2019-04-25 Toronto Workers Co-op: CoopDevs Chat

from template

Calendar | GitHub | GDrive

Time: Thu, Apr 25 @ 10-11am ET
Location: https://meet.jit.si/offline
Attending: patcon, dcwalk, ben&ferran, pau

[TOC]

Agenda

• Intros
  • Hypha Worker Co-op
  • CoopDevs
• Open Questions (from question bank)

Legend
Action
… Missed

Notes

• Intros
  • Ben: started working together with a group of folks on mesh+events in Toronto.
  • dc: Research+organizing – food and data justice, decentralization.
  • patcon: developer, community organizing – civic tech, adjacent to gov’t
  • pau: comp eng. … bridging tech & social movements. hitech+coop. in barcelona region. katuma platform for regional supply chains. saas platform, then coop formation? …
  • ferran: ansible [& devops?]. accounting for coops → odoo (Open ERP)? coop telecom (somconnexio.coop).

• ben: recap of offline Barcelona pre-convo:
  • CoopDev (CD), based in BCN, structure: 4owner+2workers, 1 year worker becomes member (probation)
    • ferran+antonio = workers
  • CD part of larger assoc., previously existed,
  • legal form of the wider org: “association”. has president, money person, secretary and thats it.
  • no right to economical activity. You can issue invoices but not much more.
  • ppl can come close via the association (less legal structure, more social connection)
  • to join professionally, have to join the co-op
  • larger assoc meets every tues for meetups? very loose
  • totally separate legal entities. informal agreement between assoc members and co-op. but same project and single brand.
    • one logo → http://coopdevs.org/
    • same communication channels
  • revenue
    • assoc shouldn’t need much money to run. to be associate it’s just 10€. But coop feeds or helps it. stickers, events, etc.
    • coop has customers and services and some grants in order to pay salaries (non-profit).
• Most people are full-time or near
• 60% billable work, 40% internal/donated/volunteer work
  • “like a donation of cooperative to project”
  • non-paid work, non-client work: work on community, communication “re-productive” :)
    • “trying to get rid of this work”? Couldn’t hear well. [name=patcon]
  • timeoverflow example: 20h a month as a donation. One city council is paying for some feature but we out-sourced it from the coop.
• Grant as a means to start and consolidate projects.
  • ERP (resource planning) example: goal is that next year should be in market and switch to customer revenue v. grant
  • lucky: city gov and catalan govt eager to fund coop and solidarity econ
    • research group at Catalunya university are big fans of platform coop and them (pilot proj & EU funding)
    • for Katuma digital platform coop
    • coopdevs initated it as a kind of little incubator, each member has many projects

• org has accumulated many projects
  • above diagram shows members responsible for them
  • note: ferran+antonio (less responsibilities) are non-member staff; rest are member-owners
    • examples: internal tech, communication (social nw), katuma, timeoverflow…
    • coop telecom = 30% income
    • but most weight in income: SomConnexió (telecom), OpenFoodNetwork
• tooling
  • gitlab.com + their ci (slow transition from github)
  • appear in → jitsi
  • bitwarden for passwd sharing
  • chat in telegram (plan to transition) riot/matrix.org for “pam a pam” project
  • difficulty to find the time to know the tools and more to switch.
  • discourse forum for the coopdevs community
  • time tracking: trello or Toggl are we winning/losing money? How much productive/reproductive work are we doing? Which projects are we investing more. We are using closed source toggl.com . “our” tool Odoo has some feature for time tracking but it’s a little clumsy.
  • Odoo is an enterprise solution. Focused on CRM, invoicing, accounting, … and has miriads of modules. Companies try to fit everything inside it.
• making decisions
  • initial difference on contracts of workers with owner-workers in the legal and responsibility plane, but info and decision making is shared
  • quarterly planning
  • play it fairly casual (in response to advice process vs consensus etc)
  • project lead (both for internal and customer-facing)
  • monthly assemblies (meetings) asking how everyone is feeling.
  • assoc. also meets monthly, many members come, check in, planning future activities
  • general assembly annually, board elections… etc… to meet legal requirements
  • Many dec’ns made over chat (discussion in telegram), or starts in telegram, then get together to reach agreement. Mostly for concrete dec’ns– for example: sending invoice, accepting client
  • Have a co-working space as the physical place, keep general “hours” for specific projects and also being in-person spread across the week
  • wish there was more face-time
  • also hold calls when needed
• Unknown unknowns, things CoopDevs wish they knew when starting:
  1. accept the fact that legalities are hard, won’t get done correctly – work with accountants or folks with expertise
  2. with accounting there are many important things to need to know: quotes, invoicing, balances, understand how those relate to budgeting
• ben: who does accounts?
  • enrico did business management, so has that background
  • partnered with accounting coop
    • need to check in on them, as coop is ultimately accountable
• time tracking + invoices
  • toggle →[manually]→ odoo
  • katuma: starting with google spreadsheet.
  • which access do the accountants have? Shared google things. Access to our Odoo now. But Enrico is who is managing it. Ideally: all inside odoo
• best “hacks” of org structure or process?
  • suggesting everyone to install plugin for time-tracking (game-changer)
• pau: number of members - workers?
  • 5-10 ppl in coop. Could be sustainable to pay salaries and have an impact.
  • ferran: …smtng processes
  • handbook: documenting everything that we do. company shouldn’t stop when someone leaves? joining should be easier
  • ferran: “roles of each person are not that much decided.” “could afford more projects and be more safe with more ppl.”
    • still feels like he’s costing money :)
  • onboarding process helps org to see how it works.
  • Have a goal of a base rate per hour (35 euro) have to hit that before growing?
• how does education/onboarding work?
  • has a very particular env where ppl go through association and project work first, so lots of osmosis
  • onboarding does have also values processes?
  • ferran knew coopdevs at sobtec conference and social economy
• have you had any conversations around considerations of diversity & inclusion in your work?
  • pau: effort to include more women and underrep’d folks in assoc, by doing outreach to “women in tech” groups, but hasn’t really panned out so far. ( #ask why?)
  • coop is very small group.
  • ben: what about diversity of skills. e.g. designers?
    • mostly tech ppl, just bc how they started
    • lots of ppl tired of startup movement and want to do something different

_{Edit this page}