We’re going to host a CoTech hack here at Space4 in London. The hack will take place from Thursday 21st-Saturday 22nd June 2018 at Space4, 149 Fonthill Rd, London. N4 3HF. Everyone who is a part of CoTech is welcome. If you are not an official CoTech member, but would like to attend, please get in touch to discuss.
The idea of having the event partly in the week and partly at the weekend is to maximise attendance. You do not need to come for the whole time!
The idea for this event is to be DOING more than TALKING. We have superfast broadband and plenty of space for people to work alone or in small groups to make CoTech tangibly better during these 3 days. So far, there are groups forming who want to:
Sort out the existing website content and layout
Improve the repository of skills and availability of individual CoTech members
Update the Wiki
Improve the branding and messaging
…Please use this thread to put forward other ideas (ideally by volunteering to head up one group).
Outlandish will provide the space for the 3 days. Individual co-ops will need to arrange and cover their own transport and sleeping needs if necessary. We may try to use the CoBudget for getting together a fund for food and drink (watch this space).
I’d be up for doing a medium-scope redevelopment of the website - anyone up for joining? I think we’d need to get a bit of a ‘brief’ together for pre-sign off.
Might be good to invite @Graham@shaun and others from DigiLife collective as their documentation is a lot better than ours, IMHO.
Sounds productive. Unfortunately I wouldn’t be able to get there sensibly due to childcare/family commitments, but could potentially engage remotely for some of the time.
Sounds awesome, thanks for organising this. I’m afraid however that I have prior commitments and won’t be able to join in — please let me know if there is anything I can do to facilitate things before 15th June (eg adding SSH public keys to hosting accounts etc).
In order to work out who is coming, when, and what they will be doing (hopefully we can start to think about work groups ahead of the event), I have created this spreadsheet. I’d be really appreciative if you could add your names to the days that you plan to come along.
Appreciate that a spreadsheet is a fairly lo-fi way of doing this so if anyone wants to create a more techy solution be my guest!!
Yeah, this is a real shame. Thanks for trying to arrange though (and whoever else helped).
Huge elephant in the room really, this lack of participation. AFAIK, (I’ve pushed to help in all of them at some point) the move for working groups (newsletter, community call, wiki gardening, consitution writing, new-to-cotech welcoming) appear to not be functioning either. CoBudget never took off …
We’re all cooperating in our own little boxes it seems.
‘We’re all cooperating in our own little boxes it seems’
Indeed, but cooperating none the less. Big plus.
(If it’s any consolation, this is not atypical for all organisations - cooperative or otherwise. What we’re trying to do is hard and will take time. Lots of it.
I felt for you when I read this! So I just wanted to get in touch and say thanks so much for voicing how you feel - it can be really frustrating when it seems that the co-operation is not quite happening.
I think there is probably a bit more than we individually realise but a lot of it seems to be outward facing at the moment, rather than internal stuff. I talk about CoTech to lots of people/orgs but have taken my foot off the accelerator internally, mostly because I felt that I was starting to become too central to it, and I don’t have the time to work on it constantly.
Last week I met up with some people who are involved with networks across the world and we spoke about challenges that we face. Fluctuating participation was high up on the list but (to echo what @royAB said) we all agreed that it was better than no co-operation.
When/if the hack day goes ahead, I’d like to look at what we’ve done so far including the points you listed, and how we can improve our internal processes.
