Cat Johnson: Loomio is a worker-owned cooperative building open-source software to help organizations and communitieswith collaborative decision making. Based in New Zealand, the co-op is part of Enspiral, a collaborative network of social enterprises. Loomio’s vision is to create a world where it’s easy for anyone to participate in decisions that affect them.

The Loomio Co-op Handbook provides a behind-the-scenes look at the co-op: what inspired it, how the organization plans and implements its work, how it is organized, and its values as a co-operative social enterprise.

The handbook serves as an overview of a pioneering digital cooperative and a roadmap for other worker-owned cooperatives. It details how the organization strategizes and plans, how it uses work sprints to “maintain agility, clarity and accountability,” how it self organizes into working groups and how it uses a collaborative process to prioritize product development.

In addition to the practicalities of running a worker-owned cooperative, the Co-op Handbook also offers insights into how Loomio looks after its people, from prioritizing well-being and conflict resolution to professional development, and more.

If you’re creating a worker-owned co-op, or platform co-op, this will be a good resource to have in your toolbox. In the following video, Loomio’s co-founder Ben Knight shares his story and some insights into self-organizing communities.

The post The Loomio Handbook: A Roadmap for Worker-Owned Cooperatives appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Christopher D. Cook: In 2008, Alanna Krause hit a wall. Just 25 years old and already rising through the corporate ranks as a global technical support team leader at Bloomberg in London, Krause began to feel that her work was “meaningless.”

“No matter how well I did my job or how much I improved things, ultimately what I was doing was moving numbers from one column to another column,” Krause said.

A year later, amid a rousing protest against the G-20 Summit near her office, Krause had a deeper epiphany. “I was climbing this ladder, but I looked ahead of myself and I saw that no matter how far up it I climbed, there was nowhere up there I wanted to go,” Krause recalled in a speech at the New Frontiers 2016 conference in New Zealand.

Embarking on a journey many might dream of, Krause quit her job and traveled through Spain, India, and the U.S., looking for meaning and fulfillment. She eventually landed in Wellington, New Zealand, where she joined the decentralized, entrepreneurial collective Enspiral.

Functioning as a supportive umbrella for freelancers and social enterprises, Enspiral offers its members creative independence and a strong sense of community. Members pool and invest a portion of the profits from their work into new social-impact projects.

Alanna Krause shows how collective funds can be used at Enspiral.

Enspiral is “a bubble within which we can make our own economy, where we get to set the rules,” Krause says. “We don’t have to wait for the world out there to change for us to start living in the transition economy, right now.”

While Enspiral may operate in a bit of a bubble because its core members are highly paid independent software programmers, it is part of a growing movement forging new paths for freelancers in an increasingly unstable work world.

An emerging collectivist movement

Like an extended smashing of atoms, the 9-to-5 job market has shattered and splintered over the past 25 years in ways that have both liberated and trapped millions of workers.

Uber drivers, ditch-digging day laborers, adjunct professors, freelance software designers, temp attorneys, domestic workers, and often woefully underpaid “task rabbits” hired online at a moment’s notice, wouldn’t appear to have much in common. Their pay and working conditions vary wildly, and some push paper while others handle steering wheels, mops, diapers, or sledge hammers — but what unites them is a gig economy marked by flexibility, instability, innovation, and legal and financial uncertainty.

As the gig economy proliferates, growing numbers are breaking away and creating their own work communities, based on a mix of autonomy and interdependence. Combating precarious economics and social isolation, freelancers are using new open-source technology and old-fashioned shoe leather organizing to create new ways to work and to work together.

Enspiral, for instance, uses a mix of physical meeting spaces, open-source technology, and digital organizing to help workers build creative and economic independence as well as community. The collective is just one piece of a burgeoning global freelancers’ movement that is helping independent workers to reposition power and ownership in a platform-driven age.

Scanning the freelancing terrain, Steve King, a partner at Emergent Research, says he finds loose-knit “guild-like groups informally banding together to help each other” who are sharing their networks and resources for mutual gain. From coworking spaces to platform-based support groups, these freelancers’ networks have cropped up organically, King says.

The constellation of freelancer organizing ranges from Enspiral-type freelancer collectives to newfangled unions for gig workers such as Uber drivers. Whether fighting for living wages and basic rights, or collaborating on projects with fellow freelancers, these initiatives share the larger aim of creating meaning, dignity, and power in their work together.

The gig economy’s roots

As more goods and services are sold via the web and mobile apps on an as-needed (or wanted) basis, the freelance and gig workforce has exploded. In the U.S. alone, 55 million people — about 35 percent of the total labor force — worked on a freelance basis in 2016, according to a newly released study by the New York City-based Freelancers Union and digital freelancing platform Upwork. The ranks of freelancers jumped by 700,000 in just one year, from 2014-2015. Roughly two-thirds of freelancers, 63 percent, are working independently by choice rather than sheer necessity, the study found.

Just in time for the elections, the study also concluded that 67 percent of freelancers “are more likely to vote for candidates who say they support them having ‘a strong voice in deciding issues about their work’ or ‘having access to health and retirement benefits regardless of their employment status.’”

Now that everything else is scalable, modular, liquid and temporary, shouldn’t your benefits be portable? Photo: Freelancers Union, Flickr.

“Independent professionals are an increasingly integral part of the U.S. workforce,” Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel says. “We should be addressing their interests or America will fall behind countries that are better equipping their evolving workforces.”

Sara Horwitz, founder and executive director of the Freelancers Union, echoes that sentiment.

Freelancers “are a diverse but vital part of the U.S. economy, contributing over $1 trillion in freelance earnings to the economy,” Horowitz says. “Now’s the time for business leaders, policy makers and candidates alike to stand up and take notice of their potential influence and to start developing ways to help them overcome the most pressing issues impacting their lives.”

Beyond the coffee shop: freelancers go from “working alone together” to working collectively. Photo by Tim Gouw, Unsplash.

The complex and evolving landscape of freelancing includes compelling success stories but also deep disparities, just as in the larger labor market. “Because contingent work can be unstable or afford fewer worker protections, it tends to lead to lower earnings, fewer benefits, and a greater reliance on public assistance than standard work,” a 2015 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office stated.

Despite vast ranges in worker empowerment and income, this is a precarious group, the GAO found. Contingent workers are more likely than full-time employees to be people of color, women, low-income, and with less education and class mobility.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the ranks of Britain’s self-employed workers have risen by 732,000 since 2008, while permanent conventional jobs rose by 339,000, according to an in-depth report published by Co-operatives UK and partners titled “Not Alone.” But while this may seem a sign of spirited entrepreneurialism, the report found that low-income workers in the self-employed sector are now the norm.

This upheaval has its roots in a deeper power struggle over the terms and conditions of labor. “There is a long-term shift of power from workers to employers since the 1970s,” says Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston University.

