What next for the FairShares Association?
Rory (FSA)
Public
Seen by 114
Dear Loomio Group members,
I thought this would be a good point at which to ask a key question about the future of the FairShares Association in light of my own retirement and future plans.
In July 2021, I took early retirement from Sheffield Hallam University and have been scaling back my academic activities. I plan to stop these completely at the end of 2022. The website of the FairShares Institute at the university has been discontinued, but maintaining the website of this association will continue for the foreseeable future.
Whilst work applying the FairShares Model to practice continues amongst the members of this group (particularly within Graham Boyd's network of entrepreneurs), the association itself is not currently developing any new materials/resources. The most productive line of development work is the FairShares Commons concept promoted by Evolutesix.
To ensure the availability of existing resources, I've just renewed the domain fairshares.coop for a further 2 years. This leaves about £1350 in the association's PayPal account. We have sufficient funds to cover hosting/website maintenance for another 3 - 4 years, even if we receive no further income from member subscriptions/book royalties.
People are still using the FairShares Rules Generator, and I receive occasional casual enquiries about using the https://fairshares.education site. However, without proactive development of either the association itself or resources, there is a case for planning a wind down of the association whilst finding a home for existing resources we want to survive in perpetuity.
In my view, the association has achieved what it set out to do, which is establish the credibility and resources needed by people who want to create multi-stakeholder and/or solidarity co-operatives. My energy/attention is gradually turning to other pursuits, but I'm happy to spend the next 2 years supporting a second generation of FairSharers if there is a group who want to continue proactively developing the association (and its resources).
Is there a group amongst you who would like to take over, and reinvigorate, development of the FairShares Model and its association?
(If not, I'll start planning how to winding down the company and find a permanent home for its resources).
dana Sun 27 Feb 2022 6:40PM
Also eager to work together on new governance ideas and tools that we think can help with association engagement in strategic plans and work... and of course we are together already here in Loomio which we can use for some decisions to come!
Rory (FSA) Mon 28 Feb 2022 2:12PM
This is all really positive. I'm about to go into a catch up meeting with Graham (Boyd) and Gareth (from Solve Earth).
Graham (Mitchell) - big thank you for the offer to host great fairshares website(s). Perhaps after the meeting with Graham B, we could arrange a meeting with the three/four of us (and anyone you wish to include) so we can take forward the practicalities of where everything will end up.
Graham M - I experienced some tricky problems keeping the website up and functioning due to the PHP compatibility issues with Wikimedia/hosting environments (ipage want me to 'upgrade' to PHP 7.3, but that will break the FairShare Wiki, I reckon. A person with your skills/knowledge will probably handle it better than I can, but I'll gather as much information as I can to assist any transfer(s).
dana Mon 28 Feb 2022 8:09PM
Excellent! And what a positive gift to see how we as a community can work together in new ways!
dana Sat 5 Mar 2022 7:01PM
Filled with hope and anticipation here.
dana Sat 5 Mar 2022 7:08PM
Our dark times demand new solidarity and I feel so grateful for our community here.
dana · Fri 25 Feb 2022 7:16PM
Exciting! We can try to attract and develop new resources and relationships as a bigger tent. I am prepared to get into what @Graham seems to point toward as strategy work with allies and adjacent spaces in a creative, structured approach! :)