Circle Call 2025-08-27

General Information

Wednesday 27th August 2025 @4pm Discourse thread for the meeting

Video Call Link

https://de.meet.coop/chr-mfa-bze-hdu

Agenda

• Appoint facilitator and note taker
• Check forum thread and add all the discussion points
• Check parked agenda points and review actions from previous meeting (July Circle Call)
• Ethical Consumer Conference - November 7th 2025 - dropped the price to £395+VAT which includes two tickets

Minutes

Discussion points: 1. Update on Coops UK thing [Natasha]

• Date given, but then emailed to say Rose is holiday until w/b 1 Sept

• Discovery call scheduled for 17 Sept

• Annoying but… fine!

• Reminder that they have to spend it soon... but they're a bit stretched right now

2. Ethical consumer conference  [Natasha]

• Emailed by ethical consumer folks, want us to have a stall at Nov 7th

• £395 + VAT (includes 2 tickets to the conference)

• Attendees: mixture of ethical companies, policy types

• Ben: could we have more stalls? With one as a freebie?

• Rich: very consumer based focus, but doesn't mean there's not a space there for us to sell and be visible.

• Ben: could we use cotech fund for attending ethical consumer conference

• Topic for debate at our Oxford meetup

• Could Agile, Creative and Agile go, and be the face as CoTech.

• Just need some guidelines (e.g. not push our business cards!)

• We can promote to other CoTech members the value of meeting others from CoTech

• Decision: We'll go as the three of us, split the stall cost three ways, and ask host for a cheeky extra ticket

• Discuss this situation as a possible case study for the future. i.e.

• a case study that: we had the monthly meeting, we all decided to commit to the conference, and we financially supported it

• Question about how accessible this call and the minutes are.

3. CoTech event and attendance [Mikaela]

• Looking for advise on going forward

• Richard: if we only had Agile, Creative and Outlandish, it'd would be useful but not CoTech.

• Richard: Go ahead anyway and do a push, with benefits / what they'll get out of coming

• Natasha: I can help give some names to directly contact.

• Mikaela: have a venue but we dont' want to mess with the Quakers.

• Ben: cap out the catering, in case there's a last minute rush.

• Only had 2 RSVPs so far.

• Going to do an email reach out to members list on the wiki

• Add deadlines for signing up / ask: "do you think someone from your coop would come, how many people?"

• Potentially: 2 tracks on business and open session. Will flesh out events on the call out email

• Ben: Creative can create some social assets for sharing, and schedule into plan.

• How external do we want this event to be?

• Mikaela: not that outward? Members of CoTech are primary

• Ticketing:

• Perhaps this could be mandatory? I.e. you are expected to come and are billed, unless you opt out

Actions

- Natasha to email ethical consumer conference about getting a stall and having one more ticket

- Outlandish to bill Creative and Agile for the conference if it all goes through

Parked Agenda Points

- How can people get accounts for the wiki?