The Return of the CoTech Newsletter!

I made a start on the September newsletter

@chrislowis @LeoSammallahti

Please edit freely and add your own content :slight_smile:

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Thanks I’ll work on it tomorrow!

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I’ve added a couple more stories. Will we be able to publish on 30th September?

You can also send me your content as text and I can transfer it to markdown

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I’ve written some content for it so that we can publish today so no worries. Just waiting on @edmaw and @MelMcNab to send me some content from GreenNet and Meet.coop and then we’re good to go :slight_smile:

In October I’m not going to have the time to write it again, CoTech-wise I’ve got the Hubl onboarding to focus on and I’m looking to create some more time in my day for some personal projects

Does anyone know of any junior or student writers who would be interested in taking it on? It seems to me a great opportunity to gain commercial experience in a friendly and welcoming environment

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Would you go beyond the “press release” type of article, into news, comment, tech questions, etc?

Added the newsletter to the monthly call agenda later today… will you be attending? :slight_smile: I’m hoping to ask if anyone had some ideas for things to try out in the October edition

Heyo,

Thanks for the all the efforts on this initiative!

Please can we edit the job description at the end to:

Job Opportunity: Part-time Communications
Animorph are looking for someone sociable, attentive, and curious to join their team as the person in charge of outward communications, working 8–12hrs per week over the next 6 months.
Please read the full job description, and share with your networks today!
Applications are open until 10th October 2020.

Done! Will publish now :slight_smile:

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Hi all! I’m not able to write a newsletter for October due to workload and in November it’s gonna be worse - I’ve signed up for an event which involves writing 50,000 words :sweat_smile:

I’ve been looking for a volunteer to take it over for a couple of months, @Caitlin very kindly got in touch with some master’s students (I think junior/student writers is best because it will help with their careers), and they asked about payment (which I think is fair!)

I want to open a Loomio proposal to set aside a little funding towards this? What do people think about it, and about the budget we might need?

My thoughts:

  • the London living wage (£10.75/hour) seems fair to me?
  • It took me about 2-3 hours as @decentral1se said it took them previously
  • If we successfully adopt a push system we can remove time researching/polling for content, the writer just needs to compile it
  • We might want some budget for management/expanding the readership but we could consider this and open another Loomio poll later
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Hey, good luck with the work!

Good you raised this. It seems like the newsletter just came back and now it is gone again. Which shows again that the network cant rely on volunteer unpaid work because we’re mostly already overclocked with work (a lot of that already unpaid).

Most coops I know struggle to even drop a post or two on their own twitter every month and handing out a wage for someone working for the network is another instance of the seemingly unsolveable issue. So, this is all kind of hard to do! I guess you are aware :blush:

I don’t have much faith in the push system but I do think 3 hours of work is a known quantity, anyone could do it really since we have aggregated all the places you need to go looking for it.

Did our collective attempt to come up with an internal solidfund ever take off? I am certainly not in the loop, maybe it did? I’d like to know. However, I wonder if we can’t just try to bake this into something like https://solidfund.coop? We work with them to sign up coops (some of us are already in there, right?) and then make a propsal for a recurring 3 hours work a month which specifically aligns with bringing cooperators together in this network. The existing posts on this forum show that it is a serious morale boost.

Those are the thoughts :+1:

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Hey this is my bad - I promised to commit to this but didn’t keep my promise. Will make sure to put at least few hours a month to write something up in the future. It’s no problem for me to commit few hours a month to write this pro-bono.

It did indeed. The CoTech fund category has some more information, and you can see the accounts, invoices etc on git.coop. You’ve reminded me that I need to update this and share another report.

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Radness! Uhhh, then, why isn’t this a CoTech fund thing :slight_smile:? Seems totally worth it and it fits the bill. Under cotech / fund · GitLab it states “Marketing and promotion”. Is there a guide to applying for the fund? I won’t have time to take on doing the actual newsletter but I’d help write the mini-application or whatever required to get the funding. @LeoSammallahti you could do it and then get paid which would help you prioritise it long-term, right? When life circumstances change, pro-bono stuff is the first in line for getting cut. Or @calummackervoy we could get this to coop-friendly volunteer people you mentioned.

I know a writer who might be interested in doing this paid work and would really benefit from the work.

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We discussed this just now in the November CoTech governance call and the summary is that:

  • paying someone is a good idea to ensure that the newsletter goes in a direction which aligns with CoTech’s interests, and not the interests of the editor/writer(s)
  • the next step is to produce a proposal for Loomio

I thought that the most digestible way I could do this would be to write a draft proposal, with brackets for what we lack:

We want some money, for a (monthly/quarterly) newsletter to hire (a writer) to work for (3 hours) on each newsletter at a rate of £10.75/hour. The newsletter content will be experimented with, to start with by (suggestions from the working group). We will need to pay someone £10.75/hours for (? hours) each month to manage the newsletter, a task which involves (helping to gather content, measuring success/gathering feedback, measuring experiments and engagement). The newsletter’s current audience is people on the CoTech forum, mainly CoTech members and friends from other co-ops worldwide. We would like to (restrict/extend) the readership

Compiling other suggestions so far

  • @Jonathan asked before about going beyond the “press release” content
  • It would be great if someone knows someone who has experience managing their co-op’s newsletter, I only have my blog :slight_smile: (shameless plug)
  • Let’s have a call to go through this?
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:heart: Fuck Yes :heart:

…one thing I’d quite like to do with it: have a sort of showcase where member co-ops can boast about what they’re up to, but strictly from a social point of view - e.g. Outlandish’s app on school cuts, Code-Operative’s work on ACORN red alert, info about how the Red Bricks intranet was built & won and so on… just that personally this is the stuff I most love to read about, and I think it can be beneficial as we can egg each other on with it, and have moments of “oh I can help with this project” etc

Is there a place for funding co-operative agitation? :grin:

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Hey, re: Circle Call 2020-11-25 - CoTech notes and questions over “who is the audience” - for me, it was CoTech itself. CoTech won’t magically organise itself, it needs people to throw fuel on the fire to show what is happening and what is perhaps exciting and where are the places to get involved.

I am feeling a bit more involved these days and if there was some euros floating around for this I’d be happy to give a hand at making this a fixed thing happening at some regular interval.

Will try to get on the tomorrow call and thrash out some ideas.

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OK, following the call, I’m gonna try and follow the fund thread (CoTech Fund 2021 - join now!) and try to get a proposal out for using the fund for this.

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That sounds ace. I’m well overdue preparing some rough accounts for the fund, and we haven’t really had many proposals so far. If there’s anything I can do to help move this on let me know!

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Proposal submitted to Loomio to fund this work with the CoTech fund :rocket:

https://www.loomio.org/s/31yDYvhx