Schor says plunging rates of unionization, increased corporate power, anti-labor policies since the Reagan era in the U.S., and a move to producing goods on an as-needed basis globally, have led to a “weakening of workers” — a key reason behind today’s precarious labor. This steady diminishing of workers’ rights has placed even more power in the hands of corporations.

Amid a more volatile global market, “companies don’t want to be locked into providing income security for their workers,” says Gerald Friedman, professor of economics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

This volatility is one of the driving factors behind the freelancers’ collectives cropping up today. But it’s not a new phenomenon. “In the nineteenth century, working class self-help organisations included craftsmen’s guilds, co-operatives, friendly societies and the first unions,” the authors of the “Not Alone” report noted.

In today’s “age of economic insecurity and rapid changes in technology there is now the opportunity to reinvent democratic self-help for the twenty-first century in order to widen participation on a fair basis for all in work,” the report added.

Freelancers get collective

Today’s freelancer collectives are driven not just by fancy technology and well-remunerated innovation — they’re sometimes driven by a passion for social change at community and societal levels.

In Spain’s Catalonia region, the Cooperativa Integral Catalana (CIC) offers everything from common meeting places and community dialogues on economic alternatives, to income tax benefits and community pantries where people share local food.

The cooperative strives to be an autonomous community and is building its own kind of political-cultural-economic commons. Once every two weeks, the cooperative hosts open assemblies to discuss ongoing and new projects, ranging from reports and documentaries on capitalism, to developing independent currencies to conduct trade outside of the larger economic system.

The CIC has set its sights on a wider transformation of society — a vision that spans personal autonomy, community sovereignty, and creative exploration of new ways of living and working.

Cooperativa Integral Catalana members with a co-op produced energy drink, which can also be purchased using social currency. Photo by Luis Camargo, CiC, Flickr.

“It is one of our tasks, empowering us to explore other forms of reciprocity, use of so­­­­­­­­cial currencies, fair coins, direct barter and exchange, un-monetized economies, and gift economies,” CIC member Raquel Benedicto says.

Other collectives may not be as explicitly political, yet are forging new collaborative communities that are slowly but surely democratizing the economics of creativity.

In Berlin, the Agora Collective provides artists and other creative workers with a shared space and collaborative formats for developing their work. Agora, which was founded as a coworking space in 2011, provides studios for artists and dancers, collaborative artist workshop programs, residencies, and programs that support international artist collaborations.

“Our coworking floors accommodate professionals of all fields, and allow a diverse and active community to flourish in our building,” the group describes on its website.

With strategic partnerships across Europe, and financial assistance from the Nordic Culture Fund and the Swiss Foundation among others, Agora has been able to think big — providing not only coworking spaces and collaborations, but ongoing dialogues and projects that invite new ways of thinking about work and how it should be valued. Agora’s Circular Economy project, for instance, is an extended conversation about ways to re-organize production and consumption to eliminate waste.

Similarly, Netherlands-based Seats2Meet (S2M) blends shared workspaces and social networking, tapping an immense desire among freelancers to expand opportunities and social connections. Since its launch with just 10 people in 2005, S2M has grown steadily, connecting tens of thousands of independent workers to thousands of free, shared workspaces around the world — and to each other. As Shareable reported in 2013, S2M links freelancers up with diverse kinds of physical spaces, including ice cream shops, libraries, theatres, and even hospitals.

S2M president Ronald van den Hoff says what began as an experiment in sharing physical spaces evolved into a knowledge exchange, peer support network, and community for oft-isolated indie workers. “The rise of the numbers of people using the ‘free workplaces and catering’ was staggering,” Van den Hoff says. “Within months we had hundreds of independent workers daily visiting us, filling up the public lounge, and logistically we were completely overwhelmed.”

Seats2Meet headquarters in Utrecht, Netherlands. Photo: Neal Gorenflo.

Freelancers, “started to co-work almost automatically and share their knowledge and network, [and] somehow the reciprocity flourished,” he says. “So we decided to use ‘the willingness to share’ as a form of payment.” In other words, people could co-work for free as long as they agreed to help each other.

Although S2M is a for-profit company, Van den Hoff says its detachment from venture capital and other forms of investment return imperatives has empowered this model of sharing work among freelancers.

“The main limit is people themselves: the moment startups are financed by VC’s, they are protecting their assets — ‘it is my database, my network, my clients’ — and they lose their ability to share,” he says.

S2M is redefining work and workers’ relationship to each other in important ways. Providing free workspace to those who help each other, for instance, represents the seed of a new social contract between workers, rather than between workers and companies. The organization’s community is rooted in peer support.

New Zealand’s Enspiral Network has also created an inspired model of freelancer collaboration and community. What began as a coworking space among like-minded people in Wellington six years ago has evolved into a new-fangled cooperative linking freelancers and social enterprises in a global network of mutual aid and collective action.

Like other freelancer collectives, Enspiral, has grown beyond simply sharing a physical space. The organization mixes independence and collectivism, enabling creative workers such as graphic designers, tech gurus, data whizzes, and others to pursue their ventures — with administrative and other support systems funded collectively by the group’s members.

“What do you need?” — taking care of each other at Enspiral. Photo: Namaste.org.

The Enspiral Foundation, a charity run by Enspiral members, provides the connective tissue between the community’s contributing members, freelancers, and social enterprises alike. Contributors voluntarily donate to the foundation, and decide democratically how to use the money to improve their social impact and business prospects. Together, contributors’ have created Enspiral Services, a “market-facing” entity where they promote their services collectively.

Among the group’s many innovations is Loomio Cooperative, whose main offering is an open source democratic decision-making platform. Launched in 2012 when Enspiral members and Occupy activists recognized a need for collaborative decision-making tools, Loomio is simultaneously a limited liability company with investors and a registered worker-owned cooperative.

All these organizations represent new models of independent and interdependent worker communities supporting each other’s work socially, professionally, and collaboratively — created from scratch, without huge amounts of capital, big investors, or bureaucracy.

The cooperative explosion

Growing numbers of freelancers are also seeking out or creating cooperatives — some organized as online platforms, others old-fashioned brick-and-mortar — for community and financial stability.

Despite many distinctions, what unites platform co-ops and traditional worker co-ops is their focus on shared worker power and profits. “In the 19th and 20th century, the shop floor was the primary arena for worker organizing, now it’s platforms,” says Nathan Schneider, writer and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Amid the demise of the labor social contract and the rise of contingent work, says Schneider, the gig economy creates “atomized and individualized participants, and is really structured for us to be competing with each other.”

“We need to imagine alternatives to that model,” Schneider says.

As the gig economy has centralized profits while decentralizing work, digital activists and entrepreneurial creators are launching slews of platform cooperatives — websites and mobile apps that provide a service or sell a product but that share ownership, governance, and profits with users. Tech-savvy sharers have created cooperative online marketplaces and peer-to-peer venues like Stocksy and Fairmondo, where the creators and producers run the show.

