Imagine MegaZord in 3 years time 2016

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This is one of the pages on this wiki which came out of the Wortley Hall 2016
Co-operative Technologists First Annual Gathering at Wortley Hall, 14th - 17th November 2016.

Text copied from two Hackpads:

Imagine the Megazord in 3 Years Time

Session One

Joaquim

  • who - coops, freelancers, 20+ tech coops
  • difference - improve life of tech coop workers, support other coops, fund socially good projects
  • concrete collabs - cobudgeting, work
  • challengs - hierarchy, difficult to achieve! many different coop structures, which is right one?

Matt K

  • lots of coops working together
  • projects for public good
  • coops work and put their surplus into common pot, to be cobudgeted?
  • impacts, actions, change - captured in the name and brand of the megazord
  • funnel new people into cooperativism
  • workshops and training for workers
  • sharing clients, people, resources, helping coops to do this
  • tools and software built for the megazord by the megazord

Richard

  • new name!
  • megazord sits atop other organisation in the industry, a sign of quality and consistency
  • encourages and helps organisations to become a coop
  • some capacity for coalition to recommend member organsations depending on request of a client that comes direct to megazord
  • sharing work
  • proportion of surplus is spent privately by member organisations and some is given to common pot
  • universal cobudgeting for all members of megazord
  • mmegazord has own management?

Kayleigh

  • tech work comes in to megazord as standard
  • more social value projects delivered
  • viable business model
  • inclusive of those who want to be involved
  • social movement, positive social change, get shit done
  • improve working conditions, better pay
  • co-ownership, concrete collabs between coops
  • challenges: too much talking, outlandish spends lots of money on it, struggle for power?
  • members: worker tech coops and freelancers who are interested

Constance

  • members: social and solidarity network, YCN, YECN
  • pulls resources together to imrpvoe working lifes and allows cooperation to flourish
  • to tackle issues we are facing on the planet, e.g. environmental
  • educate and train on collaboration and cooperate on projects that have social/environmental impact
  • foster solidarity in working lives and practices
  • we share a campaign/passion for cooperation, communication, branding of cooperativism
  • money should go to education, campaigning that can't get funding otherwise
  • we share regular time together to collaborate and educate
  • how to become a cooperator and fight systemic competition between us

Amil

  • who: interested workers, tech coops of all sizes, other coops in other industries, business that share ethos and desire to collaborate
  • channels of communication in place so we can share skills, knowledge, make all this accessible
  • feeling: solidarity, community, being a part of something that exists to help and support you, feel strong and able to achieve great things
  • why: create value where we can, creative influence for social good
  • challenges: pay, flat rates?, projects we want to work on, distributing work between smaller coops,
  • challenges .. giving bigger coops chance to work on smaller things, convincing clients to give us work and sell them our ethos

Session Two

Pete/Felix/Mateus/Harry/Brian/James/Chris/David

Where we want to be in a year (or a month, or three years)

Collaborating on projects

  1. Principle 6: where possible we should hire each other
  2. Things to work out
    1. Pricing and contracting
      1. Align our hourly rates and how we charge our clients; keep it simple
      2. Align the way we pay workers, so each individual on any one project gets paid in the same way.
    2. Expectations on how we share revenue
    3. Expectations on how we share risk
      1. If the project's going wrong, we're all in it together
      2. How do we decide how to optionally reduce our margins on a project
    4. Generally helping us work together: the importance of spending time together
      1. on projects, but outside of projects as well.
      2. Maybe chapters, geographical- or service-based
      3. How many meetings

Collaborating on pitching for work

  1. Things that will help
    1. List all our clients, and all our project types
    2. Profile's (shared wiki) on each coop's service offerings / getting to know each other.
  2. Things to work out
    1. Who fronts pitches (we can avoid MegaZord pitching for now)
    2. how can we help orgs pitch for projects they would never pitch for on their own
    3. Ideally, no two coops should ever pitch for the same work: but how would we know? Does it really matter

Collaborating on post-project work

  1. Things to work out
    1. How do we do support - who takes support contract?
    2. Think about what happens when the relationship with client changes: it becomes more about hosting, or there's a non-design led second phase, etc. Does it need to shift account management? How do we keep it flexible? But how does the initial design agency get first dibs on a future design

Changing the culture / psychology towards our fellow coop "competitors"

  1. There will be occasions where we "lose" work to another coop which, strictly speaking, we "deserved". We can work to reduce it, but we can't eliminate it. We all need to start prepping ourselves for that, convincing ourselves of the false economy of worrying about it; different cells of the same organism.
  2. CoBudgeting helps with this

CoBudgeting across the MegaZord

  1. Option 1: autonomous spending of surplus, but with visibility across the MegaZord
    1. Ease up the "downsides" of sharing work by getting visibility of our own spending
    2. Surplus goes into CoBudget under a Coop account or individuals' accounts
    3. We can then collaboratively fund projects and see how other people/orgs are spending their money
    4. Wave, for example, are usually funding their projects, because they're always working for good orgs. --> this should be seen as cash, coming out of CoBudget
  2. Option 2: Put some money into a MegaZord fund that we spend collaboratively.
    1. Harder. Requires people to "give their money away". Next phase?!

Branding

  1. We should be collaboratively investing in a branding exercise for the MegaZord, maybe cooperativism in general

KPIs

  • Number of people working for tech coops
  • Number of tech coops in the zord
  • Revenue/profitability
  • Number of co-productions, revenue from it
  • Money saved from shared services
  • Range of skills
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