Funding the CoTech newsletter with the CoTech fund
Autonomic Co-operative
Public
Seen by 82
Background
The CoTech newsletter was an initiative which came out of some enlightened self-organisation which I can't quite remember who was driving but it was essentially an unmitigated success on all accounts. People loved this thing!
3 editions were published over at the all singing all dancing new category in the forum: https://community.coops.tech/c/newsletter/16 and tools and sources were setup on git.coop: https://git.coop/cotech/newsletter. We also setup a way to accept submissions from the network.
The purpose of the newsletter is to highlight inspiring examples of cooperation in the network, lay out "entrypoints" for how to get involved and try to bring all that juicy actually existing motivation and solidarity that is going on all the time in CoTech but it is not as visible as it could be.
The reason it stopped happening is that it is a commitment of 3-5 hours or so each month and that involves quite a bit of manual work, trawling around the internet hangouts of various coops and trying to put an editorial angle on the newsletter itself and then get the text peer reviewed and polished.
AFAIK, the community animation group targetted the newsletter as a good way to spark energy in the network and there was a thread to bring it back: https://community.coops.tech/t/the-return-of-the-cotech-newsletter/2223/28. Following a discussion on the latest community call, it seemed like a good idea to toss this into a proposal for the CoTech fund and get the thing going again.
Proposal
The CoTech fund will support up to a maximum of 5 hours a month of work by the newsletter team in order to publish the newsletter. The team is yet to be formalised but probably it will contain some of these people: https://git.coop/cotech/newsletter/-/graphs/master. I (Luke) can commit to it one my own in any case. The newsletter will appear at the end of each month. The proposed pay rate is £15 and hour. This brings the maximum funding amount to £75 a month. The newsletter team will setup clear ways to receive feedback from the network and will publish their work transparently and use open source licenses for their software tooling.
Chris Lowis (Go Free Range) Mon 15 Feb 2021 9:38AM
I think this is a great proposal and would really like to see it happen. I'm very keen that the work doesn't go unpaid - but I think it would also be great to try and get people (like me ... looks sheepish) volunteering again to help. I think a paid "coordinator" for the newsletter makes sense.
I think once a month should be a minimum - it's quite important that these things are regular and frequent to be useful. When we first wrote the newsletter the idea was "if you read one thing about CoTech make it this" - as a way to counter the challenges that folks had keeping up with the forum, loomio, mailing lists etc.
@lucyking1 - your point about using a big chunk of our budget is very valid. But as you said, we aren't really using it for anything other than fixed costs at the moment, and I think too many projects needing money would probably be a good problem to have. It might encourage us to up our contributions, or for other CoTech co-ops to start contributing.
I appreciate Loomio puts a bit of a time limit on proposals, but it would be good to get more opinions too. I'll see if I can contact the fund contributing co-ops to let them know this is running.
@jdaviescoates - I couldn't see United Diversity in the list of contributors to the fund. Would you be interested in contributing? (Voting on fund proposals is restricted to contributors at the moments)
Autonomic Co-operative Thu 18 Feb 2021 9:28AM
Ok, I've re-opened this one until the end of the month. That sounds like a good idea to get more voices heard here. I'd love to work with you on his @Chris Lowis (Go Free Range), so let's think about getting stuck in for next month since this looks like a goer.
Sion Whellens (Principle Six/Calverts) Tue 16 Feb 2021 9:07AM
Didn’t get a vote in but would support. There’s been a similar thread over at Solidfund on shifting from purely voluntary work...
Autonomic Co-operative Thu 18 Feb 2021 9:27AM
I've re-opened the proposal for a while longer, so please go ahead and vote :)
Lucy King · Mon 15 Feb 2021 4:10PM
I think I'm happy to go ahead as is for now and see how it pans out in a few months time?