I’m involved (with @Kayleigh and @aaron) in designing the programme for this year’s Worker Coop Weekend in the peak District, 11-13 May. Looking for feedback/ideas, but looks likely to include sessions on: taking SolidFund to the next level; ‘barefoot’ coop development; possibly something on decentralised organising. Also a focus on new business referrals. For those not familiar it’s immersive, cheap and fun (for the most part…)
Last year there was a lady from Rhizome (I think) with her family including dog. There’s a BnB right next to it and lots of space to walk around and get fresh air.
The only tip I have is that some people camping last year found it cold — bring two sleeping bags per person, this is the location of Foundry Adventure Centre on OSM:
Hi Chris see remarks below, it’s a fairly remote location; the adjacent B&B is likely to be booked up; so plenty of space for camping, and pretty relaxed atmosphere, otherwise you’ll probably need car transport to another B&B in the district
Just a little reminder about this, tickets have now gone on sale so I told John Atherton that I’d let everyone know.
This is the agenda for the weekend @Leutha, if you still want to do a Viable Systems Model, could you probably take the Preston co-op update - that’s more a point of info rather than a session (someone put my name down for it but I’m not going to do it).
That’s shame, I would have found something on viable systems of interest. In fact I’ll be hurrying back from the worker co-op event on Saturday afternoon in order to participate in Jon Walker’s birthday celebrations!
The key points that I think came out of this were that:
The co-ops are using different point of sale / warehouse inventory software, this is a massive and complicated, crucial and key part of their IT infrastructure.
We all agreed that it would be great to see if we can co-operate together more and that if one or two people from CoTech could visit each of the food co-op to get a better understanding of their current systems and needs that this could provide a very valuable starting point. The idea would be that the food co-ops would be able to put people up for free and that we could apply to SolidFund for the cost of the fares, perhaps we could also get a grant to fund this. Any volunteers to take this on, it should be fun.
Thanks @chris, I thought it was a really great weekend too. Thanks also for taking the pic in the session.
It was really encouraging that the food co-ops were engaging with us. The conversations started at the last worker co-op but we all agreed that we don’t want to leave it another year to catch up again.
I’d very much like to be involved with the research into their current processes/use of software. I want to catch up with some people at Outlandish so I’ll have an update about it later this week (the office is quiet today).
It was really good to catch up with fellow CoTechers this weekend, hope you all enjoyed it and had a speedy journey home.
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Very happy to be involved if I can help. Suma is on my doorstep so could do that site visit with zero overhead. If wehave different people doing different site visits/interviews we would want to have a consistent approachso that the collated data makes sense and is useful. Also happy to engage in that.
