Hypha Worker Cooperative: Governance Experiments

Section I: Introduction

Hypha Worker Co-operative is building a governance dashboard that combines several of our existing discussion and voting tools. We created a timeline of the co-op’s history as an experiment to test out our work. Documentation for reusing and customizing the dashboard is available, and the timeline is viewable on GitHub Pages. 

Good governance is at the centre of every successful co-operative, and this is especially true for worker-owned co-operatives operating with a flat or horizontal organizational structure. High levels of personal accountability, shared trust, and horizontal leadership stand in for hierarchy within these organizations, and robust and participatory governance processes are critical to maintaining a healthy co-operative structure. Yet, collective decision-making is not broadly socialized or understood outside of a few particularly robust, localized co-op ecosystems (e.g. Quebec, Canada or the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy among others) creating both practical process and social/educational challenges related to decision-making and governance. And while a wealth of information exists about what factors contribute to a healthy governance ecosystem, existing tools and processes are often geared toward larger co-ops and credit unions (i.e. large boards, hierarchical structures and time-intensive processes) and most importantly for our use case, for in-person deliberations. 

Remote-first work and different configurations of working environments are becoming more prevalent, and these organizations need solutions that are digital-first – whether they are co-operatively owned or not. An additional strand of influence for our thinking on governance has also been shaped by the relatively new discourse on decentralized governance and the emergence of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) within blockchain-based technical ecosystems. Although there have been some clear challenges raised regarding this model, our questions are more procedural: can blockchain-based DAO tooling work for smaller groups of people with different trust configurations than the typical case of pseudonymous voting, and can they be repurposed for non-development work?

This project, which we nicknamed ‘the governance experiment’ was driven by Hypha’s needs for integrated, cooperative-focused solutions that work within our existing processes and configurations of a remote-first, worker-owned co-operative. However, we believe that worker cooperatives offer a corrective to the extractive models of usual technology development and that our experiments in governance hold insights for any organization curious about different modalities of operating and governing. 

Before delving into the project itself, it’s useful to add context for Hypha Worker Co-operative; where we’ve come from and where we’re going. Hypha was founded in 2019 as a non-share worker-owned cooperative. As a technical services and development consultancy, we partner with organizations who seek out our deep knowledge and expertise in cryptography, decentralized governance, web protocols, and distributed ledger technologies. Our focus is on creative partnerships and the unique use cases of these emerging tools. We have always been a remote-first organization, and we work with partners around the world. There were seven founding members, and are currently (as of the end of 2024) ten members and two probationary members. Originally, Hypha used Loomio, an excellent collective decision-making tool (developed by the Enspiral cooperative) but quickly found that it was too process heavy for a small group of people and it was abandoned after a year or so. Subsequently, the decision-making process devolved into informal discussions in group chat between members with some documentation occurring in a private Kanban board on Github. Processes were documented sporadically in our Handbook. In recent months, and with addition of several new members, we’ve begun to formalize our governance procedures once more; for example, creating a Governance Working Group, and adding a Decision Log.  
During our 2023 Hypha retreat, which is one of the few times we gather in person, we had a brainstorming session on the themes of  ‘dogfooding’ our governance processes, making art, and having fun. Thus the governance experiment was born to answer the question: can we build solutions that leverage our existing tools and processes but make our governance more inclusive and legible to all members?

Section ll: Project overview

While the genesis of the experiment was in the summer of 2023, the work began to gather shape when we submitted the idea to the Summer of Protocols RFP, a call for ideas supported by the Ethereum Foundation. Our proposal asked how we could create a protocol for the messy complexities of co-operative governance, and considered what might be reproducible given the variety of processes and forms within the co-operative sector. Although the proposal was unsuccessful, the RFP forum feedback was helpful. 

Another key step in the experiment was the introduction of the concept of generative decision-making. In June 2024, all Hypha members gathered for a workshop given by PercoLab (a Montreal and European-based cooperative) that clarified our thinking around decision-making, a key component of governance. Given that Hypha has grown substantially in recent years, this also gave us the chance to create a shared understanding around what horizontal leadership looks like in practice.

The final shaping of the experiment took place during the application for Metagov’s Interoperable Deliberative Tools cohort. This work added an additional layer of interoperability consideration and helped place the project in the broader context of deliberative democracy. This presentation created for the cohort presents a timeline of the project from conception to Autumn 2024.

Although our work has been shaped by numerous additions and side-quests, the core objective of leveraging existing tools and processes rather than adding new elements to improve our governance work has remained. Our focus is on integrating data from various software tools (GitHub, Google Sheets/Docs, Matrix chat) into one space or dashboard where members can better understand and follow the decision-making workflows. The larger ambition is to enhance governance capabilities for democratic organizations by creating documentation for our work that can be repurposed; likely as a new page in our Handbook. 

