Hi Polly,
I am from Digital Liberties, who will be becoming a Co-op next week. We shall be joining Cotech as well. I also have long experience in the late 20th Century Print Co-op scene, where I know Sîon from. Like Bill I’d like to attend the planning meeting tomorrow if that’s possible?
all the best
Fabian
@everyone - here is a report from @Bradley of Founders and Coders on where we stand with CoTech and what the next steps might be: Co-tech Research Report - Google Docs
We look forward to discussing it with some of you tomorrow afternoon at Space4
@everyone I’ll be taking notes in this doc today: Wortley Hall Planning session 08/09/2017 - Google Docs
It currently has the agenda for the session and feedback on the interest form so feel free to take a look and add comments if you have any questions.
@everyone I’ve updated the notes from the meeting to (hopefully) be an accurate reflection of the day.
Next steps:
Talk to Wortley Hall about payment schedule (Aaron)
Arrange next meeting in London for October (Aaron
Have a think about approach to facilitation and contact other potential facilitators (Pete)
Chris Roos and Chris Lowis and myself will have a call on Friday to discuss next steps on the logistics side. I’ll advertise this ahead of time so that others can join if they’d like.
Thanks,
Aaron
@everyone Following on from our productive first planning session, we’d like to arrange a second one in October.
If you’re interested in attending, please fill out the Doodle poll by next Friday 22nd September.
Sorry, we’ll be holding the session at Outlandish’s swanky new co-working space / venue, Space4.
I have updated the Wortley Hall 2017 wiki page and copied the 8-Sep-2017 Space4 notes across (note that all the formatting is copied over if you use the visual editor, it’s dead simple to copy from Google docs to the wiki and if we do means that we have one place where we have our own copies of our documents, so we can organise them and search them etc).
Hi everyone,
Thanks for filling in the Doodle. Based on the results, I’ve set the date as Friday 3rd November 1pm - 6pm and have added this to the CoTech calendar.
Thanks,
Aaron
Looking forward to it see you all then!
Just to report that the ‘facilitation team’ has started to form. There are three of us: Laura Hilliger, Sion Whellens and me.
(Thanks also for the other suggestions.)
We met again today and have started our planning. We’re all very different but we see that as a strength. And we’re very confident we can help make this year’s event a great success.
Here’s an update on the facilitation for Wortley Hall.
To remind everyone, at the planning meeting in September I promised to come up with a way forward on facilitation.
It’s gone a bit further than that now:
We’ve got a team together and started meeting (virtually). This is Sion Whellens, Laura Hilliger and me.
We’ve shared an initial estimate of the costs. It’s based on three people for three days, and one day of prep time. We’ve provided a day rate (£600 per day) that we consider to be a normal co-op day rate for facilitating. So the total is £7200, plus some expenses. (It seems likely that some but probably not all of our travelling and accommodation expenses will be covered by our respective coops).
We’ve started to design an agenda/process for the four days, starting at 5pm on the first day, Monday 27th, through to lunchtime on Thursday 30th (the last day). Our plan is to continue working on this agenda in collaboration with all of you - through the planning meetings, for example, and we’ll share more details as its appropriate.
We also understand that there are some questions about the cost, in comparison with last year etc. That is fine, and only right and proper that it is openly discussed.
Our view is that facilitation is a specific skill, like programming, and while we are happy to volunteer some of our time - and to reflect this in the day rate - we think it is important that our contribution is valued and respected. We believe that to organise and run the event properly, and get a good result, is more work than we would be prepared to do purely as volunteers.
However, we really understand that resources are limited for some, and we want to respect that. Therefore that means we are all prepared to settle on an amount that seems fair to us as facilitators, and to the participants too. We’ve made one proposal so another proposal from someone else would seem a good next step.
And given that we have already started to do some work preparing we’d be very pleased to hear back as soon as possible.
Pete, Laura and Sion
Thanks @PeteBurden @Sion and @Laura for putting together the proposal.
I have a couple of concerns and would like to know what other people think about it. Please note that these concerns are in no way criticisms or intended to cast doubts on your fabulous facilitation skills.
Personally I’m more concerned about point 2 as we had a few issues with that last year when some people from Outlandish were paid while others weren’t and it took a couple of months to unpick the issues that arose.
Thanks Harry. I talked about some of this with @aaron yesterday, and we also discussed this question of breaking down ‘what needs to be done’ in terms of facilitation (not just shaping the programme and interlocuting, recording, etc but also the nuts and bolts of registration, joining process, liaising with the venue, all that stuff that Outlanders did last year). It’s right to get transparency and accountability about ‘who does the work’ and on what terms.
thanks @PeteBurden for posting this and sharing your thoughts at this stage. And thanks @harry for kicking off the conversation.
Perhaps one of the challenges at present is that some things are being done on a mostly voluntary basis, some is being supported by a coop (Go Free Range, I think), and some is paid. We don’t have agreed basis for deciding what we pay people for and what not.
I think this may be a bit of a ramble, apologies!
Thanks for the thoughts so far.
