Is anyone interested in picking up a role ahead of the gathering?
We will need:
Please reply here or message privately if interested!
Thank you for working hard to make the party on Thursday happen, sorry to miss it. We will hopefully have a wee drink on Wednesday evening!
The original proposal covers costs for a venue for the gathering and refreshments. There shouldnāt be a problem with bringing a new proposal to the Fund for the party and catering costs though.
Happy to update the wiki on the day and to support facilitating efforts!
I really appreciate all the hard work youāre doing to organise this, thank you for that and for keeping everyone updated.
Iām not sure if we can approve such a large overspend without asking the fund contributers. Ā£1700 is a really big chunk of our available budget for the year after weāve paid for the fixed infrastructure costs. Weāve been discussing appointing a network coordinator, for example, and weād need some budget for that.
Is there anything you can do to keep costs managable, or at least share with us the source of the overspend? Some concerns were raised up-thread that there may not be many people around on the Thursday night - could the party be downscaled and the DJ/sound system cancelled (I donāt know how much these things cost, or whether thereās a cancellation fee)? Could we ask attendees to sort out their own food to avoid catering costs?
Sorry for asking questions that have probably already been thought about - Iām trying to wear my CoTech treasurer hat and keep an eye on spend.
I mean, I think the original budget proposal was inaccurate. I heard that it costs approx Ā£1200 for the last gathering so it was always a problem (not of my making I may add). Last year they used tickets to recoup some of that which I did forget about.
We could cancel the party completely. There is already problems with finding a space.
However, I do find it a bit crap that rich CoTech co-ops canāt fork out for a small event. Itās not exactly a bank breaking amount of money and it would go only into the co-op economy. We should take our community building events as a golden opportunity for networking and building the network. Need more money in the fund if we want to run these events.
I understand the frustration of taking over organisation of the event with a budget agreed that isnāt sufficient and that you werenāt involved in proposing. Thank you again for persevering!
In the past we did rely on some larger/āricherā coops to chip in for shared costs but there were some problems with that (Iād be happy to talk about that some more in another thread or when we meet). We set up the fund to share the costs more democratically to avoid some of the problems.
In the end, the fund means weāre spending money on the event that coops who canāt attend are contributing for. I think thatās a cool system but I have a responsibility (as part of the treasury team) to make sure we stick to the process as best we can. I think thereās more chance that coops will be happy to chip in more if we can collectively show weāre being careful and professional with their contributions.
A few suggestions for ways forward
Do you know how many people are attending and what the per-head breakdown of costs is? Maybe if you can share that someone might have some additional ideas.
Please spare a few minutes to reply to the 2-question questionnaire 
to help us prepare for the gathering kick-off session! The more contributions the better the image we can draw 
Sorry to be missing you all later this week. You know I love these things! But Iām in Spain on holidays. Hope it goes really really well, I look forward to hearing all about it. Well done to all the organisers! xx
Hello everyone!
Sorry for the silence things have been hectic our end and with a full schedule and a lot going on. However the good news is myself Alan and Olivia will be attending this gathering and we will be arriving about 10.30 am Wednesday and will be leaving Thursday around lunchtime.
Look forward to seeing you all!
Ben
Iāve cancelled the party venue and DJs so we should be a bit less over budget now. Everything is all organised now. Looking forward to seeing you all!
Remember to do a lateral flow test before arriving.
I canāt get to the event this time. I hope that it is successful. If I was going to be there Iād probably be encouraging a discussion about re-establishing/re-energising CoTechās mission (which I feel has dissipated), hoping that people might be interested in talking about leveraging the power that is latent within CoTech to make innovative exciting stuff happen in the cooperative economy, talking about the servers.coop project and encouraging people to support that. And I would be aiming to talk about the Innovation Cooperative that is in process of being born, what it will be able to provide in support of CoTech and how CoTech in turn can be an invaluable part of the Innovation Cooperative ecosystem.
Dear all, unfortunately, due to personal circumstances Iām not going to make it tomorrow. Really a pity as I was hoping to get to know Co-Tech members more, but hopefully there will be other opportunities. If any of you are attending Co-op Congress Friday & Saturday do come and say hi. All the best with the Gathering!!
Sorry to hear that Vica. Hope everything is ok.
It was a truly splendid time! Big thanks to Autonomic for coordinating the gathering.
Will update wiki later today, for now a little thank you tweet!
Thanking everyone for all the organising and participation and joyful times!
Finally uploaded the notes from the handbook/policy session to the Wiki. Please edit if I missed/misrepresented anything said.
Holler at me if you are interested in taking any part of that session forward, like identifying some common pain points across our co-ops and seeing how we can collectivise resources.