Fairmondo, founded in Germany in 2012, is a platform co-op alternative to eBay where the more than 2,000 online sellers are member-owners. It puts openness, fairness, and democracy at the core of the enterprise. Co-op employees choose at least half of Fairmondo’s executive board, and major business decisions are made democratically through a general assembly of members. To support their global expansion, Fairmondo is developing a network of self-directed local cooperatives, including one in the UK soon.

“We have seen phenomenal growth of worker co-ops in the past ten years, partly because workers are more precarious, more vulnerable,” says Melissa Hoover, executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. “We see people starting worker co-ops to gain protections, because they are too vulnerable on their own. When you’re an independent worker, it’s harder to bargain than when you are part of a cooperative.”

Particularly inspiring, says Hoover, is the “exploding trend” of service sector worker co-ops, many of them launched by immigrant women.

Caregivers, domestic workers, and taxi drivers are joining forces in worker-led and often union-supported ventures to reclaim power and voice in their work. Teaming up with unions and worker advocacy groups such as Make the Road New York, workers are starting co-op businesses providing services such as domestic care and ride hailing services.

“There’s so much focus on Uber drivers, but nobody cares about the day laborers, nobody cares about the domestic workers,” says Emergent Research’s King. “We have to remember this economic shift is hitting people hard, and we have to focus on the ones getting hit the hardest.”

In New York City, transgender Latina beauticians, long suffering discrimination and abuse, are forming their own worker-owned business. “The girls got immediately excited by the idea of creating a business where they would be the sole owners, where there wouldn’t be any bosses verbally and physically harassing them, and where they could earn a dignified wage to survive,” Daniel Puerto, worker cooperative developer at Make the Road New York, a nonprofit that fights for the rights of minorities, told ink.nyc.

Taxi driver co-ops are also paving the way to increased wages, diminished pay gaps between managers and employees, and cab driver healthcare — all while producing a profit, according to a 2015 Democracy at Work report.

Denver alone is home to two driver-run taxi co-ops, showing there is plenty of interest and promise in this alternative. The biggest, Green Taxi Cooperative, employs more than 700 drivers, unionized within the Communication Workers of America, which represents numerous cab worker co-ops. Union Taxi, another taxi driver co-op supported by CWA, slashed drivers’ car lease rate by two-thirds, increasing their earning power and free time.

This May, the New York-based Independent Drivers Guild (IDG) secured an agreement to improve pay, benefits, and working conditions for more than 35,000 Uber drivers, who are treated as independent contractors and thus denied workers’ compensation and other protections. The IDG, affiliated with the Machinists Union, gives these app-based drivers the collective power to improve their earnings and fight abuses on the job.

Through the guild, “our voice will be heard,” says longtime New York City driver and organizer Muhammed Barlas. “More money comes into their pocket, plus they have some protection,” he says.

The two-tiered platform economy

Of course, not everyone is finding entrepreneurial success. The gig economy notion of workers opting in droves to become well-paid freelancers masks a more complicated reality. For every finely paid independent consultant, there are many more “freelance” domestic workers, janitors, and others contending with lower wages and precarious work.

Surveys simultaneously show that a majority of freelance workers want to remain independent, and that an increasing percentage of the labor market — particularly Millennials and minorities — have difficulty attaining adequate paying full-time employment.

Depending on factors ranging from pay and economic leverage to issues of entrepreneurialism and risk, what represents precarious work for some also marks independence for others. Many experience both.

The issue of worker choice is central to whether freelancers and other independent toilers are satisfied with their situation, says Emergent Research’s King. “Consistently fifty to sixty percent of those doing independent work tell us they chose it and they like it,” he says. “About thirty percent say they hate it and want to go back. A lot of it is psychology, people’s risk profiles.”

Our “choices” as workers operate in a context and continuum of real and perceived options — as well as our ability to command high enough wages that we can exercise that free choice.

What dictates worker choice, freedom, and power is not always so clear-cut. “Whether you’re a freelancer by choice or by necessity, what we’re seeing is that the line is increasingly blurry,” says Melissa Hoover, executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives.

For instance, Hoover says, some lower-paid independent workers are highly entrepreneurial, while, adjunct professions may not want to be working on a freelance basis.

“There’s a substantive difference between freelancers organizing to get more work, and independent workers protecting themselves against abuse on the job,” she says.

At the same time, Hoover says, high wage freelancers also need basic legal protections. “The common thread is that without an employer there’s very little protection, very little stability,” she says. “Whether you’re freelancing by choice or not, you’re still dealing with the externalization of costs by employers.”

Despite the risks and uncertainty, researchers for the “Not Alone” report concluded that many self-employed workers “enjoy working this way and would not necessarily want to return to a traditional job.”

“While this does not disguise their low income and their social and economic insecurity, a key point to take into account is that they do not necessarily want ‘saving’ or ‘rescuing’ from self-employment but instead seek recognition, support, and assurance that the risks and rewards of their status are balanced fairly between them and the organisations they trade with,” the report noted.

The role of unions

Unions may seem an afterthought in today’s disarrayed economy, where only eight percent of the private sector workforce enjoys collective bargaining power. Yet, while still organizing millions of workers directly on job sites, unions play an equally important role as supporting actor for worker alliances, cooperatives, and guilds seeking to galvanize freelancers’ power.

“Labor was built firm by firm, sector by sector — now the economy is far more fluid,” says Institute for the Future’s Natalie Foster. Since the early 1990s when the “temping of America” and contingent work disrupted traditional shop-floor organizing based on a single worksite, unions have scrambled to adapt to this atomized workforce.

Technology may be part problem and part solution. The tech-based jobs in the gig economy have further dispersed workers and jobs, making it harder for unions to connect and organize — but many unions are embracing both shoe leather and digital organizing.

With support from The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and more than 50 community-based domestic worker groups around the country, the Domestic Workers Alliance has emerged as a change agent for thousands of nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers across the U.S. who are pressured into independent contractor status marked by unlivable wages and abuse on the job.

As more of this “work that makes all other work possible” gets farmed out via online platforms such as care.com and handy.com, these workers — largely immigrant women and women of color — become further isolated.

“The more companies go online to find domestic workers, they’re getting all their workers on their platform, it’s really affecting how workers find work,” says Barbara Young, national organizing director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), and a 17-year veteran of domestic work herself.

Many domestic workers endure 60-hour work weeks with no overtime pay, harassment and abuse, no time off for personal health, and lack of clarity about their pay and job security, says Young. Nearly one in four are paid below their state’s minimum wage.

An NDWA survey found that domestic work is one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy, Young says. “But the reality of the work is it’s very unstable and insecure.”

Young says platforms like care.com initially offered $5 an hour domestic jobs, but “we said it’s too low, you’re breaking the law,” and eventually, with pressure from her organization and its 20,000 domestic workers, some firms improved.

Another domestic worker alliance initiative, Fair Care Labs, helps spawn market-based and technology-driven ventures to create a just future for the industry.

