In the before times, co-op members came together in person for a couple days about twice a year to spend time on our cooperative’s strategy and culture. We haven’t seen each other IRL since our London meet-up in January 2020. Nowadays, we do our very best to make sure that we all meet online for at least a half a day each month to focus on our internal stuff. Like every organisation, We Are Open Co-op has to set time aside to focus on our internal strategy, culture, processes and setup.
Over the summer, we got out of our monthly rhythm because we didn’t want to exclude any members, and we had some time off scheduled. Now, however, autumn has arrived, and we’ve run our September Co-op day.
After checking in, saying hello and discussing the phrase “brand new second hand desk chair”, we got to work and focused on two main areas of the co-op: Operations and Marketing.
Operations
Digital stuff, workflows and processes are not static components of business. Technical decisions need to be reviewed on a regular basis no matter what shape or size your organisation is.
We spoke about our digital infrastructure and making improvements to our server setup. We’re going to track downtime on our current servers, have a look at whether or not specific web apps are wobbling and review our energy consumption with those servers. Then, we’ll set to work revamping our infra.
The other operational tidbit we addressed was reviewing our Divvy Up template. The Divvy Up sheet tracks our days and budgets on individual clients. This template has been changing about every six months as our administrative processes evolve and become more efficient.
Marketing
A lot, most or all our clients come through referrals, so we have a long-standing negligence towards our own marketing.
We recently onboarded a media education grad student, Anne, and she is having a strategic look at our work. In our co-op day, Anne shared some of the things she’s been working on that loosely connect to our “marketing strategy”. She also showed us thinking she’s been doing regarding Learnwith.weareopen.coop, our library of free resources for working openly and collaboratively. In response, John got excited about Wardley Mapping, and all of us started geeking out on the methodology. John and Anne are going to do some Wardley Mapping for WAO in the coming days.
We also spoke about running an end of year campaign. It would be something experimental, creative and fun for us, additionally it would serve as some sort of marketing. We have some ideas :)
Proposals
Earlier this year we participated in Outlandish’s Sociocracy Workshop, and now use Sociocracy principles to run our organisation. In our co-op day we ran proposals to allot budget towards two budding ideas. We decided to support someone going to the CoTech meet-up in London later in the month.
We also passed a proposal to do a Strategic Starfish exercise in our co-op days as an experiment. Once that proposal was passed, we did the exercise. Our Strategic Starfish was great fodder for all the little to-dos and ideas people have about co-op work. We should have done that at the beginning of the day because we would have produced even MOAR things. Oh well, next time! We’ll be meeting for another half-day soon ;)