So your thinking of starting a Cooperative are you? It can be a very rewarding and interesting experience. Running a cooperative offers many oppourtunities to further your knowledge in many areas. Every cooperative needs a point of coordination. As the founder of the cooperative either you need to take that responsibility or it will find you :-)

Below are a few general questions often asked by people thinking of starting their own Cooperative.

How much time will it take?

Thats rather like "how long is a peice of string?". The time the cooperative takes from you on a monthly basis depends on how you want to go about things, E.G are you going to recruit people from far around? how far are you going to help people? and so on. One tip is only take on people who at least have a basic understanding of the Internet. Someone who knows that a domain needs a primary and secondary DNS server and so on.

How do we share a server?

There are two basic methods in sharing a server. Firstly you can partition a server into totally separate virtual servers. While this sounds ideal it had some down sides with the software needed to do this. Bottom line is it removed much of the flexibility of owning your own server! plus as the coordinator of the cooperative it will make you job of helping the other members much more difficult.

The second method is to simple share the servers resources. If you planning on using Linux then as you may know Linux/Unix is an ideal O/S to use in a multi-user environment. Such matters of file ownership and permissions are handled perfectly. On our servers we have multiple MySQL servers installed for those members who require a little more in the way of privacy and flexibility.

Who are the right people for a cooperative?

This is a very important issue. The people choosen to form a cooperative will determine if it is a success or failure. We found the best way to find the right kind of people is to lay the facts out as we have in this website and then leave them to come to us. If they understand the advantages outlined on the site then already you know they are of the right attitude and understanding. You should not need to convince someone as to why they should join, or if they ask a question along the lines of "why are you so different from the likes of a 2Gb per month Raq3 host" then you can safley assume the prospective member is not ready for the likes of a cooperative. The whole cooperative will hinge around people who are willing to work with others for something which on their own they would not be able to get or acheive. I'm not saying that the members all have to be Linux geeks either. Using tools such as Webmin will make life easier for those who have little experience of Linux. So long as the members are happy to learn they will get along fine, and they will be better for the experience too.

Initially we also made a post outlining our ideas in a couple of news groups. One was a general UK Internet group the other was a general UK Linux group. Amazingly we had a lot of trouble with the Linux group posting. It appears many Linux based service providers hang out in there and they obviously felt threatened by our idea, why I don't know.

What are the financial implecations?

Obviously you need a central point for the members to put their money each month and for payment to be made to your server host. This means one of you have to take the responsiblity for the finances. So long as the cooperative is a non profit makeing endeavour the tax man will not bother you. Just remember to keep the balance below £2000. When you have a final total cost from your choosen host, you then need to work out how much it will be when split between the members. Try and work it so there is at least a £30-40 surplus each month. The surplus can be used in the event of server problems and for future upgrades etc.

How do we coordinate our efforts?

Firstly by email. Any private or urgent matters are best transmitted by email. Any "how do I" questions of a non-private nature could be put on your own news server so the members can read the info at their leasure and also reference back to old posts. We've also found running a web forum to be a valuable feature. As the coordinating member of the cooperative it will be your duty to keep details of all the members, such as Address, email, phone, mobile etc.

What do we need from our host?

We choose to have between nine and ten members per server. I must admit even with our original server, on average its only about 25% utilised. If you choose to have nine members on the server then firstly it would be nice if you could have 10 ip addresses. Thats one ip address for general use, attached to a non meaning domain name and one ip address per member. You can use the generic ip address for temporarily hosting new members or running other generic services.

Secondly a little flexibility would be nice. The hardest thing we found when our servers were hosted by a third party was the fact that every server in the rack costed us. This meant we had to shuffle new members around untill we had enough to fund an additional server in the racks. This is part the reason why myself and the co-founder have formed a new hosting company, as cooperatives do need various aspects of flexibility from their provider.