2021-04-21 Hypha Worker Co-op Quarterly Planning - Spring 2021 🐛🌱🎛️

Time: 5:00-7:00pm ET
Location: https://link.hypha.coop/calls
Attending:

Agenda

Length: 2 hours
Format: Video call

Cultivator: Dawn
Scribe: uv, pc

Time	Length	Description
00:00 - 00:10	10mins	Introductions and check-ins
00:10 - 00:30	20mins	Organization updates
00:30 - 00:50	20mins	WG/Initiative updates
00:50 - 00:55	5mins	BIO BREAK!
00:55 - 01:20	25mins	Discussion: New initiatives mapping
01:20 - 01:45	25mins	Discussion: Financial forecast and budgeting
01:45 - 01:55	10mins	Updating priorities for upcoming quarter
01:55 - 02:00	5mins	Review of decisions and next steps

Background and Intent

This is our first quarterly planning call as we sit on the cusp of an organizational transformation from a our existing structure to one that is more resilient, cross-functional, open to experimentation around new styles of collaboration, and has supportive structures in place for members’ learning, growth, and livelihood.

Expected Outcomes

At the end of this planning session we will have:

1. Prioritized our goals for the upcoming quarter
2. Updated our member capacity
3. Made organization-wide decisions collectively to guide our next three months
4. Mapped out our initial list of initatives

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Pre-Planning

Time Required: 1-5 hours

To ensure the sync time we have together is productive, we are asking all meeting attendees to do the following before the meeting:

1. Reviewed [this] agenda.
2. Read initiative transition plan. Do you have questions? Anything confusing?
3. Checked out our initiative playbook (draft). Any parts that remain unclear? sections we need? comment!
4. Participated in working groups to prepare for first quarterly planning call. Ready to discuss? 4a. Add your update to the slide deck!
5. Updated member capacity and think on strategic goals.

Please complete the check on Loomio.

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Spring Quarterly Planning Call

Introductions and check-ins

• What’s the last great book or comic or graphic novel you read?
• If you could write a book, what genre would you write it in? Mystery? Thriller? Romance? Historical fiction? Non-fiction?
• Bonus: What would it be called?
  • gi:
    • what are you going through, short fiction book, talks about a woman with a friend who is in her later stage of life various encounters with people in her past life
    • realist fiction (e.g. raymond carver, rachel cusk)
  • uv:
    • ministry of the future
    • really short sci-fi stories stories
  • pc:
    • cloud atlas, likes weird story structures
    • magical realism, sci-fi, weirding reality
  • bl:
    • both en/es the little prince (marginalia!) - no idea what’s going on
    • reddit /r/writingprompts
  • el:
    • technical writing (documentation)
  • yj:
    • cory doctorow (Radicalized)
    • sci-fi! space!
  • dc:
    • red rooms cherie dimaline (short interconnected stories), marrow thieves.
    • historical fiction, bc hard to write well maybe? inspo: a conspiracy of paper about pugilist and early stock market in london

Organization updates

• Review Y2 strategic plan (Governance, Bizdev)
  • Walkthrough of plan: https://link.hypha.coop/capacity 🔗 Presentation
    • dc: shorten values list in the future after exercise on alignment
    • dc: going through themes, guiding goals, from last year
• Finances update (Finances)
  • bl:
    • aether has changed revenues quite a bit
    • budget doesn’t reflect pre-aether numbers
    • each month 20K revenues
    • external contractors ~$2k-$7500 (variablility in COMPOST, START)
    • server costs for meet.coop in the 100’s range
    • 13k-16k on member wages per month
    • 650 on op costs (licenses, etc.)
      • don’t expect this number to grow significantly
    • 2k professional services a year (per month pretty low)
    • 1500 surplus that is retained for initiatives
• Member hours and upcoming capacity (Operations)
  • dc: Review of member hours and capacity: https://link.hypha.coop/capacity
    • check in on capacity (some folks haven’t filled in)
    • checked clockify hours (127-200 hours)
    • internal hours aren’t accurate
      • March wasn’t a great time for us
    • flag risk: we need to track hours for the new model
    • good: we are spending more hours ext vs. internal
    • misalignment between capacity and who’s doing work

Capacity:

• dc: over capacity rn, need more support on internal core tasks
• dc: unsustainable. spending more time than quarter time.
• uv: pulling back on commitments to make external commitments within hypha
• yj: feeling lower capacity
• pc: need motivation, not good interest match with current projects. digital coaching work feels like a good fit
  • dc: open collective for pc?
  • pc: feeling like not moving forward?
• el: have capacity for projects like infra, but not a good match
  • bl: like compost and meet.coop?
  • el: yes
• gi: roll off being active in summer (non active member in the summer). will finish commitments (the bentway, infrastructure)

Tracking:

• bl: how to track hours external hours? e.g. meet.coop? aether? - dc: no need for day-level granularity. just keep in same month.

  • yj: the way that take is done, might put below min wage
  • dc: we are striving for month level accuracy in clocklify
  • pc:
    • personal need minute level accuracy
    • dc: clockify works at a higher resolution than we need collectively, track to your level of granularity

• dc: can we commit to month level accuracy on clockify?

