We need to hit the ground running when it comes to the Wortley Hall gathering (which is taking place 27th-29th November). Therefore, we at Outlandish are proposing to host a 1/2 day planning session in September for members of Co-Tech. The aim of the session is to identify and agree on the key elements to work on over the weekend, and make sure we have the right teams and knowledge in place so that we make the most of the time together.
The planning session will take place at Outlandish’s event space at 149 Fonthill Road, London, N4 3HF. We will provide refreshments.
I have created a Doodle to find out the best day for the most possible people. Please fill this Doodle in by the end of next Monday August 7th!
I’ve set the date as Friday 8th September 1pm-6pm. If those intending to attend could email me polly@outlandish.com then we can start putting together an agenda and discussing other requirements.
The address is 1st Floor, 149 Fonthill Road, London, N4 3HF.
Reminder that the planning session is taking place this Friday 1pm-6pm at Space4 - 1st floor, 149 Fonthill Road, London, N4 3HF. Aaron at Agile is chairing and sending round the agenda on Thursday, so any suggestions please send them his way.
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 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.
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).
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.