Russ Garrett, Co-Founder of London Hackspace, proposed the motion for vote and it passed unanimously at 20:16 BST. Therefore this was the moment when the world’s first virtualised non-profit corporation came into existence. The vote is captured in the photo below.

London Hackspace is a Company Limited by Guarantee, the UK form of a non-profit corporation. The One Click Orgs virtualisation completely removes Board Meetings from the organisation’s formal procedures. Instead a board member can put forward a proposal for vote at any time on the One Click Orgs platform and proposals that pass will be legally binding on the corporation. The platform also provides facilities to record minutes from offline discussions and register Directors’ conflicts of interest declarations.

This is just the first step in a larger process to virtualise all governance processes for the corporation. The next step will remove the requirement to hold an Annual General Meeting and enable members to elect Directors through an electronic vote on One Click Orgs.

Thanks to Francis Davey who did a lot of work drafting the virtualisation elements for the revised Articles and Chris Mear for his herculean effort preparing the platform. Many thanks also to UnLtd for supporting the project and to London Hackspace for being such an excellent partner to work with.

Over the last few months we’ve been talking to Russ and Jonty, founders of the Hackspace, to understand how they wanted the organisation’s governance to develop and plan the best approach to virtualising its legal structure. Unlike One Click Orgs’ existing platform for Associations where the legal structure is created from scratch, we’ll need to reverse engineer the Hackspace’s existing articles to replace references to meetings and paper notices with links to the electronic platform. This requires some delicate choreography.

The first step will involve passing a resolution that replaces the “Proceedings of the Board” section of the articles with new clauses permitting Directors to make proposals and vote on them anytime with the decisions logged electronically. Then we’ll make a model change to the platform to separate Members’ powers from Directors’. Next the sections dealing with “General Meetings”, “Proceedings at General Meetings”, “Members’ Powers” and “Votes of Members” will be replaced, virtualising the appointment of new members, the election of board members and removing the requirement to hold an annual general meeting. Finally the filing of annual returns to Companies House will be automated. As ever, the code and legal provisions created in the course of the project will all be released under open licences so anyone is free to reuse and adapt them.

This is an important project for a number of reasons:

• It will create a legal template that can be localised to different jurisdictions around the world which will make it a lot easier for people to set up hackerspaces.
• It will reduce the bureacratic overhead of running a hackerspace which for many people has to fit alongside a day job.
• It will open up new possibilities to involve the members of a hackerspace in how it is run.
• As well as hackerspaces the resulting platform will be relevant to a wide range of other non-profits.
• It will provide a natural “next step” for projects which have set up on the One Click Orgs platform for Associations (currently in closed Beta)
• The project will thoroughly test the UK’s 2006 Companies Act which includes a lot of innovations favourable to virtual corporations. In the process it will clarify what further legislative amendments are required for fully virtual corporations so we can campaign for those revisions to be made.

We’re organising a special hacknight at the Trampery this Thursday from 7pm to 10pm to get started on the project so come along and code with us if you’re in the neighbourhood.

Chris and I made a short presentation at last week’s London Hackspace Meetup, which we filmed. Here’s the first part in which I introduce the project. The second and third parts showing Chris’ demo and code walkthrough will follow.

WordCamp UK (UK)

Open Font Library (International)

Open Kollab (USA / International)

Southend in Transition (UK)

Crafting Gentleness (N Ireland / International)

We’ll be setting up platforms for each group over the coming week. In proper OCO style the final decision was made via a vote on our governance system. We’re looking forward to working with each of the groups and learning how we can best support their goals. We’ll be announcing the next batch of beta participants in the near future.

Meanwhile our presence at the BIL Conference was a great success. I was the second keynote in the main auditorium talking about the relationship between technology and organisational structure, the principles of emergent democracy and the One Click Organisations project. Then Emma had a main-auditorium session on the Sunday afternoon discussing the democratic open source development approach we’ve pioneered with OCO. Both sessions were well received and we met a lot of people who are interested in the project and/or have groups wanting to use it. The conference as a whole was overflowing ideas and projects. I’ll link to videos of our sessions as soon as they’re published.