Loomio
Wed 30 Aug 2017 1:03PM

Cobudget & Collective Finance

F Francesca Public Seen by 209

Hi all,

I wanted to give you a short update on some new things I am working on that might be of interest to some of you. As many of you know, I stepped back from chairing OuiShare Fest last year and since have been thinking about which area to focus my energy on next. My explorations to other communities and networks made me realize that there is topic that has kept coming up in different aspects of my work: collective finance and resource allocation as a cornerstone for transforming organizations to become more agile, open and collaborative.

Why work on collective finance?

Having often been the person running budgets in OuiShare as well as having been part of diverse experiments around value distribution and more collaborative ways of budgeting, I keep coming to the same conclusion: we still lack the financial infrastructure, literacy and practices to make distributed leadership and emergent ways of organizing a true reality. I don’t see how we can transform organizations and society if we don’t also tackle how to make resource distribution more transparent and less centralized. Money may be one of the hardest place to start, but it is also very tangible, which is why I am personally very driven to work on this.

At the moment a team of 4 others and I are in the process of creating an organization called Greaterthan, with the mission to make collective finance easy and accessible for groups, communities, networks and organizations. In February, we took over the stewardship of Cobudget from the Enspiral network and are now working to support the developlement of an ecosystem of collective finance software tools and (human) practices.

Collective finance & OuiShare

At the moment our team is “consult-strapping” (like boot-strapping with consulting :) )and trying to learn as much as we can from this to define the direction of the development of Cobudget. This consulting work around collective finance goes hand in hand with the more general organizational transformation work already happening in the OuiShare ecosystem, so it will be also be very connected to OuiShare Experience & the Rethink & Remix project (where we’re offering a Masterclass on collective finance etc.).

If you know any organizations or groups that could be interested in exploring how they could implement collective finance, it would be great if you could put me in touch! Since this field is so new and there are not that many people working in it yet, I’m also keen to connect with any people you know looking into these topics as well (the like of Opencollective, CollectiveOne etc.).

Lastly, as many of you know, we’ve been experimenting with using Cobudget in OuiShare for about one year now. There is still A LOT to be done to make Cobudget really support OuiShare’s work fluidly, and that is one of the things I will be working on improving in the coming year. Any feedback or thoughts on this are most welcome.

Other updates

  • Excitingly, we were selected to receive a small grant of 30 K from the Prototypefund to kickstart our work
  • With Greaterthan, I applied to a program called the Edmund Hillary Fellowship (a non-paid fellowship, a little like an accelerator), a 3 year program bringing together entrepreneurs and investors that want to work on global problems from and with the ecosystem in New Zealand, and have been accepted! That means that I will be spending a few months each year in NZ starting this October.

If you are curious about learning more about this program, let me know and I’d be happy to tell you more about it!

MW

Martin Werlen Wed 30 Aug 2017 5:31PM

Congratulations for all the work on collective finance and for the grant and the fellowship ! :smiley:

TB

Tiberius Brastaviceanu Thu 31 Aug 2017 2:04AM

Hi @francesca keep me in your list. We are tackling this problem at a quite large scale, in the context of the Verdun Project, with a close to $8M budget for 5 years. We do have some background experience with budgeting in an open environment, procurement policies, meritocratic access to decision making about planning and spending, legal structure, etc. But this project will be a challenge and we'll need to join forces : )

F

Francesca Thu 31 Aug 2017 12:40PM

Great, let's definitely talk soon then!

A

Ana Thu 31 Aug 2017 3:20AM

@francesca , you really rock pretty lady!!
As you know I´ve been manage Cobudget for the Spanish community, we can keep on talking about the findings :)

F

Francesca Thu 31 Aug 2017 12:42PM

Absolutely! I hope we can talk about it at the Munich summit? Spain has actually been the most active on Cobudget so far, thanks to your faciliation, so it would be great to discuss this further :)

JS

Jon Schull Thu 31 Aug 2017 3:00PM

I am hoping to create a project-funding pool in co-budget for e-NABLE, the global network of volunteers using 3D technologies to make prosthetic hands and arms for underserved populations. Very eager to be part of your initiative!

F

Francesca Sun 3 Sep 2017 4:19PM

Great to see you here Jon! I saw that you are in touch with @katebeecroft and are going to do a call with her:)

MB

Myriam Bouré Tue 5 Sep 2017 8:01AM

Congratulation @francesca ! Of course we are very interested in OFN to follow your reflexions on all that as we are also experimenting things on our side, and are always facing the challenges you mentionned. :-)

PT

Pauline Trequesser Tue 5 Sep 2017 8:06AM

Congrats @francesca !

MH

Manel Heredero Wed 6 Sep 2017 7:35AM

@francesca @anamanli I have started invoicing in projects where I am using the OS brand and OS people, so hopefully there will be money coming in soon that I can use with co-budget. So here is my question: clients are from the UK and Spain, and I would like to support OS projects anywhere in the network, how does co-budget account for that? How do the funds move in the back end?

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