“As more domestic work shifts online, through on-demand platforms in the gig economy and online marketplaces, the issues related to domestic work have been shifted, not solved,” Palak Shah, the group’s alliance director of social innovations, explains on the group’s website. “We want to effect change while the DNA of the online economy is still being written.”

As this “DNA” writes itself, the AFL-CIO and many worker advocacy groups are promoting public policies to help protect the millions of on-demand workers who may not benefit from platform innovations.

In its agenda for the on-demand economy, the labor umbrella group promotes racial and gender equity in new digital economy jobs, advocates for new approaches to hold companies accountable for their working conditions, and champions portable benefits policies that will provide workers with a robust safety net.

Beyond equitable wages and protections, however, lie equally important if less tangible challenges: How can we ensure that these emerging freelancers’ collectives are able to sustain their work in the long-term? What role could public policy play in supporting these efforts? Can these communities find ways to share their knowledge and lessons learned to aid future freelancer initiatives?

Amid a fractured employment world marked by invention and insecurity, freelancers are confronting macro-level economic challenges as well as age-old tensions between individualism and collectivism.

Even a successful story like Enspiral remains both inspiring and cautionary.

“Our freelancer co-op model is still underdeveloped,” cofounder Joshua Vial explains. “We face many unsolved challenges such as recruiting leadership, providing income security, managing quality, securing sufficient working capital, resourcing work ‘on’ the business and supporting people without managing them.”

As the economy promotes this dizzying mix of exploitation and inventive community-building, freelance workers — in both higher and lower wage sectors — are fighting for legal rights, creating new work arrangements, and building businesses with social vision. Somewhere between economic coercion and human agency, with plenty of success and struggle, freelancers are finding their way through the economic wilderness.

Our gratitude goes to Steve King and family who provided funding for this piece and other stories on freelancing, platform cooperatives, and libraries. 

Freelance collectives — stronger together. Photo: Mike Benedetti, Flickr.

The post How Freelancers Are Reinventing Work Through New Collective Enterprises appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Name: Loomio
Website: www.loomio.org
Industry: Online Open-Source Software

Could you provide some background on Loomio? What problem does your service/product solve?

Loomio is a decision-making tool for groups who want to collaborate democratically. It enables more transparency and inclusion, with fewer meetings and emails. Unlike a survey or poll, it facilitates a process of constructive deliberation, synthesising solutions from diverse viewpoints.

We created Loomio to solve a problem we ourselves were having, and then found a lot of other people need this tool, too. It can be very difficult to get everyone together for a meeting, and even then you often only hear from certain voices or you run out of time. Meanwhile, trying to make clear, well-documented decisions using mass reply-all emails or open-ended social media messaging is a mess.

With Loomio, it’s easy to include all the stakeholders, and converge on clear outcomes you can act on together.

Loomio originally grew out of the intersection of activists from the Occupy movement and entrepreneurs from Enspiral, a network of positive impact businesses. We realized we were trying to solve the same problem — fast, inclusive, effective decision-making — so we tackled it together.

What inspired you to found Loomio as a worker cooperative as opposed to a traditional model?

We’re a social enterprise, driven by our impact mission. We believe that more groups practicing effective, inclusive decision-making can change organizational dynamics at a global scale. In order to have that kind of impact externally, we have to authentically live it internally.

Equitable collaboration is in our DNA. For us, being a co-op was an easy choice, because it so closely fit with our most deeply-held values. Beyond that, it was a really effective way of clarifying stakeholding and sharing responsibility.

We want to have impact with our product, but we also think the way we’ve structured our company and how we work is part of our social mission. We want to show it’s possible to do a startup differently, with no bosses, driven by pro-social values, and with true collective ownership.

The Loomio team. All workers at Loomio are also owners of the company.

How have the worker-owners decided to share the responsibilities of running the business?

We open-source all our processes, structures, and policies in our Co-Op Handbook, which you can see at http://loomio.coop.

Collaboration and co-ownership doesn’t mean everyone is involved in every decision. That would be impractical. We work to strike a balance of empowered delegation and collective input. The ultimate mandate in the co-op traces back to the worker-owners as a group. From there we make a range of delegations such as the to the board of directors (governance) and coordinators (operational management).

The cooperative members agree the overall strategy annually, and get together once a quarter to set some high-level outcomes for the whole co-op. The team self-organizes into working groups (like product development or marketing) to achieve these outcomes. We are a fully agile organization, running two-week sprints and daily standups. Individuals have a lot of autonomy in their day to day work, and we emphasize good reporting and documentation so others can keep up to date.

Of course we’re heavy users of Loomio ourselves! We use it to make decisions among the members of a working group, and to widen out the stakeholding to the whole co-op if needed. We’ve made over 500 decisions together as a team on Loomio. It allows us to be dynamic and responsive in a fast-moving environment, breaking the trade-off between speed and inclusion, because we need both.

What did the start-up process look like? Where/how did you find start-up funding?

We took a very ‘lean startup’ approach, creating a useful minimum viable product as quickly and cheaply as possible, and then iterating on it based on real user feedback. We got off the ground with no capital at first. We quickly started generating revenue from consulting services, working with organizations who want to collaborate and do effective consultation but need help.
After releasing a beta prototype of our software, and being overwhelmed with interest in it from around the world, we did a round of friends and family loans. Then, in 2013, we ran a successful international crowdfunding campaign ($125,000 USD). This enabled us to work on a new version of the software, and Loomio 1.0 was released the following year. We implemented a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model, with free and paid options. The free version is supported by donations, or you can subscribe and get premium features.

In 2015, we raised a round of ethical capital ($450,000 USD) from impact investors, using redeemable preference shares. It’s an innovative instrument that keeps control in the cooperative and the focus on the impact mission, while compensating investors and helping us grow the business. We’re looking toward another similar round in early 2017, as we continue to increase revenue. [You can read more about Loomio’s pioneering investment strategy here. –Ed.]

What has everyone found are the benefits to being organized as a worker coop?

We love being a co-op. Honestly, I can’t imagine owning a startup by myself, and feeling all the pressure just on my own shoulders. Doing a startup is a roller-coaster ride, financially and psychologically. We look after each other and share the load.

Being a co-op has allowed us to build a truly great team. While we can’t offer much money to workers right now, we can invite them into co-ownership. It’s served as a good signal to attract people who want to work in this way and who share our values.

Our co-op structure has had a big impact on the development of our product. We’ve built something that works because we use it every day to make real collaborative decisions together. Our values show through in what we design: a hierarchical, extractive, closed-source company just wouldn’t build this product. Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation said of Loomio, “Our values —our democratic values— are in that software.”

For me, the level of authenticity being a co-op enables is one of the main benefits. Our product is about collaboration, inclusion, and creating a more equitable world. Because we live these values in everything we do, I can hold my head up high knowing that, while we haven’t got everything figured out, we are walking the walk.

Loomio makes software that helps groups make decisions together.

What has everyone found are the challenges to being organized as a worker coop?

