cross-posted on We Are Open blog
At the beginning of 2020, We Are Open Co-op came together for an in-person (weren’t those the days!?) meetup and decided that 2020 would be the Year of the Co-op. We got ready for the year by cleaning up our tooling, recommitting ourselves to our collective endeavour, and talking about our processes. We cleaned up our tooling and recommitted ourselves to our collective endeavor. Talked about plans, the future, our processes.
As luck would have it, 2020 was both the Year of the Co-op and the year of Covid. The social-political landscape influenced our year in a way we couldn’t have planned for. We are lucky to work in a field that continued to thrive in the last year. We had a variety of projects and clients in 2020, many of whom were looking to our expertise in digital transformation as they shifted to an online existence.
We created global strategies for openness, taught and advised on digital spaces and organizational cultures that could continue to innovate despite the predicaments 2020 threw at us. We both welcomed a new member last year, and then successfully springboarded two members and a successful project out of the co-op. We helped charities large and small harness the energy of the cataclysmic shift and lay the groundwork for the new normal. We rebranded. We did a lot of stuff, while also dealing with the conflicts and curveballs that arose in response to global issues. Read more about our work in 2020.
On to the future
In the first 2021 Co-op Day, we reflected on the last year and started to look forward. We’ve deemed this year, the Year of the Rebuild: Co-op 2.0. We learned so much last year, and now we’re eager to implement what we’ve learned and reenergize our cooperative with new ideas, new projects, and new clients.
Both our pricing model and our resourcing model is dynamic. We have a minimum day rate that all members agree to, and we use a sliding scale to determine an appropriate pricing model based on the client and the particular project. Last year, we had a number of projects that benefited from having collaborators who are not members of the co-op. Today we decided to start off by creating a rule of thumb for a Collaborator Day rate.
Next, we tinkered around with our tooling and decided to try out a new project management tool and time tracker. Since several members use Toggl personally, we decided to give it a try as a cooperative tool. We’re all using Toggl Tracker now and will try using Toggl Plan for the next three months. We also decided to revamp some of our budget tracking spreadsheets and processes for running projects. It’s important that we all have an overview of cooperative business so that we can appropriately resource and plan.
Co-op Projects
Finally, we had some existential conversations about current and future cooperative projects. We chatted about the future of the Learning Fractal newsletter, Badge Wiki, our email courses and a potential new podcast. All in all, we’d like to wrap some strategy around our creations so that they serve a function in marketing the co-op and for business development.
We only scratched the surface if the work we have to do this year. We’ll be addressing our decision making processes after taking Outlandish’s Sociocracy Workshop at the end of January. We’ll be documenting more policies on our wiki. We’ll be using 2021 to iterate and rebuild a new We Are Open Cooperative and to do more great projects with our fantastic roster of clients.
Do you have a project that looks WAO shaped? Get in touch!