As is our custom, we held another monthly Co-op half day last week — a block of time scheduled and set aside to dive into some of the stickier issues and ideas of running a cooperative.
These are things that we can’t get to in our regular catch up meeting, and Co-op days are days when we sit down together, tackle the topics that are more long winded and build solutions for ourselves. It’s also a time for us to hang out, bond and generally team-build.
🦋 We are open to evolving…
We Are Open is ticking along in the slow summer months with a general can-do attitude and some work from some lovely repeat clients. We are, however, not at capacity for the rest of the year, and so we talked about how to drum up more business. We’re lucky that we have folks knocking on our door quite a bit, but maybe we’ve gotten too comfortable with waiting for work to come in.
Of course we want to continue working with the good clients we have, but we also want new and exciting projects. We’re eager to learn about all the people doing good in the world, and we want to support them in their endeavours. We don’t want to be comfortable, we want to be inspired. So we set ourselves a goal of having 5 completely new clients each year.
To achieve this, we scheduled ourselves an “Hour of Power” each month — we’ll use this hour to actively look for interesting projects and people. We’re also going to, like, try this thing called “marketing”.
🚀 Speaking of marketing…
We worked on a PDF ‘information pack’ version of our website and a “WAO in 3 Slides” deck. This might seem like a strange thing to do for digital activists like us, but there are a lot of people who are more likely to spend most of the day in their email inbox. We also put the finishing touches on our new Collaborator Contract to make it easy for us to contract talented people to fill holes in projects, or because we’re eager to work with others.
The latter proves tricky because, while we committed to all things open, we also have to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements (“NDAs”) with certain clients. So there’s a tension between the two which we have to spell out in the contract. On the one hand we want collaborators (a.k.a. sub-contractors) to be open, on the other we want them to abide by NDAs.
Excitingly, we’ve come to the end of our first season of the Tao of WAO podcast. We’ll be back for another season at the end of the summer, so we gave a brief update of how that went in preparation for a full Season 1 Retrospective, which we worked on this week.
🧦 Co-op IRL…
Our last order of business for our Co-op half day was to discuss the fact that we haven’t been in the same place in a year and a half. Covid halted travel for everyone, but we know how important in-person bonding time is. So we’re eager to find a time to meet up. WAO members don’t want to fly (see why in the Spirit of Us), so we’ll likely head to The Netherlands and head there by train and ferry. It’s still hard to commit to travel, but we need to start talking about it. We’re thinking the first week in October, all things being equal.
🌞 Summer days
We’re privileged that we can use the summer lull to plan for the fall, and we’re excited that we have some interesting work coming up. If you have projects that you’d like to talk to us about, now is a good time to schedule a 30 minute chat!