We are a very diverse team, with backgrounds in social change, facilitation, community sector, and civil society, as well as business, technology, and startups. And of course we’re working for a collective vision, not an individual one. It was a long process to integrate all these perspectives into one coherent product and business model. So velocity has been somewhat of a challenge. I think we could have moved faster. We’ve all worked on ourselves and grown a lot as people along the way, and profoundly deepened our shared understanding.

Going through that process of integrating our diversity made us much stronger, as a team and as a product. Now we’re pretty good at thinking strategically and getting the whole team focused. Working in highly collaborative and inclusive ways often means investing more time getting everyone on the same page, but once you get there you can move together super effectively.

We’ve also faced challenges with raising capital. We’re not a good fit for traditional venture capital (VC) funding, because we don’t have ordinary equity and don’t want to set up certain profit maximizing incentives. We’re not building Loomio for a “big exit” — we want to create a company that lasts, pays back investors and ourselves, and ultimately builds the commons.

So, it took us longer than many startups to find the right model for capital. But once we found it, we discovered that there are investors out there who deeply care about social impact, who seemed to be waiting for just such an opportunity. I think better capital models for mission-driven startups and co-ops is definitely a problem worth solving, for investors, entrepreneurs, and society. The market is ready for alternatives.

What advice, if any, do you have for anyone interested in starting their own worker coop?

Check out our handbook, and feel free to copy it, fork it, adapt it. It’s open source! And please share back what you learn with us. We’d love to see more worker co-ops starting up, and are eager to help if we can. Real stories of the journeys of others are extremely helpful. We feature a lot of them on our blog.

Find a group of collaborators who share a deep sense of purpose and values. That’s what held us together through differences of opinion, hard times, and moments of doubt. The number one reason startups fail is the team imploding and relationships breaking down. If you can collaborate well together, you’ll be in good shape! So invest in good process and communication, and look after each other as human beings.

The post Making Decisions Together: The Story of Loomio appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This video is a very personal testimony how Alanna and other co-founders of Enspiral wanted to change towards a more ethical economy that is generative to people and the earth:

“Alanna Krause of Enspiral tells the story of how Enspiral created a system for participatory budgeting, and a new internal economy between a community of 300+ entrepreneurs, creatives, freelancers and change-makers dedicated to working on “stuff that matters”. After working in the financial sector through the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/2008, Alanna left the sector and succeeded in helping create a model for a new economy that works for everyone.”

The post Alanna Krause on Enspiral’s Ethical Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The P2P Foundation is a global network of researchers in open design, open hardware, free software – all kinds of systems that are open to contribution and create a common resource. They build collective knowledge, and explore how to develop livelihoods in a new social and economic paradigm.

The P2P Foundation team members are individually extremely productive, and skilled at working autonomously. They continually deliver value when collaborating in a format like a wiki. But they found that decision-making about taking collective action was different.

When we have to do things together that really require more high-level coordination, and more detail, we tended to turn in circles.

They found themselves having discussions that would not reach a clear conclusion. Then six months later, the same topic would arise again. Certain activities with more complexity proved hard to coordinate informally.

Loomio helps us to say, ‘We discussed this. We came to an agreement.’ It’s easy to use, and allows us to work in a non-hierarchical way? ?without being chaotic.

Making a decision on Loomio makes it legitimate, and allows the group to clearly delegate responsibility for execution. Those carrying out the implementation know the whole group is behind them.

You get a mandate from your community— that’s what I like about it.

For Michel, the most important thing about Loomio is that it’s useful. This is why he’s seen it spread virally throughout peer-production communities, without the need for marketing. It resonates because of what he calls values-sensitive design.

Our values — our democratic values —are in that software.

Despite being the foremost librarian and chronicler of open-source collaboration practices, Michel himself is a researcher, not a technologist. Yet he finds Loomio to be user-friendly.

I’m not so tech-oriented. For me, it’s a tool. I want to be a driver; I don’t want to be a mechanic. I never had any issue with Loomio.

The P2P Foundation uses a large range of digital communication tools, producing an extensive wiki and an online magazine, along with blog posts, videos, and other kinds of web media. But they found that decision-making is something that requires a purpose-designed tool to be effective.

Talking together, we could already do. But the combination of talking together and decision-making is what Loomio has.

From his vantage point, Michel sees Loomio as part of a much larger movement toward permission-less collaboration, open cooperativism, entrepreneurial coalitions, and commons communities.

My dream is that Loomio is just one of a set of tools that could be used by these new productive communities. There should be a library of tools that don’t compete for the mass of people who want to entertain themselves, but are really for serious people who are producing common goods. Loomio is going to be a core to their tool set.

Michel recently came to visit Loomio during his New Zealand speaking tour. He calls himself “the librarian of the movement,” traveling the world connecting diverse groups working in highly collaborative P2P ways.

—-

The post Video: How the P2P Foundation Does High-Level Coordination appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The post What is Enspiral? A FAQ appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Summary

Enspiral is a network of professionals and companies on a mission to make the world a better place. We emphasize empowerment, collaboration, and innovation. One by one, we are disrupting every core organizational process. Then we open-source our solutions and create apps so others can do the same. This is the story of collaborative funding.

Context

The story of Enspiral is the evolution of a transformative idea: we need to drastically increase the capacity of people doing meaningful work in order to solve our biggest problems. There is a trickle of human energy going toward the biggest challenges of our times, and we exist to turn it into a river. Enspiral began in 2008, when founder Joshua Vial realized he could earn enough to live on by contracting as a computer programmer part time, leaving the rest of the time to work on social good projects. Then he realized that if he could support others to do the same, the total impact would vastly increase. By 2011, Enspiral had become a collective of passionate professionals – people who could have been freelancing independently, but instead chose to collaborate and work together to allow them the resources and flexibility to pursue charity and social impact projects. What happens when you get a bunch of ambitious, talented, values-driven people together in a vibrant coworking space and empower them to think big about positive impact? They launch social enterprise startups, of course. Enspiral grew from a collective of individuals to a collective of more than a dozen social enterprise ventures. There are no bosses at Enspiral. There is no management hierarchy. The way we work is inspired by the internet, a network of interconnected nodes and free-flowing information. We started dreaming about what the company of the future would look like and adopted a core approach of radically distributing money, information, and control, and using information systems, culture, and purpose to create an environment where people and teams self-organize. We innovate through an agile process: hear a user need, develop a fast ‘mvp’ solution, measure the result, iterate, improve, repeat. One by one, Enspiral is collectively taking on every core organizational process and disrupting it by throwing out the old, hierarchical, top-down way of doing things and coming up with new collaborative processes. After several years, a pattern is emerging: we have a problem we need to solve in order to work the way we want to work, so we start experimenting until we find a good process (usually after several failures), then we test, iterate, and improve. Once we feel we’ve honed in on the solution, we systematize the process and open-source it. It starts with scratching our own itch, but the real goal is changing the world by helping all kinds of other organizations move toward more human, inclusive, empowering ways of working. Many organizations can’t experiment the way Enspiral can – so we do the groundwork to make it possible for these new paradigm processes to scale and spread. The first example of this process was the development of Loomio (the story of which was named winner of the “Digital Freedom Challenge” M-Prize), a tool for collaborative decision-making that Enspiral developed with activists from the Occupy movement, now being used by thousands of people around the world (see how it works in this video). Another core process ripe for disruption is governance – we are in the middle of developing a process for collaborative strategy-setting to address this (if the pattern holds, watch out for an app a year from now). Now we’re disrupting budgeting, with something we call collaborative funding.

