Time to fund OuiShare activities for 2017!
Hey everyone, in accordance with what was agreed last year, it’s time to fund our general operational costs for 2017.
To get an easy overview of the full budget, you can look at this spreadsheet. Behind each activity, you can see the direct link to each bucket on Cobudget, labeled [GL 2017] to fund all these activities.
Overall, all activities and budgets remain the same as in 2016, with the exception of a few new roles. Read more about these in the section below.
In 2016, 100 % of these costs were funded by OuiShare France, however the aim is that as we have more communities with financial resources, this % goes down and distributes itself among more communities.
Even if only symbolic amounts, it would be great if our other communities with legal structures, Spain, Germany and the UK could add some funding. Individuals can too, of course!
Outlook: as you may have seen, I launched the following proposal for us to find more resilient ways to fund our global activities through paid memberships.
Next steps:
- Read & comment: Have we forgotten any critical activity that needs to be added? Is there something you don’t agree with? Add your general comments about the budget here on loomio, and activity specific comments next to each bucket.
- Fund: I suggest that all communities who intend to contribute funding have a meeting to agree internally how you would like to distribute your funds, and then do so by December 31st. OuiShare France can give about 30 000 € to the global budget, and will add its funds after that, so we can simply fill up the remaining buckets.
What activities are we talking about?
All these buckets concern infrastructure, resources and activities that are used by all OuiShare communities together. They part of our commons. You will notice that most of these concern communications in English and tech infrastructure.
This includes:
- Communications in English: social media, newsletters and our online magazine
- Our website and tech tool costs, tech & web maintenance / support. Examples: Website hosting, Mailchimp account for newsletters, Soundcloud pro account for OuiShare Radio.
- Financial & operational support to ensure the above activities continue
I’ve put up buckets for each of these activities individually, so that communities can use funding to express how important they think each of these activities are. If something is not seen as relevant by anyone, this would be a sign that we should stop the activity.
POINT OF DISCUSSION: Ypu will notice that the only communications we are funding “globally” are English ones. Till now, we could say that this has been a strategic choice of OuiShare to have a strong international presence and be accessible to people from anywhere in the world. This means that the financially stronger communities are subsidising English comms for all the small communities that do not have the means to fund communications in their language and keep local members informed (i.e. Portugal, Sweden, Netherlands, Eastern Europe, Lebanon, etc). Does this rational make sense? Let’s discuss!
New coordination roles added
There are some new roles you will find in Cobudget that I propose to add for 2017, which are part of the general topic of “Global Coordination”.
- Global Ops team Facilitation: Lead & Support the process of renewing / ending contracts for all team members of the global ops team + ensuring people are replaced when needed. Facilitating retrospective and feedback with each team member. // Work that happens once annually.
- Cobudget Steward: a person that makes sure our cobudget is “clean” and supports administrators with tracking, training and onboarding new users // http://cobudget.co/#/buckets/416
- Website Steward: a person who makes sure the OuiShare Website is functioning and regularly updated with current events, projects (by reminding community members to do so and informing tech maintenance team if necessary).
Inspired by Enspiral, I think we could call everyone working on these things the OuiShare Ops team.
Important, to be differentiated:
- Some roles are remunerated, others are not
- Some activities happen once annually, others are ongoing
- One role cannot only be held by one person. We can recombine roles based on people’s time and skills so that one person can also have several roles (this is an effort to make roles less bound to specific individuals and make it easier to find replacements).
I propose that the guideline to decide when an activity is remunerated by default or not, is whether the activity is 1) critical for OuiShare functioning operationally or 2) just nice to have or about improvement (vs. sustaining). This includes governance!
See the image I attached to visualize what is meant!
Background on why I’m proposing this evolution
To give the brief overview, here is the evolution I see in the area of global coordination that we have gone through:
- We realize we need to verbalize and fund thus far unexpressed roles and thus create the roles of community and global coordination – August 2014
- After 1 year we realize it does not work and is leading to Core Overload - June 2015
- We distribute community & global coordination, and as a first test, do not replace it by anything other than a resource hub for the time being – November 2015
- PRESENT: The distributing of community management and onboarding is working quite well and is a work in progress, but there are roles within the area of global coordination that will not happen and are needed for OS to function that I think we need to verbalize. These roles may not all need to be funded, but it is important that they are at least defined and attributed to individuals.
