Cobudget

Related Links

• Notes from the Cobudgeting workshop at Wortley Hall in 2016
• Cobudget working group on Slack
• Brian's notes from the Cobudget conference call with Enspiral

• The CoTech Group in Cobudget
• Brian's email to the CoTech group introducing the trial
• The Cobudget bucket to fund a bar tab at the CoTech social during Open 2017

The Current Cobudget "process"

The CoTech Cobudget

We have created a *Cooperative Technologists* CoBudget group, here: cobudget.co/#/groups/603 (log in required)

A note on terminology:

The CoBudget platform has *groups* (Cooperative Technologists), which in turn have *funders* (Outlandish, Go Free Range, etc).

A funder has *funds *(£, even though the icon in the app is $), which they can allocate to *buckets *(project pitches).

A bucket is first created for "discussion and design", before being opened up for funding.

Getting you set up on CoBudget

• We are creating *one CoBudget account per coop*, so email brian@outlandish.com or chris.roos@gofreerange.com an appropriate email address (e.g.team+cobudget@yourcoop.com) so we can add you.
• Log in and change your profile name to the name of your coop.
• Everybody will start with £0 funds.

Proposing a bucket

• Go for it!
• The only requirement at this stage: specify the project owner, which must be a participating coop, and they will be responsible for collecting the funds and managing / paying for the project.
• The project owner is advised to wait for all the funds to hit their bank account before kicking off the project, but ultimately it's up to them - it's their risk.

Funding a bucket

• Because this is a trial run, you won't have any funds. So...
• Post a comment in the bucket's discussion stating how much your coop would like contribute
• Chris or I will add that amount to your funding pot
• You can then allocate your funds to the bucket

When the bucket is fully-funded

• The project owner will be responsible for collecting the actual money from each coop
• They will also be responsible for managing and paying for the project

Afterwards

• If there's money left over, we can have an interesting chat about what to do in this scenario
• We need to gather feedback and lessons-learned, and decide on how to make the process more efficient and sustainable
• We expect a more formal Loomio proposal at some stage

Any questions about any of this, probably easiest to jump on Slack: https://tech-coops.slack.com/archives/cobudgeting-wg and ask there.

How to Sync up Internal Cobudget accounts with the CoTech Cobudget account

The way Outlandish are planning on making this work is:

1. We have one account in the CoTech Cobudget: e.g. cobudget-team@outlandish.com
2. Notifications (i.e. new buckets) will be sent to that email, which forwards on to everybody
3. If anybody sees a bucket come in to their inbox that they wish to sponsor, they can go into our own Outlandish CoBudget group and replicate the bucket (link to it). They will set the budget the amount that they think Outlandish should fund. I.e. if a CoTech member creates a £3000 pitch, and I want Outlandish to fund £500 of, I would create a £500 pitch in the Outlandish CoBudget
4. Outlandish members can then fund the Outlandish bucket as they see fit. When it’s funded…
5. I can go into the CoTech CoBudget and fund the bucket that amount.

Obviously steps 3 through 5 could be collapsed into “we will have a quick chat and decide how much to fund and just do it”. But Outlandish is just at the size when this is impractical for us, hence the slightly over-engineered solution above. We’ll let you know how it goes; and I’m keen to hear other people’s solutions as well