Triggers

By late 2012, the Support Crew was exhausted. All five of us have been running ourselves ragged trying to solve all the problems of a complex, unruly beast called Enspiral. This was never how it was supposed to be. The idea was that, as a collective, everyone would share coordination responsibilities, and we wouldn’t centralize management into just a few roles. But as we’d scaled up, we’d lost our way. As the collective grew from just Joshua to a a couple dozen people, Alanna came on board to help herd cats. Then the network grew even more, to nearly 150 people, and the Crew expanded to include Rebeka, Anthony, and Richard. Everyone was so busy trying to do their daily work that we’d stopped stepping back to look at the big picture. Almost before we knew it, this small group had been tasked with all the traditional responsibilities of management – setting the strategy, managing the budget, making decisions – but without any of the resources, leverage, or authority of a traditional structure. Instead of consciously designing collaborative processes, we’d just been bringing in more people to help get the work done because it seemed like the most expedient thing to do. We all believed deeply in Enspiral – but Enspiral as it was meant to be, not this. None of us had signed up to be anyone’s manager or boss. We looked at each other around the room. When had supporting the people and the network we loved become so frustrating and depressing? Only a few people were running things behind the scenes, while everyone else was disconnected from the core work. And now those few people were fed up. So we quit. Or rather, we collectively fired ourselves. We couldn’t crew this massive boat with only a few people, so we stopped trying to do the impossible. Running a large collective actually requires collective commitment and engagement, not just from a few people, but from everyone. So we let go of the rudder, stepped back, and looked at everyone else riding the SS Enspiral with us and said “OK, now what?” Either we’d collectively figure out how to steer the boat together, or we’d sink. It was the scariest and best decision we ever made. Key Innovations & Timeline When the Support Crew – the management team that had accidentally formed in our network that wasn’t supposed to have managers – made itself redundant, Enspiral had to figure out how to self-organize. It was time. The Support Crew sensed that our years spent building up a robust collaborative culture and a track record of innovative solutions meant that quitting was not an act of abandonment, but of tough love. It was less like and mutiny and more like a mother bird gently nudging a fledgling out of the nest. We didn’t know where it would go, but we knew it would fly. Everyone in the Crew moved in to focus on other projects within Enspiral – Rich on Loomio, the collaborative decision-making platform, Rebeka on Enspiral Space, a co-working hub for social enterprise, Joshua on Enspiral Dev Academy, teaching skills to new coders, and Anthony to Live the Dream, a social enterprise accelerator. We were left with just a skeleton crew with a mandate not to do anything directly, but instead facilitate collaborative processes for the entire network to manage itself. Immediately, Alanna needed a way for the collective to decide the monthly budget. Enspiral’s budget is made up of contributions from all the Enspiral companies. They can set whatever level of contribution makes sense for their business (typically around a 5% revenue share). This is not a tax or a requirement – it’s a voluntary contribution that serves as a regular recommitment to the idea that we share a set of values and we can achieve more by collaborating together than we could working in isolation, while preserving the autonomy of individual people and companies to work on whatever and in whatever manner they choose. The benefits of becoming an Enspiral Venture are informal but powerful, and come down to one core driver: trust. At its heart, Enspiral is an altruistic network based on trust, with a vibrant gift economy. When a person or company participates actively in the network, they have a whole lot of amazing people and ventures who are in their corner and actively helping them succeed. We share leads and connections with each other generously. We lend each other money and invest in each others’ ventures. We promote each others’ projects at every opportunity. We share our learnings and hone our skills together. We grow a shared brand together to build a reputation greater than the sum of its parts. We help ventures find great staff and people to find great roles. (More details about the process of becoming an Enspiral Venture, expectations, and benefits here.) In the past, the Support Crew had done their best to spend the budget to benefit all the companies, build up the network as a whole, and help Enspiral achieve its overall social mission: more people working on stuff that matters. The companies, who were putting the funds into the collective pool, generally trusted the support crew to manage the budget, and in fact gratefully abdicated responsibility for managing it to save having to worry about it. But in practice, this meant they were very disconnected from actual decision-making and it wasn’t good in the long run. Now that a small group wasn’t going to do the financial decision-making for everyone, we needed a way to coordinate. Bootstrapping a dozen startups is not a walk in the park – everyone was already very busy with their own work and no one had time for inefficiency. It was not feasible to expect everyone at Enspiral to engage with profit and loss statements. Financial reports were left gathering digital dust unopened in people’s inboxes. Trying to force that method would not work. We needed an accessible, engaging process that allowed everyone to meaningfully engage with the budget regularly, and have real control over the funds they were contributing, without overtaxing their valuable time and energy. Getting 120 people together for meetings every time we needed to spend money was out of the question. If we could all think together, we’d gain the huge benefits of collective wisdom. But with no authoritarian leverage or bosses to exert it in the network, if the process wasn’t actually fun, interesting, and gamified, people wouldn’t opt to participate. At the same time, Enspiral itself as a company has regular expenses and obligations that need to be covered (paying the accountant, legal costs, insurance, taxes, software and hosting, and paying the skeleton crew of part time employees). We had to ensure solvency and legal compliance, while creating a space for decisions about taking risks and supporting new projects and growth. Budget decisions are about priorities – they make no sense out of context. If we say yes to one thing, we have to say no to something else. It’s very easy for people to love the idea of their pet project, but unless they can see that part of the budget in the the context of everything else the organization needs to accomplish with limited resources, it’s not a meaningful preference. So we came up with Collaborative Funding. Here’s how it works. Each month, all the contributions to collective funds are listed on a spreadsheet. Core expenses to keep the company going at the leanest level (previously collectively agreed on Loomio) are subtracted out. What’s left is the discretionary budget. Each person or company retains the right to allocate their part of discretionary funds, in proportion to what they contributed that month. Anyone at Enspiral, regardless of if they have contributed funds, can start a “bucket” – a proposal to do work for Enspiral that requires funding. They write up a proposal making their case for why the work they want to do will benefit everyone, help Enspiral achieve its strategic goals, further the social mission, and why they, the proposer, are the right person to deliver the project. This process was, from day one, explicitly an experiement. Everyone understood it wouldn’t be pretty and polished until we actually all engaged with and and worked together to improve it. Here’s the rudimentary form people use to submit bucket proposals. People use a form on the website to submit bucket proposals. Anyone at Enspiral can propose a bucket. Everyone with allocation rights in the round – the people who contributed funds – considers the buckets and decides which ones to “fill” with their portion of the discretionary budget. If people collectively feel like a project is a good use of resources, it will get funded. If there are critical budgeting priorities taking precedence, “nice to have” projects won’t get any funds that round. Funders can split up their allocations as they like, or put it all in one bucket. In aggregate, the result is a budget that reflects the collective priorities of the group, determined in proportion to real stakeholding, in the context of the big picture goals. The entire process takes place transparently. A big reason we can run this transparent, collaborative process with minimal administrative overhead is because we use Loomio, an open-source app developed at Enspiral to solve the key question of how distributed groups can make fast, effective, inclusive decisions together, without resorting to a small group of people holding all the power. (Read the story of how Loomio grew our a meeting between Enspiral and the Occupy movement in this winning M-Prize entry). Everyone at Enspiral, even if they neither have allocation rights over funds or have proposed a bucket for funding, can see exactly what’s happening with the budget. Since we run the process on Loomio, everyone is invited to make comments and share their thoughts about what should be funded, although ultimately it’s up to those with allocation rights to make the decision about how to spend their portion. We ran the first round of collaborative funding in April 2013, and every month since. The process has been run as an MVP experiment using spreadsheets and Loomio. Now we’ve taken all our learnings from a year of collaborative funding and we’re developing Cobudget, an app that will make the process visually engaging, intuitive, and flexible – and easy to use by other organizations.

