2am in the Bar at Wortley Hall
On Wednesday we had a small, intimate CoTech Community Call. With five co-ops representing (in the first call we had at least double, with multiple attendees from some co-ops), our hour long community call was a much more in-depth discussion about the CoTech network itself. We did have an agenda, of course, but because the call was so small, we meandered into more specific issues of the network.
Wortley Hall 2018
First, we had a long look at the surveys people filled out after the annual CoTech meet up at Wortley Hall. We were pleased that people were generally happy, but we knew there is always room for improvement. One of the biggest failings of the annual meet up had to do with organizing and payment. We talked about in the future, there needs to be an organizing committee that feels empowered to make decisions. This is important because the venue needs to communicate with a single person and there needs to be accountability for the event as a whole.
Trying to consult everyone in CoTech about each and every decision is crazy hard. We talked about setting a budget for Wortley Hall up-front and suggested figuring out a more formal process around payments to avoid late invoicing. It would seem that some co-ops had to cover the expenses for other co-ops on good faith. Which is nice, but shouldn’t be necessary. Instead, people should commit both to the event and to prompt payment for their accommodation. We discussed the possibility of getting CoBudget working — it was developed to turn Enspiral from a talkocracy into a do-ocracy — perhaps that might help CoTech move forward on the annual meeting planning.
Do you have ideas for Wortley Hall 2018? Get involved! Here’s a thread, voice your interest! Let’s hope a self organizing committee is underway soon.
Subsidizing CoTech Network Work
Next we talked a little about the first edition of the CoTech newsletter. I was pleased to see it when it came out, but disheartened to hear that the task was difficult and not very many people acknowledged it. So on behalf of me, THANK YOU to the folks who developed the newsletter.
This led into a discussion around the fact that some co-ops are subsidizing CoTech Network work. For example, all the work Go Free Range does for CoTech is paid for by Go Free Range. While Free Rangers work on CoTech they’re not doing paid client work, but they still receive their salary. I’m not sure how prevalent the practice is amongst CoTech members.
We Are Open Co-op uses Loomio to propose co-op paid activities. We set up a process for this, and it has worked well to encourage co-op related work. We feel that working for free is bad practice. We see it too often inside alternative economies (open source, activist AND co-op communities) and are eager to ensure that people who contribute are also rewarded in tangible ways.
This doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t ever work pro-bono, it’s just that in some communities pro-bono is more of the rule than the exception. My co-op also asked me to invoice a few hours a month to keep an eye on what CoTech is up to. This shows me that CoTech is important to us, but also that I’m important to my co-op co-founders. Laura happy. Also, you happy because I’m telling YOU what the network is up to, at least the bit of it that I have any insight into.
This led me to some quandaries. Is it the responsibility of all member co-ops to ensure that they support one of their members to participate in CoTech? Perhaps this is yet another place where something like CoBudget would help our network?
Anyway, doing stuff for the CoTech network itself often feels a bit thankless. Smaller co-ops won’t be able to put in as much time and effort because they’ll generally subsidize less. We had talked about getting someone to help coordinate the network. Perhaps it’s time to revisit that conversation? Perhaps this job could be something someone within the network does on a part time basis (even just a day a week) until the job itself is more clear? Someone who is paid to help disseminate the firehose of information or ensure proper use of CoTech channels might help the network more than we think.
At the end of the call, we talked about a couple of upcoming co-op events. We had some interesting experiences to share about Open: 2017, and thought a one-day CoTech event specifically for CoTech members would be fun.
In the end, the people who participated in the community call agreed that it would be more fun to hang out together and chat at 2am in the bar at Wortley Hall than to try and coordinate a CoTech appearance at some other conference.
The next Co-Tech Community Call is on March 28th.