While many existing tools facilitate deliberation, voting, and consensus-building, they are often separated from the usual workflows of organizations, increasing logistical and attention needs. Repurposing commonly-used collaborative and development tools into an interoperable dashboard that streamlines democratic decision-making processes meets people where they are, rather than asking them to shift their precious attention to another tool or space. These tools are also often designed for large institutions, making them less adaptable to the unique needs of smaller organizations and collectives. Additionally, these tools frequently operate in silos, preventing seamless integration and data sharing, and slowing the development of comprehensive governance processes. Our governance experiment bridges these gaps by creating a web application that aggregates data from a variety of commonly used software tools, enhancing governance capabilities of democratically-run organizations. Not only does this enhance collaboration, but it offers an open source approach, and cost savings through reusing existing options. While our dashboard will feature the tools we currently use, its modular approach means it can be adapted to meet other organization’s needs (depending on the APIs of each software tool or platform). Eventual flatfile exports will also enhance interoperability. The dashboard offers an integrated solution, embedding governance workflows into existing platforms; Google Drive, Github Issues and one or two voting tools, in the case of Hypha. It provides a unified view of deliberative and decision-making activities for small (<20 person) remote-first democratically governed cooperatives and collectives. 

Section III. Implementation and integration

While the outcome of the governance experiment is the dashboard, we needed a way to test its applicability and usefulness while also honouring our original ambitions of artistic playfulness. We devised the idea of creating a timeline for Hypha, marking key events since the cooperative’s inception. (The process for creating the timeline can be seen in this GitHub issue.) In addition to populating the dashboard with data, the timeline provided a means to test out several voting modalities. 

In the past, Hypha has relied on informal voting mechanisms (i.e. emoji voting in chat) or restricted voting to our annual AGM when we are required to gather in person and can visually ascertain a vote’s status. In keeping with our swing toward more explicit governance processes, we identified a need for online, anonymous voting options. Members were asked to vote on a series of events or happenings taken from each year of the co-op’s existence. We trialled three different voting tools: ADoodle, an easy to use and free option created as a personal project; ONVote, a blockchain-based voting app; and Constellate, a voting tool built by Hypha that is based on the Earthstar protocol and uses keypairs. ADoodle is the simplest of the three options as it is entirely email-based and is the most straightforward to administer. However, motivated by our interest in blockchain-based tools, we also tested out ONVote as it is a rare on-chain option that allows for anonymous voting. This option required a little more work to gather all member’s cryptocurrency wallet addresses, which is required to restrict the voting to a selected pool of voters, but was also fairly simple. However, both of these options rely on externally developed, closed-source (or at least opaque) software that could change–or disappear–at any time. Hence, it made sense to do a little extra work to build our own voting application using the Earthstar protocol, which we’ve used in previous projects with entirely different applications. Constellate required each member to create and share a keypair, one half of which is shared with the vote administrator, to create a secure and anonymous vote (although to be clear, there is only so much anonymity one can have in a group of 12 people). Voting exercises were run over the course of several weeks in Autumn 2024 and data was aggregated into the dashboard, as this development work happened in parallel to the votes.

Our browser-based governance dashboard integrates with Hypha’s key tools– Google Sheets and GitHub– to draw data into one accessible space. It is currently hosted in GitHub repository (repo) that can be copied and customized by other organizations by following the available documentation. Currently, Hypha members must sign into the dashboard using their Google credentials to display a version of the Decision Log and/or their GitHub account to review issues that are under deliberation. (We will explore single sign-on options in future.) Items that were subject to a vote have an option to ‘visualize the vote,’ which displays voting results beneath the log. Additional technical documentation is available in the repo. 

As with any good experiment, there have been more than a few challenges along the way. First and foremost, given our emphasis on meeting members where they are in their existing workflows, we needed to solve user authentication and authorization. We addressed this by implementing Google OAuth2 authentication, to restrict access to users within the organization. Then we implemented the Google API to fetch data from our decision log, to ensure only users with the necessary permissions can access privileged information. A similar process was followed to integrate the data coming from GitHub.

Data synchronization was another challenge we uncovered; how to provide real-time synchronization of data from multiple sources such as voting results and other decision-based logs. Current use-cases haven’t required time-sensitive delivery of the updates but it’s possible that this use case will present itself in future. We addressed this issue by fetching data in real time, synching it when the page loads and not caching it externally to ensure current data.

Lastly, it must be emphasized that this is a rough and ready prototype so the design is quite minimal. Although it can be easily customized, user experience and interface design considerations have largely been ignored, and future iterations should address this gap. 

Section IV: Outcomes and future directions

The ideal outcome of the governance experiment is increased engagement and participation in co-operative governance. While it’s too early to say if the dashboard will have the effect of enticing the more reserved members to engage in this work, the addition of the GitHub issues requiring feedback, and the Decision Log, paired with voting results, does provide transparency. Whether this translates to more efficient and informed decision-making processes is an open question that we’ll resolve as the dashboard use improves. As one immediate metric of engagement, voting participation varied significantly depending on member’s workloads; participation in our votes ranged from 50% -100% of members participating. An internal poll indicated that Hypha members preferred Constellate as a voting tool, with the simple ADoodle option coming in second. We’ll continue to explore voting tool options, as well as fine-tune Constellate in the coming months. In the coming weeks, we’ll put the finishing touches on our timeline; potentially adding context-rich links and eventually tokenizing the Hypha ‘moments’ and register them on a blockchain for archival purposes (and fun). 

Our hope is to share this experiment more widely within the cooperative ecosystem, presenting a new light-weight and open-source option for smaller co-ops, and sparking important discussions about the evolution of co-operative governance.