Challenges & Solutions

When we first began Collaborative Funding, no one had ever heard of such a process before. So the first challenge was helping everyone understand what it was about. Luckily, we have a strong culture of experimentation, so we were able to transparently say exactly that: this is an experiment, so please just give it a try. Honesty about the process being new and untested meant people were willing to put up with it being unpolished, and we consistently asked for and reacted to user feedback to improve it. Sometimes it can be hard to get people to engage with a new process, but because we were giving them direct control over funds in a way that was easy for them to understand and act on, each participant was motivated to make their choices. And because we essentially opened up an internal crowdfunding platform where anyone could pitch for a slice of the collective pie to do the work they were most interested in, people were motivated to propose buckets. Meaningful empowerment overcomes resistance to process change. The thinking behind the process is complex, but interacting with it is simple.Find your name on a spreadsheet and see how much money you have to allocate. Look at a few choices of buckets you can fill. Decide where you want your money to go. You can easily see the rest of the budget and the big picture to give context. If funders want to hold something back for a rainy day, or they aren’t impressed with the bucket options this round, they can put their funds in reserves. To propose a bucket, you just go to to a page on our intranet and fill out a simple form explaining your idea, and it will either get funded or it won’t. It’s very much like earning points. Gamification and making the process engaging overcomes resistance to “boring” budgeting. Here’s an example of how the spread sheet version of Collaborative Funding works at Enspiral (using some made up example numbers and buckets). Below: actual results from Enspiral’s first year of collaborative funding. Running a transparent collaborative process means we can do meaningful reporting that people feel a personal connection to – they see their direct contribution to how we steered the ship together throughout the year. Debugging the Process – we began with a rough MVP and continuously improved it. One challenge we identified was the need for keeping the bigger strategic picture in mind. We’d succeeded at providing much needed context at the level of a monthly budget. But we still had questions about whether the choices we were making around funding were going to achieve our larger goals. Sometimes what seems most important one month actually isn’t when you zoom out to the level of a quarter, or a year. After completing a collaborative strategy-setting process called Mastermind (a story for another time!) we had four key pillars of a 2014 strategy. We decided to add a requirement to bucket proposals to speak to which of the four pillars a project related to, and why it was the best use of funds to achieve the larger outcomes we’d set for ourselves for the whole year. We’ll report on collaborative funding outcomes against these goals, and hope to develop metrics over time for measuring our return on investment of the funds we put in buckets. One thing we’re still finding challenging with the collaborative funding process is forward planning. In order to make sure we weren’t spending money we don’t have, we designed the process to operate on a cash basis, only allocating funds we’ve already received. This makes it difficult when an enticing opportunity arises that would need to be funded over several monthly rounds in the future. As a first step, we’ve developed several bucket types.

• Zero or Hero – must be fully funded to target amount or the project is cancelled
• Scale to Fit – the project will scale up or down to fit the budget
• Savings – the bucket will be proposed in future rounds until the target is hit

This way, people proposing buckets can determine for themselves how they’ll deal with possible funding outcomes, and people allocating funds can make decisions accordingly. For projects that need funding over multiple rounds, the proposer can start a savings bucket, which will be included in future rounds. We have successfully funded several major projects this way, such as a major redesign of the Enspiral website, and sponsoring an Enspiral member as the “designer in residence” at a social enterprise accelerator. The biggest limiting factor of our manual MVP (the process run on spreadsheets) was that the administrative practicalities required us to run a formal monthly process. Bucket proposals and allocations are announced on the 1st of the month and allocations are closed after 5 days. Any unallocated funds are decided by the Board. Once it’s all set, the funds are disbursed to the people and teams who proposed the funded buckets. We wait until the next month to run the process again. Now we’re building Cobudget, an app to make the collaborative funding process smoother, more engaging, flexible, and beautiful. The first challenge we faced was resourcing the product team to build the app. We didn’t have the finances to fund the project internally, so we used an internal process called Fairy Gold to pay for the team (yet another story for another day!). Essentially, it is a way for people to earn a percentage of future revenue generated by a project – something like earning equity, but for internal projects. This was an empowering and enticing offer that allowed us to recruit the approximately 400 hours of design and development work required to build the first version of Cobudget. Switching to the Cobudget app is allowing us to follow a much more fluid process where people can propose a bucket at any time and have it funded on a rolling basis. It also lets people put their allocations into the ‘reserves’ bucket (i.e. not spend them right away, and save them instead) and still retain control over those funds for future projects. This substantially changes the dynamic away from ‘use it or lose it’ to longer term planning. See Charlie, a developer working on Cobudget, introduce the current alpha stage of the software in this 3 minute video. Cobudget, by Charlie from Enspiral on Vimeo. Another challenge in the collaborative funding process that Cobudget will help address is that of reporting. We found it difficult to find the right process, incentives, and triggers to get bucket proposers to report back on how their project went – simply telling people they have to report back “just because” won’t go far at Enspiral. Once a project is funded, people are focused on doing the work, not reporting on it. We manually generate 6-monthly reports about raw numbers, such as where income came from and where it was spent, but generating these reports is time intensive, and the results are quatitative not qualitative. We’re designing some exciting features in Cobudget that will make reporting a natural part of the process. You will be able to visually explore reporting information like income and expenditure flows, measures of how well a project went after being funded, how results relate to the overall strategy pillars, and data on the different ways individuals, teams, and companies are contributing to and interacting with the system. This will have profound positive effects on Enspiral’s overall ability to create engaging and transparent global reports about what the network is doing and how well it’s accomplishing its collective goals.