  • Everyone consensed on using clockify for at least month-level tracking
  • pc: ideate on strategies for better time tracking?
    • dc: we can check in on strategies to improve in a future all hands

• Agreement that yj + el: track clockify hours for meet.coop

WG/Initiative updates

WGs

• 🔗 Presentation where each inititative took us through their update and people asked burning questions
• Business Planning (uv)
  • Key update: Strategic Positioning and Opportunities Roadmap
• Infrastructure (gi)
  • Key update: Services Overview. Inventory: https://hackmd.io/@patcon/HyH0W9bAE
• Governance (dc)
  • Key update: Articles Amendment Status
• Finance (bl)
  • Key update: Books and financial forecast
• Operations (pc)
  • Key update: Health and safety

Infrastructure:

• gi will help initiatives get started
• this quarter greenfield space
• services inventory running and updated
• helping through gh backlog
• budget request $130 CAD to scale up infra for RAM
• lack of capacity is critical issue
• infra is reactive vs. proactive in dealing with issues

Migrate internal services:

• 75% complete
• will need to repurpose current ansible scripts
• jitsi should be deprecated, bbb to replace
• need to define clearly self-hosted
• jitsi:
  • put a notice page
  • pr to update the COVID-19 page
  • Consensed to deprecate it

Governance:

• on track and behind in schedule (article amendment)
• budget putting money into annual events

Finalize AGM completed:

• bl/dc doing this
• need to reduce load, was too much work

Finance:

• payroll etc.
• bl lead, offloading to rodica, yj helps with bus factors and ad hoc support
• new requirements, projects have new variations in accounting requirements:
  • OC
  • COMPOST
  • meet.coop
• $10 quickbooks/month, and money from CWCF

Operations:

• Health and safety to do
• Modest increase from $14 –> $20-25

Initiatives

• 🔗 Presentation where each inititative took us through their update and people asked burning questions
• Migrate internal services to Hypha server
  • Status update on migration (are all services migrated into hypha? which core business activities aren’t on hypha infra? (e.g., email, calendar)
• Finalizing outcomes from AGM
  • Wrap up from AGM completed (handbook documenting) IN ADVANCE
• OC: fiscal hosting
• Call me Chrysalis [cmc]
• Co-operative Intelligence Unit 2021 (CIU) -> Rad co-op dev?

Discussion: New initiatives mapping

• Work from [proposed] new initiatives from WGs, and miro board prepared by Call My Chrysalis initative: https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lVt9EFQ=/

Discussion of initiative transition:

• bl: -1 to increasing clip. incentive to do more internal work.
  • “ok i shouldn’t try to participate in external project, bc i can do internal”
  • dc: not able to run an employee off 25%. we’re starving ourselves.
  • gi: clip too low. too rigid relative to projects we want to do.
• gi: curious about member loans. eventual model.
• uv: +1 to key metric. internal to external. keep measuring.
  • uv: diff kinda of internal
    • back office: automate, and reduce
  • not needed: dripline. having better granularity about internal work seems important
• uv: member loan. for active members to commit to a certain amount of time/month. e.g., 10h of operational work per month. if can’t put in time via timebank, then should be paying in via loan.
• uv: strongly agree clip should be progressive. E.g., high amount for low-paying isn’t sensible.
  • +1 yj to progressive
  • +1 to paying admin
• pc: +1 to higher clip
• dc: we’re tracking less internal time, getting through setup
  • we are getting past boostrap mode
  • what is the reproduction rate?
  • external we’re paid: $45/hr

Estimating hours:

• infra initiative:
  • improving productivity stack: 80 hours?
  • break off IT work
• Worked from transition modelling:
  • https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HWa3XPNsY-k6MtfAlNnUWy7kPCid65OUPooWMY6qpyY/edit?usp=drivesdk
  • Consensed on guidelines with 100 hours per month cap for Q2 (April-June)

Discussed and consensed on proposed pathway:

• Start July 1 @ 22.50 (living wage in Ontario)
  • paying everyone
  • introduce member requirements (MIN/MAX hours, track hours, good mem.)
• Cap hours @ 15/member mthly, cap internal hours 100 mthly Q3
• Increase clip to 35% internal (keep flat), grandfather exceptions
  • This increases wage floor: $35/hour billed work (something like $30/hour covers internal hours?)
• Enforce clip for contractors 40% (talk through exceptions)
• PARKING for now: Do member loan (!!) for $2000 (split quarterly) for roughly paying 1/3 total hours (annual: 200hrs @ $32/hr to pay living wage = $6400) FY3 Targets:
  • bill $250k without subcontracts to cover operating costs+internal work
  • contain/keep stable internal hours / mth at start (gains go to wage)

Discussion: Financial forecast and budgeting

• Work from [draft] budget from Finance, and budget requests in advance: https://link.hypha.coop/budget

The past two months is most representative of the current and near-future financial state of the Co-operative, so I will base my analysis mostly on numbers from these two months.

