Galician cooperativism

On 4 July we took part in Día do Cooperativismo Galego, held at Bodegas Martín Códax in Cambados.

We had officially joined the cooperative movement a few months earlier and wanted to get closer to an ecosystem with which we share much more than a legal structure.

Being a cooperative is also part of how nosDeu is designed

For us, being a cooperative is not just a way of sharing ownership or making decisions. It is part of how we have wanted to build nosDeu from the start.

We want the people who are part of the project to have a real say, for knowledge to circulate and for responsibility to be shared.

That way of organising ourselves also shapes how we work with clients. We find it hard to understand a company that seeks autonomy internally while creating dependency externally. That is why we try to share knowledge, explain decisions, and build technology and processes that can keep working without us.

The Día do Cooperativismo Galego was an opportunity to meet other organisations that, from very different sectors and realities, have also decided that the way a company is built matters.

Because cooperativism, at least as we understand it, is not simply about having a particular corporate structure. It is also about ownership, responsibility, how power is distributed, and the kind of company you want to allow to grow.

We wrote about part of this journey, together with our participation in +Coop, in Cooperation is a way of working.

And in our handbook we explain in more detail why we are a cooperative and what that decision means in nosDeu's day-to-day work.