev; the original inspiration for Code-Operative, a federation of 300+ freelancers from across France.
- CoTech; a support network of more than 40 tech co-operatives from across the UK.
- Gateshead Council; a forward-thinking UK council which provided us with material support while we set-up.
If you're interested in starting your own tech co-operative, we cannot recommend highly enough joining CoTech, which is an awesome network of tech co-operatives from across the UK. If you're not sure how to introduce yourselves, take inspiration from our introduction post on the CoTech forum, back in 2018.