Each month, our revenue is about $20,000 and we pay out between $2,000 to $7,500 in project expenses (including subcontractors). We spend between $13,500 to $16,000 on member wages and about $650 in operating costs. See Financial Projection sheet for details.

Our monthly operating costs by working group looks like this:

• Finance: 2.25 (bank) + 56.50 (quickbooks) + 32.00 (wagepoint) + 200 (professional services) ~ $300
• Operations: 4.71 (cwcf) + 130.06 (insurance) ~ $135
• Infrastructure: 14.80 (domain) + 79.38 (server) + 16.15 (miro) ~ $110
• Bizdev: 100 (misc. marketing) ~ $100
• TOTAL ~ $650 per month

After all these, the Co-operative retains about $1,500 each month in profit (after the $650 operating costs is deducted), which we can use to make a budget for various activities.

We will use this new sheet for budget planning: https://link.hypha.coop/budget

Budget Requests PLEASE ADD

• Business Planning
  • Marketing $500 USD OC video
• Infrastructure
  • Scale up infra. ~$130 CAD (estimate, unsure abou setup fee)
• Finance
• Operations (WG for stewarding our shared practices and policies for effective remote collaboration.)
  • paying for tools we use that we don self-host (non-profit status for some) - current: ($14/mth) request: increase to $20-25/mth to divide
    • miro 1/yr $170
    • hackmd: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?token=BqLceW-v58gSdrAA-xID1uuGwUrXpaKvG8ezy-TpA07x3-6MsdFaG5BfiRGGXj1AT5_sxSRdeR3tqoPu&locale.x=US
    • when2meet: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/hermes?token=63B93499SG2349917&useraction=commit&mfid=1618930359025_49c30dde97565
    • matrix+riot (donate to tomesh?): https://www.patreon.com/matrixdotorg and https://element.io/contact-sales
    • gitbook -> honkit: https://github.com/sponsors/azu
    • signal: https://signal.org/donate/
    • jekyll
    • github [microsoft overlords]
    • google drive [free]
  • fees for associations (CWCF, OCA) current: $56.50 request: $215/year recurring, moving to $600/year in FY3 CWCF –> $57 OCA -> $150/year ($500/year to vote)
  • insurance current: $390.48/recurring
  • office supplies current: $0 request: –
  • health and safety stuff: $0 request: – baby-step? token funding for ergonomics (trackpads, DJ stands, etc.)
  • future: benefits
  • future: budget for socials?
• Governance (WG for ensuring our cooperative has a healthy structure, this includes drafting by-laws, maintaining articles of incorporation, and planning annual members meetings.)
  • AGM (food, social activity, etc..) current: $0 request: $250-500/yr recurring loomio hosted by infra
  • Strategic retreat current: $0 request: $200-300/year recurring slightly more modest AGM loomio hosted by infra
  • fees assoc. with interfacing with the gov’t current: $0 request: $100+ for amendment not a recurring item

[Other] Requests received by Finance WG

Here is a list of requests made to the Finance WG, ordered by perceived priority and urgency:

• A pre-approved budget that WGs can have authority over, in particular for Bizdev WG on marketing and relationship-building activities
• More support for project leads in invoicing and wage assignment
  • This may be sufficiently addressed by recent process revisions
• More transparency about internal processes of this “blackbox” WG
• Flexibilities on how to interface with projects
  • e.g. retainer model (e.g. COMPOST), out-of-cycle invoicing (e.g. ACCA), complex setup with multiple client accounts for a single project (e.g. Meetcoop, possibly COMPOST), withholding of payroll amounts, reassigning money committed to one person to another person or use…
  • In general, most things are possible, and it comes down to two criteria:
    1. What lead time is needed to support a “new feature”
    2. Is the feature worth the effort (upfront and ongoing)

Updating priorities for upcoming quarter

• Activity: Revisit goal prioritization for the upcoming quarter using loomio https://loomio.hypha.coop/d/XoKjmWx6/spring-2021-goals-prioritization
• How does this touch on WGs/Initiatives activities for next 3 months?

Next steps

• Review of decisions
• Review of agreements

Appendices

Appendix A - WG/Initiative update template

• All follow this format:
  • Lead: [for upcoming quarter]
  • Members:
  • Progress, Timeline, Needs: [not started, on track, behind schedule, ahead of schedule, completed]
  • Key update: [+ proposal for review]
  • Budget, new requests: [under budget, on budget, over budget]
  • [If completed] Takeaways: []

Appendix B - Initiative Budget template proposal

1. Initiative
   • The name of the initiative
2. Description
   • Who is leading this from the Co-operative
   • Who are involved internally and externally
   • What is this initiative
3. Expected outcome
   • Why are we spending this money
4. Total budget & high-level breakdown
   • What are the categories to spend on, at a high level
   • In the future we may create corresponding categories in our financial reports (but first we need to know what the boxes are)
5. Timeline & payment schedule
   • Month granularity for large amounts, quarter granularity otherwise
   • Include milestones if releases are dependent on completion of some checkpoints
6. Payment details
   • How do we pay this out?
   • Is it a lump sum to one receiver or many small payments?
   • Are there tax considerations?
   • Do we get receipts or other records?

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