Benefits & Metrics

Management time has been greatly reduced and the cognitive load of deciding what to do and where to spend our energy is spread across the whole network. Collaborative Funding has been the primary driver behind reducing our fixed staff costs by close to 80%. The number of people engaging in decision-making around the budget has gone from just a few to over 50 in some rounds, with up to another 100 involved in observing and commenting, while at the same time reducing the total cost in terms of time and stress of the overall funding process. We collectively engage, and then collectively hold the outcomes and consequences. Transparency is vastly increased. Whereas before, any Enspiral member could technically look at the financial reports generated by the accountant, the truth is that people didn’t. Real transparency isn’t about the numbers being technically available – it’s about proactively making the information accessible in a way people can understand and engage with meaningfully. Now everyone can see exactly where Enspiral spends its money each month, regardless of whether they are part of allocating or being allocated funds. This is a major boost to trust. People actually have their heads around the numbers now. If someone is advocating for their favorite project, there’s no behind the scenes politicking or quid pro quo – if you want something funded, you raise a bucket to the whole group, and it will either get backing or not during the transparent process of funding. Supporting one thing means saying no to something else, and the process has led everyone to think not in terms of their personal perspective, but in terms of how they can support the collective goals by their individual choices and contributions. We have been able to connect our budgeting and funding process directly to our strategy, considering how each and every bucket fits in with our larger goals. This makes the strategy real on a very practical level for everyone doing work and funding work in the network, and allows us to consistently reflect on our progress and our collective choices. Collaborative funding has allowed us to really “walk the talk” of collective ownership combined with empowerment and autonomy. Enspiral is literally owned by its members (each has one share representing decision-making stakeholding, and no dividends or profits are taken out). Collaborative funding lets all members act like business owners, making the hard choices about where to allocate limited resources, and what we want to achieve as an organization. At the same time, people contributing funds retain control over where those funds are directed. People know their money isn’t going to just disappear, and they will have meaningful input to direct it to projects that align with their top business and social impact priorities, so they are willing to be very generous and open. Financial contributions aren’t a tax – they represent voluntary and meaningful participation in a collective process. One result of collaborative funding has been amazing generosity. On several occasions, various Enspiral ventures have decided to increase their contribution to collective funds beyond what they initally commited for a given period. If people see that a proposed bucket will help them better achieve the social and business objectives of their venture, they opt to put in more funds voluntarily. This only happens because collaborative funding gives them meaningful say over how collective funds are spent. We actually give our accountant headaches because companies insist on just giving each other money to support various initiatives, which apparently isn’t something you normally see in the tax code! (Don’t worry, Enspiral Accounting is used to our crazy schemes at this point and has made sure it’s all above board). For instance, this year Enspiral Space is expanding into a bigger office, a project requiring an investment of resources to pull off. We’ve been running Enspiral Space very lean, in order to keep desk rent affordable for the bootstrapping social enterprise startups and charities in the office, so the company itself had limited extra capital. But since the Enspiral Space is the physical heart of the network and creates immeasurable value for all the Enspiral Ventures through hosting events, creating space for collaboartion, and facilitating deeper personal bonds through people working together, many ventures have invested in the expansion above and beyond their normal contribution to the Foundation. Another example was the Loomio Crowdfunding Campaign, which rasied over $125,000 internationally to bring a major update of the open-source decision-making app to the world. Not only is Loomio a project everyone at Enspiral intrinsically understands the value of (since we use it every day), but the campaign received international media attention and new strategic relationships that had positive ripple effects right across the network. So it makes sense that the ventures would dig deep and give extra support financially through collaborative funding. The end result is a total win-win: because we’re collaborating, what’s good for Enspiral as a whole and what’s good for its member organizatons comes into alignment, and collective and individual needs complement one another powerfully.

Lessons

Collaborative technology creates transformative possibilites for structuring an organization, specifically when it comes to deciding how money, information and control are distributed. By intentionally using rich information systems to build decentralised, network-based organizations, we can create a work environment that is substantially better for people. We can also dramatically reduce core costs and build faster, smarter and more resilient organizations.

Experiment Yourself, Right now

At the most practical level, implementing collaborative funding inside an organisation is actually quite straightforward. It can be run with spreadsheets and an online forum (we used Loomio) or even email. Simply take the budget, figure out a fair way of distributing allocation rights and proposing buckets, and report the results transparently. To make it ever easier for others to try, we will be releasing the Cobudget app after sufficient user testing. Our current plans are to make it free and open source. You can do this right now – you don’t have to wait for us to release the Cobudget app. All you need is a small discretionary budget to play with, and proportinal stakeholding shared among a group of people to allocate that budget to a list of potential projects. Appoach it as an experiment. It’s about so much more than just the money – transparency, collabortion, big picture thinking. But it’s important that, even if it’s a small amount, it’s real money so people can see the tangible effect their input is having. A lot of companies struggle to increase cross-departmental or cross-team collaboration. If that’s something you want to improve, try creating a small discretionary budget made up of funds from several teams or departments. Involve a representative from each in the allocation process, with decision-making stakeholding in proportion to their contribution. Make the projects your allocating funds to things that will benefit the organization as a whole. You will be amazed at everyone’s ability to raise their thinking up to the big picture level, recognize necessary tradeoffs, and work together to use resources in the most effective way. Another important lesson is the value of manually prototyping imperfect solutions. At the beginning, we had confidence in the concept, but knew we’d only learn about execution through real-world experience. While monthly rounds are limited in some ways, they gave us clear iteration points to reflect on what was working and what needed to be improved. We only began automation (building software) once we saw the benefits we wanted from the process, and had a relatively stable model. Collaborative Funding is not a budgeting panacea. All the problems every organization faces are still right there. The difference is they are transparent, and collectively owned. For example, right now, Enspiral is planning and budgeting for our twice yearly retreat, where our distributed network gets together for a series of events and spends time away together. And you know what? We don’t have as much money as we’d like to fund it. But all the suggested events went on the budget spreadsheet, and now the entire network understands the problem and collectively owns the responsibility to solve it. Some people will revise the budgets for their events down to make them leaner. Some will focus on bringing in some more resources. Others will let go of their pet idea because they can clearly see it’s not getting a lot of support and the budget is already stretched. And when the retreat arrives, no one will complain that the lunch is potluck instead of catered, because they were directly involved with the decision to spend that money on hosting a workshop to help local charities instead. Nothing is ever as well-funded as it would have been in an ideal world, but we’ll all understand the choices and tradeoffs we made, and everyone will feel like it’s something we truly made happen together. Dissolving the central point of authority in a group and replacing it with a process where people can express their opinions, exercise power, and bid for resources can have a transformative effect on an organisation. It breaks down the “us and them” dynamic and invites people to step into responsibility for the bigger picture. This causes a cultural change which ripples through every aspect of organisational life. There is no behind the scenes. There is no “us versus them”. There is only us, doing the best we can to make a difference with what we have.

The post The Enspiral Network on Collaborative Funding appeared first on P2P Foundation.