I suppose the next step is to identify which of these should also be workshops in December, and if there are any new workshops which should be added? I think it would also be useful to have someone taking responsibility for each workshop & making sure it’s prepped?
Regarding skills sharing, there might be some that could simply be done between us using unstructured and non-standardised text, but I also guess that lots more potential opens up if we develop some kind of shared skills or competence framework, which we started out trying to work towards at the London meeting last year. We’ve more likely to make progress if we prepare for it this time – is anyone up for that? Like, no teams of one person (sound principle I think).
I’d be interested in the folk using Ansible getting together and sharing what we have been up to since the CoTech Hack 2018 and I’d also be interested in a discussion about co-operatives, copyright and licenses.
Updated the wiki with some more information, notably on accommodation and working groups. I got in touch with a local housing co-op asking about space, but they haven’t got back to me yet
Poll is live for lunch/dinner arrangements Loomio
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Anyone with the link can participate, suggestions are very welcome, you have until 11AM next Friday!
Based on the poll results I’ve arranged with the Star & Shadow that their volunteers will be providing lunch on both days, included in the ticket price (so please buy tickets!)
Last week we decided that to help prepare the working groups we would set a deadline for the submission of a public agenda for 1 December. I’ve contacted the people who had expressed interest in the following groups (get in touch with them if you can help!):
Present in the Sheffield gathering but missing someone to take the lead:
Governance and Membership
Website
Onboarding
If there is anyone who would like to run one of the above working groups, or something else entirely please let us know in this thread, and submit an agenda for 1 December
The agenda should cover:
Objectives for the weekend
What will be prepared before the conference
Who should join this working group
Who to contact to get involved with the preparation
@finn and I had a lovely day in Birmingham last week visiting Dev Society and Coop Web. We talked about the gathering a bit and things that would be good to get out of it. So a quick summary:
Skills Mapping: finding out who does what and also starting to analyse gaps in the network e.g. business analyst (this came up recently)
Creating a shared working agreement. Specifically for web development agencies initially but could be rolled out to other types of coops. Involves agreeing an internal rate for projects which are not a partnership to allow for a coop to bring in additional resources for a project.
Knowledge sharing and communication: Some people really don’t like this Discourse forum - too random and open. It would be helpful to have a place which has specific channels that have people in that are experts / champions.
How do we turn CoTech from an acquaintance to a friend?
The skills mapping initiative is going to continue at the next gathering, which is great. I’d be up for discussing the working agreement stuff as part of the business development WG.
This is really a brain dump but hopefully some of it is useful! Time to go home…
4 of us from Open Data Services should be coming (it took us a while to confirm, sorry); we are looking forward to it!
We are keen to use this opportunity to share best practices and learn about how other co-ops work.
So, we’d like to propose that we can facilitate some learning sessions:
I can do one about open source, software licenses and contributor agreements - there has been some discussion about this on the forum recently.
Jack could do a session on how co-ops approach policies - things like staff policies - for example we just put in place a new parental leave policy but we struggle with stuff like work life balance so we want to know how others tackle this.
Kadie could do a session on general structures - how our co-ops are set up. eg We do equal pay, do others do that? [Would have to be Friday]