Mission

IO Cooperative provides its members with technology infrastructure to sustain and enhance their professional, academic, and personal lives. It accomplishes this as a member owned and run California Consumer Cooperative.

All administration and operation of IO Cooperative and its infrastructure is performed by its members.

Due to this shared responsibility of administration and operation, the members of the cooperative need to be able to know and trust each other. As a result of this need for mutual knowledge of and trust between members, some people and organizations will not be a good fit as members of the cooperative and as a result will not be able to join the cooperative.

Given that there are no resources to administer and operate the cooperative other than the members themselves, all members must contribute to the administration and operation of the cooperative.

Services we provide

IO Cooperative provides server co-location, network connectivity, virtual hosting, and other technology products and services to its members.

What do we mean by a cooperative?

IO Cooperative exists to offer services to our members. The money collected from members for those services goes to pay for the costs to run the co-op. These costs comprise things like the rent to the datacenters, network transit, insurance premiums, merchant fees, taxes, billing services, network hardware, cabling, etc. As our costs change over time, member pricing changes as well as our service prices are based on our costs.

There are no paid employees and all of the labor to operate the co-op is provided by the members. Crucially, this means that unlike a traditional ISP where you pay money and they provide service, with the cooperative, in addition to paying for services, our members also need to help run the co-op since they’re the only ones who can. This assistance could be through technical operations, serving on the board of directors, financial bookkeeping, fielding member support requests, helping new members get setup, installing new servers in datacenters and other activities.

When you, as a member, need technical support, those requests may take longer to service than with other ISPs that have employees providing 24/7 support. We’re just a group of people with a common interest and a shared goal.

If you’re a member of the co-op, contact us to find out how you can help. Technical aptitude is not required as many of the tasks to run the co-op aren’t technical in nature.

If you’re not a member but the co-op sounds like something you’d be interested in, join IO Cooperative here.

Governance

The cooperative is currently overseen by our 5 member board and additional officers.

• Kevin Bullock : CEO : Board member
• Gene Wood : CFO
• Gary Peck : Secretary : Board member
• Phil Johnson : Board member
• Mike Toth : Board member
• Ariel Celeste : Board member

You can read our Bylaws document for details on how we run the cooperative.