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Zatsit (company)

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Open company governance

Zatsitarrow-up-right is a mid-sized French software development company, consisting of a team of developers, tech leads and software architects. Zatsit found CONSUL DEMOCRACY when Ludovic Dussart, the company's Co-CTO, in 2024 carried out a comparative research on open source platforms for participatory decision-making.

The goal of zatsit is to deploy a open governance strategy. This means in practice creating a channel for and encouraging all zatsit's employees to make proposals for improving and helping to grow the company. Ludovic and the rest of the company leadership are convinced that actions speak louder than words and the deployment of the CONSUL participation platform was a way to show to employees that zatsit is serious about open governance.

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Participation needs

The CONSUL platform matches several of zatsit's needs.

  • Debates: Required for launching launch a discussion between collegues that can lead to a real proposition of value for the company (or not).

  • Proposals: Provide a way for zatsit's employees to make concrete proposals that could contribute to the growth the company.

  • Votes: Allows zatsit's employes to make certain decisions.

  • SDG: Zatsit is a tech company whose impact (tech impact, social impact, etc) is central to the company's decision-making. Displaying and using Sustainable Development Goals for proposals or votes, therefore, fits very well with the company's mission. The people at zatsit are often seconded to work at the offices of clients which made deploying a platform that was remotely accessible anytime a requirement.

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Significant process

So far zatsit has carried out three voting processes using the platform, and 20 accounts are registered as participants with full permissions.

The most significant process was the vote that was opened to decide if the employees would or would not accept zatsit to work with a fossil fuel company, a controversial questions as environmental impact is an important factor to zatsit.

The dilemma presented itself when, last year, one of the people at zatsit didn't have a client for three months, which financially impacted the company. There was one potential client that matched the skills of the empoyee, but the problem was that this was a fossil fuel company.

The company leadership opened a vote on the platform to propose to work with this fossil fuel company, but only as a solution for the respective employee, and only temporarily. The questions were:

  • Do you accept that zatsit works together with [fossil fuel company] in order to find a client and provide work for [employee X]?

  • Do you accept zatsit to keep [fossil fuel company] as a client?

Votes were cast and the result was that an overwhelming majority (90%) voted YES on the first question, and a moderate majority voted NO (50%) voted NO on the second question.

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Technical adjustments

The main challenge of deploying the CONSUL DEMOCRACY platform were rooted in the particular case of use by a commercial company, which is different from its main target group, public institutions.

A technical challenge (considering zatsit are not Ruby developers) was to understand the complex Ansible stack and, specifically why Ansible is not capable of both deployment ánd updating the platform. Switching from Ansible for deployment to Capistrano for updates felt unnatural.

Zatsit has enhanced the Ansible stack to feed or deployment needs (deployment of GCP compute engine). Also, the team has changed the style of their platform adjusting it to the graphical design styles of zatsit (main colors, zatsit fonts, etc).

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