A reflection on 2021
We Are Open Co-op has had a big year! It’s time for a bit of reflection, and we thought we would write a quick post that sums up all the things we did this year.
Quarter 1
As we came into 2021, we kicked off the year with a Co-op Day. 2020 was certainly A Year, so we needed to regroup and reflect on what we wanted to co-op to be. We reviewed processes and policies and set our sights on what we wanted to achieve in 2021. We wanted to do different kinds of projects. We wanted to inspire our long term clients and contacts.
We bid for the Catalyst Definition project in January. We were successful, and Catalyst asked us to run a programme for a cohort of 10 charities. Meanwhile, Doug Belshaw was running another Catalyst programme in parallel. Throughout the spring we helped our charities learn new skills. We helped them make plans for their communities and define the charity tech projects. We assisted their digital transformation initiatives.
In March, we began production for an internal Greenpeace International project that shall not be named 😉 In April, we wrapped up the Definition Project and continued to make resources and assets for our secret learning project at Greenpeace.
Q2
In May, we did some workshopping with the crypto platform NEAR, which was the first time we accepted cryptocurrency as part of our fee. In May, We Are Open Cooperative also turned 5 years old. We celebrated this momentous occasion by launching our new website and adding more stuff to our free learning resource hub. As icing on the cake, two members created a new podcast “about the intersection of technology, society, and internet culture — with a dash of philosophy and art for good measure” called the Tao of WAO.
We also created a proposal to develop an internship programme for WAO. We wanted to provide new people with intimate understanding about the kinds of skills and mindsets members and collaborators have. We wanted to create a programme in which we could learn from our interns, as they would learn from us.
Catalyst selected us for another Catalyst programme, the Continuation Programme. This was an extra bit of funding for charities to have more one to one support. The co-op set up consultation sessions and office hours for charities. To give back to a wonderful funding partner, we participated in the Catalyst Network Engagement Working Group.
June is also the month we started working on a new project with longtime collaborators, Participate. We went to Participate with some ideas on revamping an email course we used to run on the basics called Badge Bootcamp. After one meeting, we realised that it’s a good time to do more. We started looking at the intersection between Communities of Practice and Open Badges.
Q3
In July our ideas with Participate started to balloon. We published a post on Badges for Digital Transformation and documented the Benefits of Open Recognition Pathways.
Also in July, we had time to work on some internal stuff and process things that have been happening in the world. We had a bit of an existential chat and published a post and a wiki page to explain the Spirit of WAO.
And then came August, another momentous month as WAO welcomed its first intern. Anne started on the first, a start date that allowed her to have a good full month of onboarding as August tends to be quite slow. In August, our Catalyst Continuation project came to an end. We had time to help Anne get to know her new workplace and colleagues.
There was movement in the open badges community, as a proposal to align Open Badges with the W3C standard for Verifiable Credentials was made. Developments in this conversation impact some of our clients, so we paid close attention to the discussion.
Towards the end of August, we started working with our friends at Outlandish on a strand of work for a new client, Julie’s Bicycle, a pioneering not-for-profit mobilising the arts and culture to take action on the climate and ecological crisis.
In September we continued collaborating with Outlandish on Julie’s Bicycle (JB) software projects, and we launched a new strand to the project, the Strategy strand. Our task was to help the climate-focused non-profit with strategic stuff. In September we helped JB write job descriptions, figure out structural stuff and otherwise support the organisation as they prepare to hire their first digital team. We also began thinking about the strategy that team would implement.
Our September co-op day used a Strategic Starfish to reflect a bit on how things are and where we want to go.
Q4
A lot of work happened behind the scenes in October. We prepared to launch a pilot training programme with Greenpeace. We ran interviews for a Product Lead, contributed to funding documents and started imagining a digital strategy for Julie’s Bicycle. We prepared and then launched the Keep Badges Weird community alongside Participate at Badge Summit, and we did platform feedback work for Participate as well.
The Keep Badges Weird community received a good reception, and we pushed out three badge heavy posts around our community facilitation and content creation.
- Designing Badges for Co-creation and Recognition
- Reflecting on the Evolving Badges and Credentials Ecosystem
- Good things happen slowly, bad things happen fast
In addition to helping members with Keep Badges Weird work, Anne spent time in the autumn thinking about and improving Learnwith.
For Greenpeace, we launched our pilot and agreed to a new project. The new project is around implementing a strategy we wrote a while back. We found a new collaborator to work with and are looking forward to project kick off in 2022.
We wrote, edited, illustrated and finished a fully fledged digital strategy for Julie’s Bicycle between October and the end of November too. It’s a meaty piece of work that has been called “impressive”, “inspiring” and “ambitious”.
For the last couple of weeks, we’ve continued refining JB bits and bobs and we’ve run some workshops with Outlandish. We’re bringing the two Julie’s Bicycle strands, software and strategy, back together as the digital strategy envisions a big shift. We’ve also been pleased to begin onboarding JB’s new product lead, who hasn’t even officially started.
Anne’s fresh eyes and interest in media pedagogy has proven extremely helpful in the Participate Keep Badges Weird work. We’ve encouraged her to fall deeper into the world of edtech and, in particular, badges. Over the course of her internship, Anne has been coming up with badges that are relevant to her. WAO has started thinking about a badge design system so that she gets her badges soon.
The last bit of “work” we have to do this year is our WAO Christmas Party. We’re going to eat mince pies, play silly games and spend a bit of time just being together before we retreat for some well earned rest.
Next Year
Oh there’s so much! Members are looking forward to more Tao of WAO podcast in 2022, we’ll come back to get our badge design done and dusted, and we’re going into the new year with a fairly full client slate.
We are, however, always looking for new, interesting things to do. We have some changes afoot (all good things!) in the co-op so it’s going to be interesting to see how we evolve next year. For now, if you’re reading this post and feel like you want to work with a collective of independent thinkers and makers, give us a shout! We’ll get back to you in early 2022 ;)