I’d like to propose a skill sharing group in the vein of the junior dev and dev ops ones, but a bit different.
This has come out of speaking with Dot at the Cotech Gathering in Newcastle 2 weeks ago. She was proposing a tech project that she wants to exist, more for the effect that the project would have in the world, rather than it making a ton of money for herself (the idea is a tool for monitoring computing energy usage much more easily). I talked to her about the idea, and said that while I thought it was a great idea, I didn’t have capacity to help it in any significant way, because I’m busy with my own project, Wobbly, a chat app for precarious worker organising.
I think the skill-area here is about how do you balance your own project with the ones you do for paying customers? If you have volunteers on the project, how do you make sure you’re using their time effectively, and that they’re getting enough out of it to keep going? Where do you get funding from? These are all things I’d like to get better at, and I’m sure there’s many other skills and traits that could be improve that I haven’t even thought of right now.
Hi John. Great idea to float ‘good work’ project ideas somewhere within CoTech. My question would be, how best to do this, without simply adding extra to people’s inboxes; and particularly so that ideas are clearly available and able to be found by people weeks and months after the idea is originally proposed?
“I think the skill-area here is about how do you balance your own project with the ones you do for paying customers? If you have volunteers on the project, how do you make sure you’re using their time effectively, and that they’re getting enough out of it to keep going? Where do you get funding from?”
Nice question, from my experience, the tactic that I use is solidarity pricing (which is a form of cross-subsiding model):
And I combine it with a mutual-aid system as described below:
This is something quite new I’m testing out, but I would be happy to share concretes experiences as soon as I see results (either good and bad )
I would like to converse. Basically what I’m proposing is that we categorise running a project like this as a skill. I personally think that ideas are easy to come by and people implementing them is where the value is, and that’s what cotech should be developing.
So that’s why I’m fitting this into the “guild” idea rather than trying to start a new category of thing.
When it comes to accounting/tracking of skills, time-banking or energy, you might want to look to the case of Guerrila Translation use of open value accounting system, I personally find it really mindblowing: http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Accounting
I am interested on this as well. CoTech can be a platform for advertising social projects that don’t necessarily need to be developed by CoTech people. We can show them and their current status (i.e. searching funds, being developed, finished, etc) for helping them moving forward within our capacity.
We at Common Knowledge would be very much up for facilitating this, given that aiding the technical means of social change projects with grassroots activists is one of our whole reasons to exist.
Let us know once there is a meeting setup or we are happy to arrange it.
)
, I’m currently working alone, offering R&D services, mainly to ACI300 coops. (