At the end of January, We Are Open Co-op had another in-person meetup. I was in town winning an award :O so we used the opportunity to see each other. Remote work is part of each of our members MOs, but each time we see each other, we are reminded how important these meetups are.
Getting started
We start each co-op day with coffee and hellos, of course, and then our first agenda item is a few minutes of reflection on how each of us is feeling about the co-op. We talk about how the co-op has been evolving and what each of us wants from it. It’s always a relief to hear that our members remain enthusiastic about the co-op’s general existence.
After that, we run through the agenda, which we create collaboratively in the week leading up to the event. We rearrange and find out what are everyone’s MUST HAVES for the day. We always have such limited time…
Finding alignment
This co-op meetup needed to focus a bit on some alignment between all the members. We’re hitting our stride and in the last six months, we’ve had some interpersonal “conflicts”. “Conflicts” is in airquotes because we all have high EQ and none of our stuff has erupted into dumb. But guess what — as with any business, there are dynamics at play. For an hour, we did some exercises to understand our “conflicts” and then let go of whatever resentments might have built up. This is important to do in-person because we spend the majority of our collaborations in text based environments. That means that tone and body language are absent, and sometimes it can be hard not to assume a tone that doesn’t exist. Each of us are in different situations, so we spent some time understanding our various contexts.
Infrastructure stuff
After a mental group hug, we moved on to dealing with some infrastructure decisions. We set up an entirely new GSuite and then talked about cleaning up our project management tools. We discussed features we needed and modes of working so that when we are behind computer screens, everyone has the access and insight they need. We made a bullet list of things we need to do for each new client. We’ve been doing it anyway, but now we have all the things documented.
When a client comes in we allocate a WAO Lead, a contact point for the client, and set up a Client Folder and PM board that have:
- The Proposal
- A Budget and Divvy up sheet
- Notes and Dates for an Onboarding which includes a pre-mortem
- The Project Plan (Milestones, Time plan, Visual timeline of project, Number of hours per week against the project)
- Client Context (History, Strategy, Branding, Contact/stakeholder list, etc)
- Client issue tracker
Partnerships
The co-op has been collaborating with LDR21 quite a bit lately, so we chatted through establishing a partnership agreement and the must-haves for each of us. We are open, so things like “materials will be published under a CC license” are part of our general agreements. We were just looking for some baseline language here, as our partnership agreements are drawn up and agreed with a partner — that means that our partners’ wishes are, of course, taken into account for more specific joint venture agreements.
Then we went to eat pizza. As always, we continued our conversations over lunch. The pizza was amazing. The conversations were important and made us laugh.
Marketing
Next, we talked about our marketing. We know we need to get better at “selling” ourselves. With all the things our members do, it’s hard to keep up, so we’re looking to have a bit of help there. Our fantastic, wonderful, amazing co-op administrator, Hannah, has done some great work focusing in on how we can improve our social presence, our website and our general sharing. Over the coming months, she’ll be helping us streamline, clean up and get better at talking about what we do.
We are early stage innovators. We are pioneers and leaders in the field of digital literacies, open badges, smart cities, open principles and more. We are experts in creating and harnessing input from communities. As a worker-owned tech co-operative, inclusive and collaborative approaches to projects is part of our DNA, and connects us to networks.
Together we are expert strategists, facilitators, community engagement advisors, designers, developers and more. We have the practical experience and professional networks needed to help your project, so give us a call.
Originally published The Year of the Co-op on Medium.