Inside Igalia: Scaling a Co-Op Beyond 100 Members

An overview of how the open-source consultancy Igalia scales its flat, cooperative organizational structure to over 100 members.

Igalia is an open source tech co-op success story. We have been around for 22 years; we have 140 members. We play an essential role in several open web platform projects such as Chromium/Blink, WebKit (WPE & WebKitGTK), Firefox and Servo. We have contributed to GNOME / GTK+ / Maemo, WebKit / WebKitGtk+ / JSC, Blink / V8, Gecko / SpiderMonkey projects, amongst others. The reason we started as a co-op and the reason the focus of our work is Free and Open Source software are one and the same. Both are implementations of our values, in a word: egalitarianism. In this talk you will hear a bit about our history. We will focus on how we found our FOSS business niche and how we grew from a few friends to 140 people in more than 25 countries all the while maintaining our flat organization structure. You will learn what it's like to participate in a company that is run by an Assembly, the decision making body that includes every Igalian, instead of a hierarchy of bosses. We hope that this talk will expand the limits of your imagination on what a company can look like, and that next time you think about starting your own company or looking for a new job, you consider a co-op! Slides available at: slideshare.net/igalia/inside-igalia-scaling-a-coop-beyond-10… (c) FOSSY (Free and Open Source Yearly) 2023 July 13-16th 2023 Portland, OR 2023.fossy.us/