I should also have made a broader invite - I hope everyone feels free to ask any questions they like - about anything at all to do with the facilitation, or us. We’ll answer if we can.
If you don’t want to ask here, please also feel free to call, email or DM one of us.
Hi,
Thanks for the proposal and contributions so far everyone. I personally have no problem with paying for skills required to facilitate an event like this - it isn’t easy by any stretch. The issue I have is the day rate suggested. £600 per day is a lot of money when most of us will not be paid, or will at least be not doing our normal money generating work whilst we are here. All participants will be ‘working’, so for me the difference between one person participating for £0 (or effectively losing out on income) and another facilitating and taking home £600 is too much.
I think having an agreed approach for what sort of work is paid for and what is voluntary is really important, but also to have a steer on what the rates might be. I have some knowledge of the breadth of day rates and salaries that are paid to members of CoTech (and that Outlandish is on the higher scale) but maybe understanding a bit more about what we all ‘cost’ and having something like an average day rate paid to people who do the paid work bit might be a way forward.
In terms of proposal process - I do have a critical concern with the day rate proposed, and as you raised Pete (Sion and Laura), it seems you thought this might be the feedback, so I’d like to know what you would be willing to do it for that makes it more affordable for the 50 attendees.
Cheers
Abi
Thanks Abi. Great input. And yes I’d like us to come up with a fee that is affordable for everyone, and properly reflects the value provided. And I really get that many people are ‘losing’ money by attending.
One thing I’d point out is that facilitation is rarely like programming (it was me who made the analogy!). In that, few facilitators that I know work on contracts - few do 20 days or even 10 in a row. So event facilitation is often much more 2 or 3 days here, then big gaps, then maybe a day or a few days somewhere else.
So an annual average will work out differently from what you might expect if it is compared with someone who works 150 days a year doing software development work.
Beyond that I need to have a think. Maybe Sion or Laura have a view. It’s International Facilitation Week next week. A good time to be thinking about the value of facilitation!
Thanks @Abi, all. My position/observations/suggestion:
Position: if not part of a facilitation team, I would be coming to Wortley Hall in any case as a punter (not Calverts but Principle Six - my Calverts colleague Rowan is coming with her Calverts hat on). When I’m doing this type of facilitation as work, whether through Calverts or Principle Six, the rate is between £400 and £800/day + out of pocket expenses per facilitator/consultant, depending on the job/client, and it would usually be 2-handed for a whole day session involving more than 12 people. I do think 3 is probably right for Wortley and that will be intense. I’m easy about whether I’m part of the working team, and pretty easy about terms. @harry s correct that the three of us have ‘skin in the game’ as members of CoTech member worker coops, with our own views about what CoTech’s priorities might be, so while being professional we couldn’t be ‘purely neutral’. On the other hand we know the network a bit.
Observation: it’s good that we’re shedding light on the real cost/effort not just of programme faciltators (as per Seeds for change last year), but the cost of all the other people who facilitate the event and how they are compensated; and, indeed, how CoTech itself is resourced. At the risk of inflating the present issue; understanding, auditing and agreeing these inputs/outputs, and budgeting for them equitably, including acknowledging labours of love, is what we could be moving towards.
Suggestion: we have a little bit of time to work through this. One approach might be for people to suggest a facilitation/event management budget that seems doable in terms of the scale of the event and peoples’ resources, and work back from that in terms of defining roles/responsibilities and putting together teams, and how they will be supported. I like @aaron’s idea of opening a disussion in SolidFund with a view to proposing SF ‘underwrites’ some of the overheads of Wortley Hall (i.e. guarantees the event against financial loss up to a certain amount), plus perhaps some reduced-cost tickets.
@Sion - I would love you to be a participant and would be sad if you couldn’t contribute in the same way in the capacity of a facilitator. I really value your contributions and feel it would be a loss if you weren’t able to input as freely (personal point).
The thing that strikes me or possibly surprises me in your response is that you are talking about a day rate that you charge out to clients. There is, and never would be a time that Outlandish would expect any Cotech member to pay our client charge out rates. This cuts to my point really- this event in my opinion is in no way about making money, or even necessarily covering costs and certainly not about any member of CoTech earning the same as they might on any other project, its about trying to generate value within CoTech, together. So to charge what you would charge commercially is something I completely disagree with.
I appreciate that the market rate for facilitation is high and often higher than you have proposed (I’ve done my fair share of training and facilitation to realise this) and that you aren’t employed all the time like developers, but all of us earn less than we could if we were working in a normal commercial agency and consciously choose this because we are trying to do something a bit different. I am not able to work full time (kids!), earn far less than what is being proposed and still am very (incredibly) affluent and privileged.
I think the wider discussion about general approach to costs for running CoTech is absolutely essential, but one we could have a (facilitated?!) session at CoTech for. I’d very much like to focus this thread on understanding what costs would be acceptable for both participants and facilitators. What might be your costs - the minimum you could earn - for it to be worthwhile for you to do it vs coming along as a (very valued) participant? That goes for the whole facilitation team of course 