Why did we start this co-operative project?

There are a many factors that brought our group together to form our worker-co-operative - CanTrust Hosting Co-operative. The most important factor was that we each were trying to fulfill similar needs. 

• We each were web developers with local clients who were asking for Canadian-based website hosting.
• We each were managing our own website servers and needed to keep these up-to-date to keep them secure. 
• We each were maintaining several Drupal codebases and needed to keep on top of security updates to keep our client's sites safe and secure.

It was clear that with our combined efforts and experience we had the knowledge and expertise to create a complete Internet hosting solution and offer it to our client organizations at a reduced cost. The worker co-operative was the desirable model with which to run our business because it fit with our values and we were inspired to put into practice the knowledge we had of the co-op model.

I was first to introduce the idea of the co-operative model to our group.  I had worked as the Technology Director for the British Columbia Institute for Co-operative Studies at the University of Victoria many years.  After our group’s research into the structure, values and principles of the co-operative model, we collectively committed to forming a worker co-operative as a way to ensure accountability and stability of our project.

We believe the values of the co-op model (self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, and solidarity) parallel the values found in the Open Source software development community and we would like to be  successful example of how the co-operative model can be applied in the Information Technology sector.

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For those not familiar with Open Source software:
Open Source programs are co-operatively produced projects developed by the community that uses the programs and available to everyone free of charge. To be certified as Open Source, software must be distributed under a license that guarantees the right to read, redistribute, modify, and use the software freely. Our servers and client websites run entirely on Open Source software.