[Read more about steps 1 -3]((https://www.loomio.org/d/xQeZvliG/summit-reflections-restructuring-of-global-coordination-from-fran)
All Connectors should have already received access to Cobudget. Search your inbox for an email from Cobudget if you have never registered. If you do not find it, send me an email.
Albert Cañigueral Fri 30 Dec 2016 8:19PM
Excellent work and summary. I ll be happy to be more active al global level on 2017. We are also checking with @anamanli how the Spanish org can contribute to global expenses
Myriam Bouré Sat 31 Dec 2016 2:53PM
Nice work @francesca ! And +1 for @maud1 comment
Jennifer Leblond Sun 1 Jan 2017 4:16PM
Top ! :-)
Francesca Mon 2 Jan 2017 4:56PM
I totally agree Maud! Looking at this global budget his year, I think that firstly, the workload of it will get smaller each year, because in most cases we can do copy paste of the previous year and only need to focus the things that we need to add / adapt or get rid of. Therefore I think if we structure it well, we should be able to work on this budget with a small team of people who are also doing budgeting locally, for instance. I already tried to involve more people towards the end of the process this year, so I think it would be great if we could expand this collaboration for next year.
Who would be interested in joining team that works on this?
For your point about making the volunteer activities more visible, do you have anything in mind for how to do this? Do you think that it is sufficient if for now, we add them as roles to our spreadsheet?
Myriam Bouré Tue 3 Jan 2017 8:13AM
@francesca I'll be happy to be part of that team, that would be a way for me to understand better the different roles involved within OuiShare, which even after 2 years in OuiShare is sometimes not so clear :-) About making volunteer activities more visible, adding the roles would be a first step yes, and maybe some "qualititative and quantitative" indicators to raise consciousness about what those volunteer work represent, even if we don't put a monetary value on it. Like listing the projects and tasks involved in the role, and an estimation of the time spent on it (not precise, just a rough idea). That would be my suggestion. I'm wondering if using the open source version of Glassfrog could be a way to do that? @marieanneb you are already using it, what do you think? I have never used it but it could be a more visual way to represent the people involved either as volunteers or paid contributors, what are the roles and also be transparent on who is paid what for which role, which would also be a contribution to open sourcing OuiShare :-)
Maud Wed 4 Jan 2017 5:58PM
I'm not reallly involved in budgets and I think indeed it makes sense to involve first people who work on it locally; still I'll be happy to take some time to second the team if needed; and some time on reflexion about new roles needed or obsolete roles.
Speaking about tools, yes he open source of glassfrog could work but it means adding again an new tool; maybe we can try make a good use of the tools we already have; why not adapting this use of trello to our own context ? : http://futureofwork.nobl.io/future-of-work/define-roles-and-responsibilities-to-encourage-delegation?rq=roles; it's something i'm interested to work on, but I need first to finish the work on values and go further on the work about project updates (which maybe linked) so I cannot commit to help on that on short term unfortunately!
Marie-Anne Bernasconi Mon 9 Jan 2017 6:15PM
@myriamboure I now use Holaspirit, which is really easy and convenient to use (with many API integrations). However, it's not free and might add a layer of complexity to OuiShare since it's using the quite rigid holacracy system.
Francesca Thu 12 Jan 2017 12:42AM
Awesome Myriam that you want to be part of the budgeting team in the future :)
Maud · Fri 30 Dec 2016 6:19PM
Dear @francesca thanks for this work again; my main comments regarding this, as I already share on the channel on slack, are not that much about the budget repartition, but about roles.
+ first, how could we distribute more this huge work of putting the budget together ? could we try to do like a sprint or something ?
+ remunerated or not, we need a way to clearly see the roles needed (or nice to have) for OuiShare, and who is taking them; it's a view a bit different than projects. For me it's important, but I'm wondering if it seems useful to other people ?