Cooperating Geeks

A few years ago, on a BBS I used to frequent, in a tech forum long since forgotten, one of the users asked a bunch of the regulars where they got their experience. "How does one learn routing, mail server administration or just heavy duty Perl?" That's a good question.

Most of us had learned it working at universities, where we learned admin skills on the job. However, this user's situation was slightly different--he was unable to go back to school and learn these skills. And without them there was little chance he could get a job at an ISP.

An idea popped into my head that I quickly suggested: a geek cooperative. Geeks forming their own ISP and learning those skills on the job.

The idea gained acceptance, but no one took on the idea. About a year later, I decided to pursue the idea with some local geeks I was affiliated with, and we've learned a lot more than simple system administration. Through various ups and downs, we've achieved more than I could have imagined, and impressed quite a number of people. It's an idea that I think could well serve a lot of geeks.

Any cooperative's foundations are quite simple: a group of people who have a common need and find that they can achieve their goals through collective action. Each member contributes time and sometimes money, and in return they become part of a business or an enterprise. Services or goods are sold, usually at a higher rate to non-members than to members, to help bring in revenue.

This is essentially the premise of our geek cooperative, named The Geek Empire, or TGE (http://www.thegeekempire.net/). We formed with approximately ten people who donated equipment and some basic technical knowledge. Everyone brought strengths to the group, including DNS, SMTP, networking and web server skills, but these definitely needed to be polished before we could get a customer. Using a friend's basement as our NOC, broadband from a local provider (we were sure to get a contract that allowed us to resell access), we were in business.

To begin with, we amassed spare equipment, including workstations from HP, Sun and old PC equipment, along with some hubs, NICs and lots of cat 5 cabling, and mounted the core systems in an old rack. After a few evening's worth of software setup, we were ready to get off the ground.

Our webmaster set up a site, our hostmaster hooked us up with OpenSRS to do domain name registration (http://www.opensrs.org/, a very low cost, full service TLD registrar any decent organization can affiliate themselves with), and we started working.

At first, we had to fund our rather large bill for broadband access. Each core member donated $50 a month, which helped cover network access, various setup fees and some hardware we had to purchase. This was a bit of a turnoff for some people, but it helped us get off the ground. And this helped us do it all without one dollar of venture capital.

After about a year and a half of operation, TGE provides the following commercial services at a level that meets the requirements for most small businesses and individuals. We provide mail hosting, domain name registration and hosting (with off-site secondaries), web site hosting and management and even some colocation services. For the typical small business or private individual, the levels we provide are more than adequate, and the prices are significantly more competitive than even local ISP companies.

Since our founding, we've been able to rid ourselves of the "membership dues", which has helped to attract new members. Our revenue stream is enough to keep us in the black, as well as ready to purchase new, higher capacity equipment should things fail.

What's even more satisfying is we do almost all of the work on free UNIX variants. Between OpenBSD and, of course, Linux, we've managed to bring all this together using free software. We use Sendmail mail servers, BIND name servers (nicely secured, of course), the Apache web server, all of which you'll find in use at the best commercial network providers. It's been "almost all" free software because we inherited some HP 9000 workstations, and the HPPA UN*X ports are nowhere near production ready. As such, they still run HPUX.

Immediately several non-technical issues hit us. Trouble ticketing was one challenge, such as when a server goes down and someone is out of a service. We have yet to really get a system in place, but currently a tight core of members will respond to a problem report and tag it for who's responsible for fixing it. Followup can be a bit tricky, though, so we should probably integrate a real trouble ticket system.

Accounting and financial issues also became a potentially large scale problem. Keeping track of incoming money, and the sources, along with where it is being spent, required that someone learn basic accounting skills. One member, Jodie, took this on and has kept everything working smoothing. We accept PayPal payments or traditional checks; credit cards required too much overhead for our interests.

Management skills have also been developed, rather quickly, by the cooperative members. We're geeks and we were more focused, initially, on our technical areas. We found that personnel management by our "Emperor" and others had to be developed to chart directions, tasks and other associated responsibilities. Through time, these skills have been developed nicely.

Closely related, customer relations skills were learned most definitely in a trial-by-fire setting. When our network provider folded (more below), we scrambled to get the word out about what was happening, and what we were doing about it. Most customers were very understanding, and their requirements were met by our temporary measures. We learned to route everything through one member, who serves, in addition to a vital technical role, as our customer relations contact. We have found that this leads to less confusion about who is taking care of the problem and what is being done about it for the customer.

Time commitments have been difficult to hold, as well. Most of us were students when this began, and our schoolwork takes precedence. As such, when a busy semester, work or disinterest appear, we have to hand off our duties to someone else. These transitions can sometimes be a bit sticky, as, say, hostmaster duties don't get clearly delegated.

Lastly, going into business with your friends is certainly a dangerous area to tread. Between the issues of money and mistakes, feathers can get ruffled and feelings hurt. As with any business venture, keeping personal and professional motivations separate is good sense.