Deciding stuff

Part of a transparent, functional cooperative is about how we as a group make decisions. We are one member, one vote, but we don't have an official vote on every little thing! Instead, we have three levels of decision making:

It’s cool we trust each other

We Are Open Co-operative runs on distributed leadership. We encourage our members to act on behalf of the co-op when making:

• Judgement calls in getting back to clients. Sometimes it's not possible to herd all the cats before a client or potential client is expecting an answer. We trust our members to communicate on behalf of the cooperative and fill in the rest of us later.
• Judgement calls on infrastructure decisions (e.g. I need to renew this URL or I used this tool for a client and now need to pay for it). We meet weekly, so this doesn't happen very often, but every once in a while, we get a notice that we need to renew or cancel something right now. Members try to make the cooperative aware of these kinds of things in our chat channels, but even without full consensus (because one of us was missing the Day the Data server died), we trust that everyone is trying to make good decisions for the collective

One other member

None of us are perfect, and sometimes it makes sense to gut-check things with at least one other member:

• Proposals. When we submit proposals for work, we ask another member to have a quick look. We always catch each others typos. It also helps to have someone double check our maths, though how a project is priced is based on client context, not on useless formulas.
• Publishing in the name of the co-op. Again, double checking each others blog posts is more about helping each other eliminate typos than trying to have a unified, marketing voice. We are a collection of voices, everyone is encouraged to use their authentic voice.
• Project-based decisions. We will likely come up with more ways to think about project based decisions, but our general rule of thumb is that each project has a leader, and that leader is a benevolent dictator. The only place we ask for consultation is when agreeing a lower day rate (but not below our lowest day rate). Whomever is involved in the project should have a vote on that one.

Consensus based

Now we're onto the serious stuff that requires full member buy-in:

• Contract day rates
• Legal contracts
• NDAs
• How we spend money generally
• Spending money on co-op projects
• Co-ops work tools
• Adding a new member