Hey thanks I will certainly add that to my research.

I don't know about their origins but I suspect the reason the supermarkets are still successful is because the conventional co-op model works pretty well for that type of business. It's not a problem-solving firm so there's not a lot of cross-communication between departments and they tend to be small enough that a flat management structure works just fine. Everybody knows the objective is to get products onto the shelves and out the door.

My model is meant to be more general purpose, enabling the firm to solve complex problems that most co-ops don't take on.

Thanks for all the great solutions, I'll be looking into your advice. Like you said it is definitely a massive project for a beginner, I'm going to take it a step at a time, and maybe do a smaller experimental app first to get my bearings. The good thing is I'm not in too much of a rush so I have time to learn.

My current thinking is that the vote is electronic but you get a paper receipt with a bar code or something. Not sure how it will turn out, like many of these apps it's a whole project in itself

I was thinking lemmy because of the voting structure. Since it's internal discussion it could be used by the management to gauge sentiment in the company. It wouldn't be for federation.

You're probably right about it being too complex though, just not sure if there's a lightweight option that's a closer match than discord discourse (does discourse having voting?). Something to consider.

Sorry I know that's a bit unclear. The "staff roles" and "managers" are roles that the CEO is able to assign to staff through the software. In other words, it's the mechanism the CEO uses to construct their hierarchy. Same with performance metrics, those are written expectations that would be entered into the system for each person's role.

Just to provide an update, someone in programming.dev suggested docker containers so I am researching that now. Thanks