2019-02-18 Toronto Workers Co-op: Root Systems Meeting

Time: Mon, Feb 18 @ 11pm ET
Location: https://appear.in/offline
Attending: patcon, mikey@enspiral/root, benhylau, dan@bamboo/root

[TOC]

Agenda

check-ins
questions

Summary

RootSys (consulting + product) shutting down.
Plan for exit strategies. Don’t assume owners will stay forever.
Lack of accountability systems. People weren’t always working on things that brought in $$$.
“Membership seemed to be whoever was in the room at the time of decision.” Applied to founding too. Poor idea in retrospect.
Struggled to have non-Dan (CEO-ish) people behave like owners.
Experimented with: (details below)
- Models for collectivizing income; member vs non-member.
- Basic income model.
- Financial Agreement (full)
  - BEST :: basic income > commission > pay-for-time :: WORST
- Advice process
Bamboo Consulting (new, consulting only)
- Shared current role breakdown (details below)
  - Success = People putting up hands to take roles. – Dan
Thoughts on ideal composition of junior/int/senior devs during founding. (details below)
- Involve only people able to self-manage time is critical (considered “seniors”)
Education for “how to be a co-op owner” would have been great idea! – Dan
Great to be transparent externally, but focus on accessible info internally. – Dan
Good step one: build informal network of ally orgs. Directory. – Dan
“Member hiatus” policy highly recommended so that only active members have votes. (See: Enspiral)

Notes

Root Systems is in process of winding down
- founding idea: product company without one specific prod, but collection worked on together.
  - 1/2 wanted product, not consulting. but consult to start.
- didn’t pick one product tho
- were pretty good at consulting.
- mistake: measured success essentially as learning, more than product-to-market. “that structure didn’t survive time”.
- took the consulting, which we are good at, and made another company – bamboo
- some people in root systems moved away (shifting of individual priorities)
- mikey in process of figuring
- dan: want to create repo of handbook templates as RootSys wrap-up task
ben: we also want to do all of the above
- dan: BAD IDEA
started as happy to not have individual exit strategies, at the end that became a problem:
- for people leaving, there is nothing to give them
- we end up with members that are inactive but with voting power
“civic and community infra to make available to others. instead of trying to grow, help others start.”
“non transferrable nonredeemable preference shares”
- 4 years later, no individual exit strategy
- lacked “incentive to stay”, primary motive became personal learning
another group valuations $5,000 per seat (may go up in the future)
- either cash up front or payment over time of membership
- “people’s lives change, need to anticipate that”
- incentive to stay had no promise of cash-out
- #todo think about phase shifts that we might reasonably expect, and how to support
- raising capital in the beginning, no tax on that (good to get started) #todo (same in Canada?)
- number of seats can change, money pay out to members for dilution
wanted to try and help others get started instead of absorbing into root systems
ben: can number of seats change? yes. interesting one. company values stays same, but now divided. give the buy-in to other people. small pay-out.
mikey has diff version of RootSys failure.
dan = effective CEO, pipeline, contracts, big-hows, etc. not everyone cared about the company like that. #todo confirm ok for public notes :)
some people wanted to be just an employee, not a member. But thought they wanted/liked the idea of being a member.
lacked a good accountability system. or having the hard conversations. hard feedback.
- this contributed to the cultural debt
membership seems to be whoever is in the room at the time
separation of member vs. employee may have helped
bamboo not doing income sharing. some organisational clashes?
- how to do work with friends in communities. “percentage clip”? some negotiation.
- freelancer member. 25% of hourly rate to communal.
- freelancer non-member contractor. 35-40% clip.
- subcontracting firm is by negotiation.
dan: root system financial model
- commission system (percentage of money earned by contract)
- pay for time. BIG fail. might as well do salary. re: accountability. when you don’t know what people are doing, but budgeting by time.
  - bad because no relation between time spent and how money was earned
  - paying for internal things is completely disconnect from ability to make money for the organization
- basic income. BRILLIANT
shareholders are owners in root systems vs. directors make most decisions in bamboo
- bamboo roles:
  - non-billable to clients
    - governance: risk + financial management (fixed pay)
    - marketing (fixed pay)
    - operations (fixed pay)
    - business development (revenue share of org + commission of sales closed)
    - account management (revenue share of account)
  - billable
    - project management
- want people to put up their hands, and take on these roles, ownership becomes structured and put into these roles
- want to rotate roles, but gets entrenched, and never works
dan: building a company with whoever shows up was a hard idea in retrospect
patcon: Your use of “advice process”?
- advice process = must seek advice from affected ppl and experts. but not required to accomodate all. just promotes “asking”. can be customized more specificially.
- mikey: power not equal across company
- advice process leaned hard on certain empowered roles
- dan: relied highly on advice process.
  - re: $. check in with ian (finance guy?). if they weren’t sure, micheal. if they not sure, loomio. escalation tactic.
  - boundaries of advice process, once hit you need to go to the group (loomio)
  - had custom rule around debt. debt meant that advice process went to loomio.
courses / teaching new people coming in
- set expectations of each other
- capability-building together
- ben: is assigning mentors to new people useful?
- mikey took on a lot of mentorship role
dan: in retrospect, would only set this up with “seniors” (people able to self-manage)
- supporting juniors require a lot of already-in-place pipeline, should not take this on during early phases of the co-op
- if there is a workshop for “how to be an owner in a coop” dan would’ve sent everyone
- time-management, self-management is most important bit of int vs senior. hand-holding with meta-work = expensive.
- ben: also core value alignment from the start
ben: structuring so that members are not necessarily always depending on the co-op work for livelihood. is this bad?
- dan: no. but someone going “passive” is
  - once you offer share, unless you set rules for buy-back, you can’t
  - don’t want to accumulate people who have voting power but are inactive
  - raising proposals but not getting responses is most frustrating
  - important to keep only active members, people can easily re-join in the future when they feel like becoming active members again
  - enspiral: membership hiatus. if you do this 3 times, auto-exit. (dan recommends)
- as a group, we can bill 50% more per hour than as individuals
- small companies intending to stay small, form partnerships (interdependence :)
- experiment. gov from one company works on board of another.
- turns of event made them level up the handbook
- dan: transparency externally, but accessibility of data internally perhaps suffered.
  - dan: “WORST IDEA INTERNALLY” to spend all the time to make things readily available
  - transparency is about allowing people to access when asked, not spoon feeding it to you, it’s a huge waste of time
  - dan: being transparent outside is entirely worth it
  - high-level accessible information > document everything and make transparent
    - focus on the accessible information > transparency

Action Items

confirm ok for public notes
store task: “consider phase shifts that we might reasonably expect, and how to support”
ben: publish to github repo and send link to mikey

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