Time tracking, work streams, incentivising and rewarding effort

Okay.

Everybody has wounding and dysfunction around money and I can see that this is a touchy subject we will need help with. I have created a job in Trello where we can start collecting resources to support this for those who are interested. In the same way that it seems difficult to have a conversation about Alex's room without things getting prickly, it seems the same is true when speaking about rethinking the way effort and energy flow around here.

Perhaps I have completely misunderstood, because I'm not very good with money. When we discussed changes to my rent in the context of the budget spreadsheet you had prepared, our focus was on changing the value of cell B3. When the value became lower, you expressed concern that "things were going to be tight" and you would have to be living extra frugally to make it work.

I interpreted that as "money in that cell gets paid to Dean, or it gets paid to somewhere that Dean is covering if we aren't paying enough". If this is incorrect, please let me know.

Other than that, I am in no way concerned about anything you've mentioned, and you are reading far too much into my post. In no way am I trying to protect my own slice of equity (such as it is), limit the amount of work we are allowed to do, cut down your efforts or any of the other negative dealing you are implicitly accusing me of.

As I've indicated above, the bookkeeping side of things and a sense of "actuals" in running a community is one aspect I'm concerned about; and the other is in how we can become more engaged in living here by becoming more *dis*engaged in living 'out there'.

Paying a stream of our rental income to ourselves so that we can afford to take more time off work and so that we can better balance the energy here seems like a pretty good way of empowering this to me. Tom is a good example as current top bread-winner in the house: he's busy with work, can't be here as much; but if part of his rent goes to paying a stipend to whoever helps maintain the gardens that week, doesn't that benefit all of us?

All I am seeking with the line of questioning is to sort out the current situation so that we can explore what is possible from here.

thanks Sam I didn’t want to be accusing you of anything apart from not understanding the reality of what my loan repayment is about. none of the garden work I do is capital and in fact most of the work I am currently doing is not capital in that it doesn’t add value to the assets we own and there is no current way to be rewarded for effort expended on the business. That is why I'm so keen to resolve this issue quickly, and I cant quite understand why ELF folk don't engage with this issue meaningfully. It is unsustainable for me as things stand and unless its resolved by the end of the month as we talked about before, I'm going to have to go get a job off the property.

Another discussion I'd like to have is about time tracking, incentivising & rewarding effort. Maybe a separate thread too. I wanted to draw out that when we last spoke about rental changes, the discussion centered on what amount the 'additional mortgage' that Dean is paid to work on the property from should be reduced to. In software we would call this a "code smell"- why is there a special clause for Dean? These quirks in our system are usually things we can genericise and make more useful if they are accessible by everyone. Essentially, short version:

• I think we should all start tracking time we spend on ELF matters (whether property work or unpaid management work- I spend about 5hrs per week at present). I want to start to get a sense of what our operational costs for running the community are in terms of our time investment. I also want to track gardening time, etc. Basically be tracking work that isn't tracked in the equity spreadsheet since it doesn't count for equity.
• Propose we track and monitor community running costs as a group, and transform our 'additional mortgage' for Dean into a 'self-tax' which we use to fund operations.
• We could agree upon a formula for distributing this portion of the rent every month in order to place shared ELF energy where it is most needed (whether as payment to individuals, or invested back to the community as capital to purchase materials & complete projects).
• Question: does Dean earn equity for working on the property when he is doing so whilst additionally being paid via rental income? This is potentially a "person X pays person Y to do work, how are rewards allocated?" matter we need to nut out.

Guilty as charged on not understanding, hah. I think I am more or less in the same boat as you here, in that I have a fairly short runway (maybe 4 months) in funding myself for both ELF contributions and in working on the community resource management software I am building. If I was working full-time, I would not be able to put in the same amount of effort I am now on either front, and one or both of those things might have to be put on hold so that I can sustain my existence. So basically anything we can do to prolong this period for both of us, we should do- with a vision that we can extend energy to others in a similar way and hopefully increase participation and reduce feelings of "not being valued" as a side-effect.

So what do we do? What do we need to move this along? I'm not sure of next steps... maybe getting clarity on all the mortgages we have is one aspect; maybe creating some new equity spreadsheets that split up capital works & unpaid works into separate sheets and also get rid of all the weirdness in those "Dean Labour" / "DC Inputs" etc tabs such that there are no "special cases" in there for yourself and everyone is treated the same. Then we have a clean, easily understandable slate to work from in deciding if any "self-taxing" contributions to pay ourselves from others' rent is possible.

How does that sound? What else should we be doing?

Sam you seem to have completely misunderstood the fact that my second mortgage is just that. I’m selling off some of my equity in order to survive and be able to work on the property instead of doing external work. There is no way it can be construed as renters paying my wages! I have reduced my equity by 260k in establishing the loan and the renters are buying my equity plus paying interest on the loan. If you are concerned that because I am able to live frugally on my loan repayments I have time to put a lot of effort into working on the property and hence get energy equity for some of that work then perhaps you may want to suggest some limit on the amount of work I do here. I was under the impression that the group wanted me to put more effort in. If it’s seen as in some way inequitable I can always put more effort into Monique’s property so I can make that lovable for her sooner and I will most likely move in there once it’s at lock up stage anyway so I can focus more effort on having it comfortable before September. The fact is I’m going to have to stop work on the apartment soon anyway as we have run out of money until we refinance.

