Well, overall I would warn against it, although I get why it sounds appealing. The reasons are multi-fold and I'd happily share more personal details on why v

Well, overall I would warn against it, although I get why it sounds appealing. The reasons are multi-fold and I'd happily share more personal details on why via email, but the main reason why I say no is that you wind up missing a lot of dates and are constantly resetting expectations (this isn't abnormal in Software but it gets far worse). Effectively you compete for the every team members time to get things done as no-one is 100% committed to the co-op. e.g. developer X gets a project from the co-op for 40 hours of work, he commits to do it by Jan 9th, 2015 say, but he also takes another project outside the co-op that has a delivery date of 12/30/2014. He winds up getting hung up on his first project and so you start resetting expectations for the client. But multiply that by 3-4 people doing the same thing, and what you will find is that keeping clients happy is a royal pain in the ass. And it gets worse when rates come in to play, e.g. the private gig now tells the developer he'll pay $1000 on top of his hourly rate to get Z done by 1/5, etc. So now the co-op starts suffering because people are over committing, even though they are well intentioned.