Summary before June 22 Gathering

Last gathering a circle was formed to generate a road map to get a proposal for hiring a cotech coordinator together.

We created the road map, and started following it, but stalled out when it came to running workshops pre-gathering. People in general seem very busy. This session is the first chance we've had to get in depth feedback on the proposal.

The proposal is that Cotech should hire someone to make it exist more. Because that's quite complicated it's broken down into three proposals:

1) Legally incorporate Cotech so that it can contract with a person to pay them to do things

2) Get the money to pay them

3) Create the process that determines what the person does

We want to do this in a way that is simple, uses existing processes as far as possible, and can be expanded or contracted if needs be.

Current state of proposals:

1) Incorporate as either private company limited by guarantee or cooperative society. Both options have model rules from Coops UK that we could use. Biggest difference is regulation by companies house or FCA. Each coop that pays into fund becomes a director of the incorporated body, other coops are associate members.

2) Use the existing fund process and principle that larger coops pay more. Change fund calculation from membership size to revenue size as better tracks ability to pay. Discussion on how this incentivises certain kinds of business model and disincentivise others. There are ways to mitigate this but any serious contribution system is going to have second order effects.

3) The priorities and goals of the coordinator are arrived at through sociocratic discussion with the general circle. There's a long list of potential goals on the wiki with lots of initiatives and approaches that could be chosen. The specific goals are expected to evolve over time. In general the goal is to grow the organisation while keeping its component parts healthy.

At this stage, I'd like initial reactions and concerns to the summaries, because I don't want to get into detail if there's concerns about the top level plan.

So firstly, can you imagine a version of each of these proposals you can consent to?