Developing a friendly relationship with the people you work with isn’t unusual. Founding a cooperative with your friends to work with them, on the other hand, is rather unusual. But that is exactly what happened when the tech cooperative DenktMit (German for “good thinking” or “thinking along with your projects”) was founded four years ago.
Today, DenktMit is home to more than 20 companions from Germany and Austria, all of them IT experts with heart and soul. The cooperative, located in the Hessian town of Oberursel near Frankfurt, acts as a link between companies in need of new and tailor-made software and self-employed developers. DenktMit consults clients and can—if commissioned—assemble handpicked teams with years of experience. These are teams whose members are often friends, have worked together before, and know one another’s individual strengths as well as where they can still learn from each other.
A major part of DenktMit’s identity is the belief that its members are not only comrades and companions internally, but also for their clients, whose lives they aim to impact in two ways: not just through new software, but also by teaching them how to use and maintain it. Through this empowerment, DenktMit helps prevent customers from falling into vendor lock-in situations, in which they would not retain full sovereignty over their software. Preserving this digital sovereignty is one reason why the cooperative favours open-source solutions. DenktMit does not want to keep its clients on a short leash; instead, it stands for long-lasting partnerships built on mutual respect.
Besides its business partnerships, DenktMit also maintains several local partnerships on a voluntary basis in order to give something back to the vibrant community of Oberursel, of which it is proud to be a part. For example, the cooperative hosts free programming workshops for children at the local library. The aim is to guide them through their first encounters with the digital world and programming. Ultimately, DenktMit hopes to foster in them the same lifelong curiosity and hunger for knowledge that its own members have maintained throughout their professional lives.
From the small-town library to federal German institutions and Europe-wide “big players,” DenktMit has proven itself to be a trusted companion for all of them—and, in doing so, a companion on Europe’s path toward digitalisation, digital sovereignty and digital literacy.
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