Network Coordinator Proposal

Title: Hire a paid Cotech Organiser for 1 year

Proposers: Alex WA (Common Knowledge), John E (Code-Operative)

Context:

As of 2021, Cotech is not the Megazord (integrated coop of coops sharing services and processes). There is no one who spends their time doing the work to make Cotech the Megazord. We're all too busy with our own coops to contribute the time. We should hire an organiser, and they should work on Cotech full-time.

If it is too difficult or risky to resource this from contributions from individual cooperatives, we suggest funding it independently. There are grants available in the networks that we're part of to pay for a full-time organiser.

Actions if passed:

1. Cotech commits money for an organiser, whether internally funded or from a grant. 2. Cotech hires an organiser. 3. Cotech does a bimonthly review of how it's going.

Open questions:

How much money is it? £35,000, paid in monthly installments from the cotech fund.

What is this person's job description? Encouraging leaders to emerge from the network to improve it themselves. Like a community organiser role, the point is to support people to do things, not to do things for them. So rather than organising the semiannual gathering, the Organiser finds someone who wants to do it, and provides them with connections with people who have done it already and is there if they have any questions about what to do.

What does the hiring process look like? Cotech General Circle creates a Coordination Circle who draft a job description and bring back to General Circle for approval. Post the job description on democraticjobs etc, and make a page on the cotech site that we can all link to. Give people from inside and outside cotech a while to apply. Coordination Circle shortlists then interviews based on pre-determined criteria.

Who decides whether they're doing a good job? Cotech Coordination Circle works with the organiser and the rest of Cotech to create 3 priorities that they will focus on for the year, and meets bimonthly to review how these priorities are going, whether they need to be adjusted, what has been learned so far in the process. Normal agile process, getting the most value out of our resources over time.

Example priorities:

   - Increase revenue for member coops (perhaps some kind of complicated formula etc)

e.g. marketing plan, fielding leads, generating projects, link up coops for bigger projects, identifying bids

   - Greater amount of community events
   - More visibility for Cotech in wider coop ecosystem

Others:

   - Increase collaboration between coops
   - Save coops money by buying things together
   - Increase skill sharing
   - Identifying if any coops are in crisis and providing support, regular check-ins

Issues/Suggested Amendments:

   Can we afford it?

- If every coop chucks in X what does this look like? 35,000 / 45 (all cotech coops) is £778. 35,000 / 16 (current fund contributors) is £2188. - If the fund is adjusted to be something like x% of revenue, what does that look like? At the moment the fund is calculated based on membership numbers, which incentivises people to fully utilise their members (and assumes that members broadly contribute the same amount to each coop). What incentives and assumptions come from a fund calculated on revenue? - Take on external funding to de-risk - if it works, it pays for itself. If it fails, no risk - possible people are Omidyar Network, Coops UK, the Co-operative group, maybe JRRT new democracy fund and so on.

   Would we be creating too much central power?

- Not for the coops, but the person of the organiser will have a fair bit of power, for no other reason than they will just be spending more time on it than anyone in the network - checks and balances needed here

   Are we organised enough yet to take this on?

- Probably not, but the organising needed to do this will build up a lot of capacity to do real things

   Will priorities of larger coops be higher on the list for the organiser?

- Almost certainly, but this can be guarded against by either explicit rules or implicit pressure.

Resources: Link explaining Megazord https://outlandish.com/blog/co-op-of-software-co-ops-arise-er-megazord/ Thread from Nov-2017 to April 2018 on the topic https://community.coops.tech/t/cotech-network-coordinator/461/23 Wiki page with job description https://wiki.coops.tech/wiki/Wortley_Hall_2017/CoTech_Network_Coordinator_Job_Description