Policy exchange

Hi Co-operators,

The other day we have had a discussion within Animorph about learning from other co-ops’ efforts in drafting their policies. Is anyone else curious? Are there any resources you would recommend to study?

For the time being at Animorph we have a social value, disciplinary, health and safety and child protection policies as well as grieviance procedure. If anyone is interested, we are more than happy to share them!

We now have to draft an IP policy and we wondered if maybe someone has one for reference?

Cheers!

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Hi Szczepan,

I’d be interested in seeing these documents, would you be able to make them available to all here?

This is a great idea! I’m also interested! Would love to base ours on someone else’s, though there is also perhaps an odd sort of magic in building something together, personalized as member-owners :slight_smile:

That would be awesome if you folks wanted to share those!

Most of the policies are generic, derived from corporate templates so don’t faint if you stumble upon strange phrases such as CEO… Social Value Policy is the only one we actually put together from scratch.

Just set up a repo where we will be adding other policies that are in the making such as IP and Equal Opps. Feel most welcome to suggest changes and upgrades.

Maybe at some point we can establish a more general CoTech pot of policies&procedures… Co-operators, please share your policies!

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Nice! Thanks team animorph!

As someone who recently spent a bunch of time poring over various articles of incorporation (aka letters patent) to see how others wrote theirs, I found myself unable to get a sense of change history and evolution over time. And you just mentioned a few things here about history and context: “initial version imported from [source]” and maybe modified in various ways. This is sometimes captured in version control, but maybe a more human readable “Document History” section at the bottom of each might be helpful (esp to ppl who aren’t going to navigate as deeply into git history, even if it exists).

For example, I am in process of suggesting we keep our semi-authoritative Articles of Incorporation (stripped of private details) in git, partly inspired by this thread :slight_smile:

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There’s also this thread with a collection of handbooks etc.:

Some of those might have policy-like things in them.

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True – I believe “policies” are called “Agreements” in the parlance of Enspiral ecosystem. They’re quite casually phrased, but considered binding and authoritative.

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We did some work with Co-ops UK to version Articles of Association on GitHub Making it easier for new co-ops to get their Articles of Association - Open Data Services
They now have a template on GitHub, which our own articles are a fork of.

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Ah thanks Ben! But I think I side-tracked topic a bit – my impression was that this was about policies. I shared my articles just to point out that including document history might be helpful.

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There’s a good list of policies on the Co-operative Assistance Network website

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Hi everyone! Somewhat related to this, but does anyone have any advice on ISO certificates, especially when you’re a remote-based organisation, please?

An app we built for Scouts has received further funding which is great, but now needs to go out as an official tender and so we’re having to fill in a lot of certificates and policies that I’m trying to get my head round!