As usual, We Are Open had our monthly co-op day (or co-op morning, to be more precise). As we head into 2022 we’re continuing to change and evolve as an organisation.
This month we talked about everything from whether text should go inside or outside a digital badge through to structural changes we’d need to make to the co-op should we go after funding for some of our ideas. That’s how it goes when you co-own a business with your friends…
In recent co-op days we’ve run a ‘Strategic Starfish’ activity, something which will appear on the tools and approaches part of our Learn with WAO site. This time around, we just looked at the output from November, considered what’s changed, and reminded ourselves of some stuff we wanted to start doing (and some things we want to stop doing!)
As we’ve got into the habit of scheduling co-working sessions for our ongoing projects, our co-op days are increasingly operational in focus. This time around we had three things we wanted to get sorted:
- Ensuring better use of our internal Trello boards
- Finalising the badges to be issued to our intern
- Running a proposal about whether to pursue grant-funding
1. Ensuring better use of our internal Trello boards
While we’ve tried a number of different ways of organising both or internal and client-facing projects, we keep coming back to Trello. There are definite advantages to using a dedicated tracking system such as GitLab for products, but for anything more lightweight, Trello is super-flexible.
Ironically, we end up being more disciplined with our client-facing Trello boards — especially those that are open and publicly-accessible — than our internal ones. This co-op day was therefore a good time to ensure we practise what we preach.
Just as mesmerising murmurations of starlings result from three simple rules, so effective use of Trello results from following three simple guidelines:
- Add contextual information to a separate list
- Cards progress across the board from left to right
- Cards in the ‘Doing’ list should have an assignee and due date
There are other, bonus things to do like @-mentioning people, using checklists, and adding tags, but in our experience the above three guidelines get to the heart of working more productively.
2. Finalising the badges to be issued to our intern
WAO’s first-ever intern, Anne, has been due some badges for a few months now. We mentioned these in a previous blog post, with the blocker being the final badge design.
The shape of the badges reflect the triangular ‘A’ and the ‘O’ in the WAO wordmark, and the colours align with our brand guidelines. The icons are openly licensed from the Noun Project.
This co-op day was an opportunity to finalise these, with the main points of debate being whether the text goes inside or outside the badge, and whether or not the WAO logo adds anything to the badge design.
3. Running a proposal about whether to pursue grant-funding
WAO members very much enjoyed running several Catalyst-funded projects in 2020 and 2021 and so towards the end of last year we considered specifically setting ourselves up to work with funders.
To that end, we explored some possibilities with Joe Roberson, who helped us think through the benefits and drawbacks, and introduced us to four funders potentially open to working with us.
All four funders responded to our enquiries, with two saying we’d be technically eligible and other two saying we’d not only be eligible but they’d welcome our application(s).
Although we enjoyed working with Joe, the proposal we ran during today’s co-op day made us realise that our Catalyst work was at arms-length from the actual funder (The National Lottery). We’d have to change fundamentally as an organisation and take our eye off client work. That’s not what we want to do right now. We decided that we would revisit the idea of grant funding when we have an idea that we can’t build without foundational support.
The last thing we did in the 3.5 hours that constituted this month’s co-op day was recording some content for our first podcast episode of Season 3. We’ve got a number of interesting guests lined up, but we thought it was appropriate to kick things off for the Tao of WAO in 2022 with an episode featuring our members (and intern!)
Once Laura and I have top-and-tailed it, the episode will cover our predictions and things we’re looking forward to this year, as well as a discussion about going ‘dormant’ as a co-op member. We’ve got one member just coming back from dormancy (John) and one about to enter a period of dormancy (Bryan) so we thought we’d take the time to explain what it is, how it works, and why it’s beneficial.
2022 is looking like a busy year already, so our regularly-scheduled co-op days are a great way to ensure that we continue to be “self-organising ducks” and continue to succeed on all fronts.
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