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
(shameless plug)
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Fuck Yes
…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? 
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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 
Hey @chrislowis @SzczepanOfAnimorph should I re-open the vote that passed? It seemed like we might need more time to hear from the rest of the funders? Let me know, can re-open or make a new one with more time. Ooorrr, just go ahead also if we think it is ready to go.
OK, I’ve re-opened this proposal until the end of the month to gather more feedback. Please do vote if you contribute to the fund! Looking forward to see what more people think.
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Thanks for bumping the proposal, you had made and announced it widely so I personally think it wasn’t necessary to extend the deadline… still nice of you!
Just added the proposal to the agenda for upcoming CoTech call so everyone will have a chance to hear about the effort!
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OK, it passed! I will get organising for this and we’ll have a newsletter out for the end of March! Thanks all!
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Very exciting! The blog is a little out of date but we’d love to mention that we’ve been working with a few CoTechers - CoTech work placements happening at Outlandish :: Outlandish over the last 6 months. I think it would be interesting to talk about how we have different models for working with each person with regards to profit share which has been somewhat confusing at times but also a learning curve. Definitely would be good to get to a place where there are some clear suggestions for how others in the network can do it (I remember Factic had some good processes).
I’m actually not the best person at Outlandish to go into the ins and outs of the arrangements but I can find out who is (email me, ideally).
Also there have been loads of collaborations going on through the Catalyst proposals (again I personally don’t know a huge amount, I think Doug from We Are Open is).
It would be good to mention the return of CoTech events that we were running up until the pandemic which I’m getting up and running again. I am actually the person to speak to about that lol!
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Brilliant @polly thanks!
Any chance we can convince you to write an updated blog post about the different models of working with CoTech collaborators? Then we could link to that post from the newsletter.
We’ll do a general call out for stories shortly, which might prompt others to share their collaborations.
Is there an events page for CoTech events we can link to from the newsletter?
might prompt others to share their collaborations
I’d like to share Startin’Blox - members of Code-Operative, Autonomic and Web Architects have been working on that from within CoTech, Happy Dev and CoLab Coop from outside
There is a wider range of co-ops that are using it - CoTech, FACTTIC, Space Coop EU and Coopstarter among others
We have been collaborating with Webarchitects on a few projects now and it looks like there’s more coming, nothing substantial written about it though (as of yet).
Go on, write something - we’ll link to it 
Yeh Autonomic is working with Good Praxis atm. I’d like to write about it but we don’t have so many spoons.
We also launch Co-op Cloud: Autonomic Co-operative
Can I add a shameless plug for a coop crowdfunder? I’m connected with a new coop called Tanpopo that is basically trying to build the Geordie space4. They are running a crowdfunder to establish the first phase of the business and I would love to see it succeed.
Link below:
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Let’s just get this out of the way: the whole point is to shamelessly plug!
Keep 'em coming folks! Loud and proud.
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