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📅 Calendar | 🐱 GitHub | 📂 GDrive
Time: Thu, Apr 25 @ 10-11am ET
Location: https://meet.jit.si/offline
Attending: patcon, dcwalk, ben&ferran, pau
[TOC]
- Intros
- Hypha Worker Co-op
- CoopDevs
- Open Questions (from question bank)
Legend
⭐ Action
... Missed
- Intros
- Ben: started working together with a group of folks on mesh+events in Toronto.
- dc: Research+organizing -- food and data justice, decentralization.
- patcon: developer, community organizing -- civic tech, adjacent to gov't
- pau: comp eng. ... bridging tech & social movements. hitech+coop. in barcelona region. katuma platform for regional supply chains. saas platform, then coop formation? ...
- ferran: ansible [& devops?]. accounting for coops → odoo (Open ERP)? coop telecom (somconnexio.coop).
- ben: recap of offline Barcelona pre-convo:
- CoopDev (CD), based in BCN, structure: 4owner+2workers, 1 year worker becomes member (probation)
- ferran+antonio = workers
- CD part of larger assoc., previously existed,
- legal form of the wider org: "association". has president, money person, secretary and thats it.
- no right to economical activity. You can issue invoices but not much more.
- ppl can come close via the association (less legal structure, more social connection)
- to join professionally, have to join the co-op
- larger assoc meets every tues for meetups? very loose
- totally separate legal entities. informal agreement between assoc members and co-op. but same project and single brand.
- one logo → http://coopdevs.org/
- same communication channels
- revenue
- assoc shouldn't need much money to run. to be associate it's just 10€. But coop feeds or helps it. stickers, events, etc.
- coop has customers and services and some grants in order to pay salaries (non-profit).
- CoopDev (CD), based in BCN, structure: 4owner+2workers, 1 year worker becomes member (probation)
- Most people are full-time or near
- 60% billable work, 40% internal/donated/volunteer work
- "like a donation of cooperative to project"
- non-paid work, non-client work: work on community, communication "re-productive" :)
- "trying to get rid of this work"? Couldn't hear well. [name=patcon]
- timeoverflow example: 20h a month as a donation. One city council is paying for some feature but we out-sourced it from the coop.
- Grant as a means to start and consolidate projects.
- ERP (resource planning) example: goal is that next year should be in market and switch to customer revenue v. grant
- lucky: city gov and catalan govt eager to fund coop and solidarity econ
- research group at Catalunya university are big fans of platform coop and them (pilot proj & EU funding)
- for Katuma digital platform coop
- coopdevs initated it as a kind of little incubator, each member has many projects
- org has accumulated many projects
- above diagram shows members responsible for them
- note: ferran+antonio (less responsibilities) are non-member staff; rest are member-owners
- examples: internal tech, communication (social nw), katuma, timeoverflow...
- coop telecom = 30% income
- but most weight in income: SomConnexió (telecom), OpenFoodNetwork
- tooling
- gitlab.com + their ci (slow transition from github)
- appear in → jitsi
- bitwarden for passwd sharing
- chat in telegram (plan to transition) riot/matrix.org for "pam a pam" project
- difficulty to find the time to know the tools and more to switch.
- discourse forum for the coopdevs community
- time tracking: trello or Toggl are we winning/losing money? How much productive/reproductive work are we doing? Which projects are we investing more. We are using closed source toggl.com . "our" tool Odoo has some feature for time tracking but it's a little clumsy.
- Odoo is an enterprise solution. Focused on CRM, invoicing, accounting, ... and has miriads of modules. Companies try to fit everything inside it.
- making decisions
- initial difference on contracts of workers with owner-workers in the legal and responsibility plane, but info and decision making is shared
- quarterly planning
- play it fairly casual (in response to advice process vs consensus etc)
- project lead (both for internal and customer-facing)
- monthly assemblies (meetings) asking how everyone is feeling.
- assoc. also meets monthly, many members come, check in, planning future activities
- general assembly annually, board elections... etc... to meet legal requirements
- Many dec'ns made over chat (discussion in telegram), or starts in telegram, then get together to reach agreement. Mostly for concrete dec'ns-- for example: sending invoice, accepting client
- Have a co-working space as the physical place, keep general "hours" for specific projects and also being in-person spread across the week
- wish there was more face-time
- also hold calls when needed
- Unknown unknowns, things CoopDevs wish they knew when starting:
- accept the fact that legalities are hard, won't get done correctly -- work with accountants or folks with expertise
- with accounting there are many important things to need to know: quotes, invoicing, balances, understand how those relate to budgeting
- ben: who does accounts?
- enrico did business management, so has that background
- partnered with accounting coop
- need to check in on them, as coop is ultimately accountable
- time tracking + invoices
- toggle →[manually]→ odoo
- katuma: starting with google spreadsheet.
- which access do the accountants have? Shared google things. Access to our Odoo now. But Enrico is who is managing it. Ideally: all inside odoo
- best "hacks" of org structure or process?
- suggesting everyone to install plugin for time-tracking (game-changer)
- pau: number of members - workers?
- 5-10 ppl in coop. Could be sustainable to pay salaries and have an impact.
- ferran: ...smtng processes
- handbook: documenting everything that we do. company shouldn't stop when someone leaves? joining should be easier
- ferran: "roles of each person are not that much decided." "could afford more projects and be more safe with more ppl."
- still feels like he's costing money :)
- onboarding process helps org to see how it works.
- Have a goal of a base rate per hour (35 euro) have to hit that before growing?
- how does education/onboarding work?
- has a very particular env where ppl go through association and project work first, so lots of osmosis
- onboarding does have also values processes?
- ferran knew coopdevs at sobtec conference and social economy
- have you had any conversations around considerations of diversity & inclusion in your work?
- pau: effort to include more women and underrep'd folks in assoc, by doing outreach to "women in tech" groups, but hasn't really panned out so far. (:star: #ask why?)
- coop is very small group.
- ben: what about diversity of skills. e.g. designers?
- mostly tech ppl, just bc how they started
- lots of ppl tired of startup movement and want to do something different