@deancameron maybe we want to bring https://www.loomio.org/d/iNZbhRjG/elf-work-classification-and-reward-system into this thread?

Yes it’s the same topic really

sure can we merge threads?

Continuing with discussion of Dean's work classification discussion here.

In trying to align my classifications with yours I think we might be missing one category. The three groupings I had formulated were centered around how we reward the effort:

a) equity work (contributions which increase the value of ELF land or business)
b) paid work (contributions which are paid for by the community; via self-taxing)
c) unpaid work (effort required to keep the community running; to give us a sense of our commitment baseline & realistic expectation of time necessary)

Now, compared to what you have put in the spreadsheet:

"equity work" = "Capital Works". Easy.

"equity work" also seems to be equivalent to "Business O&M", but the examples you've given there seem more like maintenance-related work. I think at this stage this type of work should either be "paid" or "unpaid" (which really depends on whether we can restructure rent in such a way that we have a portion extra for paying ourselves).

"community spirit contribution" is a nice way of framing things, and obviously corresponds to "unpaid work". Appreciate that to some people, being awarded some tokens for helping out on a project actually feels tacky rather than like they are being valued. The other problem with these kinds of contributions is that they will throw our time accounting out. There is still a job in Trello to account for the time spent in the January working bee, which nobody has filled out. Without this information, we can't reliably or scientifically say how much energy has been invested into creating something. That's a problem we need to resolve. I also think it would be nice to track time against people's names even if they aren't taking equity for it; and offer to give them that equity if they decide to become a full member, so that they feel valued for the energy they've already put in.

"residents chores" is, again, more unpaid work. But the twist is there's an obligation here, so we need some way to manage a roster. I don't believe rosters, chore buster or things like that work well for us here given our varied schedules. Had a bit of a lightbulb moment the other day that a "fair" way to manage this might be to create a 'ranking' for every type of chore, which is calculated to the formula offered / benefited. Then it's just a case of deciding what "benefited" means. In the case of (for example) cooking meals it's pretty easy- you "offered" one if you cooked for the house, and you "benefited" if you ate the meal. For things like taking bins out it may be more like you "benefited" for every day you spent at the house but did not take the rubbish out. Would be interested to hear others thoughts about this- I think it could really work. Implementing a system to track it is another thing, though...

The classifications you're proposing also miss "community development work", to cover jobs that are not "Capital Works" (improving the property); but are efforts which improve the operational capabilities of the community. So creating our constitution, deciding on governance processes & equity structure, building & formalising processes would all fall under this umbrella. I think this should be considered "equity work" and treated the same as "Capital Works", for the much-discussed reason that we are the governors of our own economy within ELF and make our own rules as to how we distribute wealth. The fact that this dilutes the equity portion of those doing "Capital Works" doesn't matter to me- it's all "stuff that makes ELF better", and I think we ought to be splitting up any external valuations of ELF in accordance with our internal idea of "what is valuable", rather than the bank's. But the "different share class" idea that @deancameron is throwing into the mix in this spreadsheet might be worth exploring too... we'd need to understand that in a lot more depth to decide whether it's appropriate here.

Sam I don't think the ELF work classification proposal does miss community development work. I have just edited the document to make it clear where I see it fits. Ie in business development as part of ELF operations and maintenance function So the two share classes would cover capital shares ie the payout those shareholders would receive in the event of a sale of the tangible assets and distribution to them. The other is a Social Enterprise Share SES which would be an annual or monthly share buyback as ELF can afford it. Based on the shares held by SES holders an agreed proportion of ELF social enterprise profit or gross income less capital and interest repayments would be used to buy back those shares from willing SES shareholders. Profit is an opinion but gross income less capital and interest repayments is not, so I think that is the preferred determinant. So to give an example. Let's say the ELF covers its existing mortgages with rentals from the existing renters (which it actually does) so it borrows more money to finish the two apartments below. say $46000 as assumed in the draft annual budget sheet so the cost of servicing this is $270 per month over 30 years and the income from the rental would be $2500 per month. Some should go to a contingency/sinking fund but a substantial amount should be available to pay a dividend to non-capital shareholders in proportion to their recorded effort in the ELF social enterprise. Say for argument sake we agree to pay 60% of that as "surplus to buy back SES ie $1500 per month is paid to those shareholders and essentially ELF buys back that number of shares with those shares it can pay for about 30 hours ELF O&M work per month that is needed. as the social enterprise expands to include a LifeBubble sculpted home etc it will be able to pay for 100 hours per month or more and so the pool of effort and reward will grow.