We Are Open Co-op Day

October 2016 edition

Yesterday, Bryan Mathers, Doug Belshaw, John Bevan, and Laura Hilliger met virtually all day to discuss the past, present, and future of our co-operative, We Are Open. We’re in good shape, having picked up a number of clients in the almost six months we’ve been in operation, while working out some hard things along the way about working together co-operatively that we can share with others.

We Are Open works to spread the culture, processes, and benefits of working openly

We’ve joined together in an unusual way: we each already have our own limited companies, and have formed a co-operative in solidarity with one another. The fact that we’re corporate members of the co-op is an important point. It limits our individual liability, and makes it clear to existing and future members of the co-op that we are joining together to be stronger, rather than for exclusivity. Happily, we’re getting closer to a place where we’ll be able to implement the first co-operative principle of voluntary and open membership. More on that below.

We’re fortunate to have an expert facilitator in Laura, who not only put together the agenda for the day, but kept us on task and was flexible enough to move things around on-the-fly. Rather than a blow-by-blow account of what we got up to, what follows is a thematic representation of the highlights.

1) Workflow

Something that every organisation needs to get right is its workflow. You can have the best people and the best tools, but if you don’t put them to good use, you’re wasting time, money, and goodwill. In the afternoon, when we got to making rather than talking, we used Pombot, a Slack bot to keep us synchronised while using the Pomodoro technique.

Simple things can be extremely effective. So, for example, we ensured that there’s a template for the Trello cards that we use to track client work. This can then be duplicated by whoever’s taking the lead for that client, and it becomes the canonical link to use within the team. No matter what happens by email, Slack, or any other method, an update should appear in the relevant card.

We’re pretty hot on the Kanban methodology, although in the long-term we’ll probably use a modified approach like Scrumban. Doug has a couple of badges you can earn if you’re interested in this: Kanban 101 / Advanced Kanban.

2) Membership conditions and benefits

There’s still plenty of work to do on this front, but we made some progress yesterday around how we’ll allow new members into the co-operative. We four paid an amount of money to ‘buy-in’ to the co-op initially, and there is an expectation that the same will be true of new members.

One thing we did discuss was whether the buy-in should instead be an annual membership fee, offset by any financial surplus at the end of each year. that is divided between members at the end of the year. We’ll vote to distribute 51% of any surplus to further the aims of our co-op or to causes we believe in , which may include open-source software we use (like Etherpad). The remaining 49% is available to be paid to members as dividends.

We don’t want the entry criteria to be purely financial, plus we‘re believers in hiring slowly so that we get to know people. We’ve got an action to explore creating at least three badges around openness that we’d require people to earn as a first stage towards co-operative membership. These may be more or less related to Working openly on the web: a manifesto.

The third thing we’d require of someone joining the co-op, as well as earning our badges and paying the buy-in/annual fee, is to have joined us in facilitating at least one Thinkathon. It’s a wonderful, nuanced thing — not quite a workshop, certainly not a meeting, and focused on outcomes. It takes a very special skillset and, given it’s so central to We Are Open, the ability to run one of these is key to membership.

Another point which we haven’t absolutely decided upon, is whether we have a maximum size to any given ‘team’ within the co-op, before splitting it off into another ‘cell’. These could be multi-functional teams, co-ops in their own right specialising in a particular area, or something entirely different.

What we recognised was that one of the hard things about the stage we’re currently at is thinking about processes and practices for co-ops that grow to50 or 100 members. Perhaps, however, we don’t need to do that, but instead split into cells or teams when we get to 6, 8, or 10 members? If these cells were constituted as co-ops in their own right, this would fit well with Principle 6, which is co-operation amongst co-ops.

3) Diversifying our offerings

Right now, we offer one product to clients: the Thinkathon. That’s partly because there’s such a range of things we could offer, that this is a great place to start in order to understand client needs.

What we decided yesterday, is that we’re all interested in new, exciting stuff rather than maintaining infrastructure or systems. So while we’d certainly see value in spinning-up a simple Open Badges prototyper, we’re not particularly looking at creating Software-as-a-Service.

Thinkathons are commissioned by people within organisations who know what we do, the problem (or general ‘area of fuzziness’) they need to grapple with, and set aside time and budget to dive into issues. That’s great, and we want to continue doing that.

But what about those who aren’t at that stage, or who want to work more openly, but don’t know where to start? For these people, it would make sense to offer workshops.

We’ve hastily put up a page on our website showing that we run workshops, but we need to flesh this out, and perhaps give people a time, place, and ticket price to get involved.

4) Business development

It’s gratifying that most of our work so far has come directly through people approaching us and asking to work together. We do want to do some outreach, however, and particularly to organisations who we feel could use our help.

In a similar way to designers who redesign a well-known website on spec and send their work to the relevant organisation, so we discussed lobbing a ‘thought grenade’ at potential clients. A good example of this is something as simple as this image that Bryan sent to Transferwise. They loved it, sponsored his Facebook post so it appeared on other timelines, and got their designers to create a modified version for this page on their website!

We’ll be drawing up a list of potential thought grenade targets soon. If you’re reading this and have a suggestion for us, send it to: thoughtgrenade@weareopen.coop

5) Things we didn’t get to

Some things during the day took longer to discuss or make than we expected. For example, the ins-and-outs of the financial decisions we need to make involve a lot of nuance and there’s not many places we can look to for prior art. That meant we didn’t get to some things that we had planned to discuss:

• Next steps for working more closely with other co-ops such as Educators Co-operative in the US.
• Putting together a proposal for the Co-operative Conference next year (closing date for proposals: 28th October)
• Creating a spreadsheet so we can make a financial model to help us decide about the buy-in fee / annual membership fee issue.

We meet every Monday, but our next Co-op Day will be in November, after we’ve run three sessions at the Mozilla Festival and John has represented us at the Digital Co-ops Retreat. If you’ll be at MozFest, then please do say hello and/or join in our sessions!