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title: OCF Monthly Community Forum - Nov 2021

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# OCF Monthly Community Forum - Nov 2021

## Agenda
**Intro/Check-In**
*[Who are you? Where are you from? What initiative are you with? What brought you to the forum?]*
* Reshama - Data Umbrella - New York City - New to OCF. Joining forum to see how things work.
* Joe T. - Sustainable Progress and Equality Collective (SPEC) - San Francisco - Focused on community development, mentorship, techical and professional skill training, and career development. Also have helped onboard other collectives into OC platform. Joined forum in solidarity with other collectives to share knoweldge, resources and collaboration and appreciates our guiding principles of SE.
* Tessa C. - Rogers Park Free Store - Chicago - Local mutual aid group providing basic resources to their neighbors. Also working with unhoused populations as well as recent Afghan refugees. Joined to share resources, get to know other collectives, and flush out challenges they have faced in recent months.
* Nathan H. - OCF - Here to listen and provide information or follow-up to collectives present.
* Michelle M. - Stop The Sweeps - Austin - Started as political direct action to prevent police and city from stealing materials from unhoused populuations and have moved more towards mutual aid as different groups have vacated that space. They are still doing political work as sweeps have continued and attempting to test options for emergency housing and wraparound social services in Austin. Joined to feel part of bigger community as the work is very hard.
* Vicky T. - Build Justly - Seattle - Focused on digital justice. Data shows strong correlation between access and understanding of tech and quality of life and economic mobility. How can people use to tech to access education, job opps, health benefits, and other quality of life improvements? Joined to hear what others are doing and what resources are available.
* Sebastian K. - Proving Future - Stuttgart - Bridges people and ideas by creating communications for organizations and entrepreneurs who work in the field of sustainability and care about a fair future for all. Presently conducting comms projects and learning how to apply the OC platform.
* Mike S. - Open Collective Foundation - Chicago - Program Manager with OCF and coordinator of hosted project, the Kola Nut Collaborative, which is a timebank. Deeply interested in network weaving and building community among our 300+ hosted initiatives within our financial commons.
* Luc + Jacq - Circle City Mutual Aid - Indianapolis - Joined to listen, learn, share knowledge and be in solidarity with other groups within Open Collective Foundation.
* Robin BC - Cooperative Journal Media - California - Lives at an intentional community called Canticle Farm which is doing lots of anticapitalist and gift economy practice without necessarily grounding in the theory behind it. Working on project about storytelling and graphic design exploring solidarity economy within OCF as a pilot project.
* David S. - Communicas - Chicago - Getting started with an environmental educators grant. Looking forward to using the OC platform once grant is process.
* Taylor - Distribute Aid - International humanitarian aid shipping. Created a project on OC to expand their US operations. 1.2M masks accepted in Germany. Masks can be supplied to collectives for free, but they would need shipping costs covered. Contact donate-aid@distributeaid.org. DA is also supporting Afghanistan relocation/refugee camps and has a needs list if collectives wanted to be engaged in supporting those efforts.
**Review of [new updates](https://blog.opencollective.com/oc-news-nov-2021/) from OCF**
* Onboarding video + call; employment for initatives to help collective members lean more deeply into the work; continued commitment and deeper alignment to solidarity economy; lots of new updates from other collectives posted 
**Agile Check-Ins (What are your blockers?)**
* Michelle: Access to funding is an issue for her project
* Joe: Excited to see all of these initiatives who are collaborating within OC/F and this is a way to fix the world. SPEC feels a block in shaping the story of both their internal project and the broader OCF community which is transformative. SPEC supports those early in their career with mentorship and training in technical skills (software dev, product design, UX design). They want to help them build those skills by working on projects in the real world. They have researchers who can support projects on this platform. They would like to know who is interested in working with them on these placements and who needs this support.
* David: Communicas has a contract for a grant they are receiving. They using the funding to build out some projects including micro-enterprise, educational resources, and educational opportunities. The federal mini-grant contract with EPA is being treated as a subcontractor/work-for-hire rather than a grant. This would require all of the work to be considered as intellectual property of the funder. David is very cautious that the creative output of the communities they are serving would be owned by another agency would dampen their efforts. How can they protect this community intellectual property?
* Nathan: OCF offers some types of legal support which can help initiatives negotiate the details of unusual contract arrangements. There are also Creative Commons licensing opportunities which may apply here. Referred to direct conversation with OCF so that we can engage our legal resources and other team members.
* Sebastian: Conducting a bigger communication project where he is creating mobilizing events. Ticket sales should be wired into the projects instead of needing to manually notify internal team members in order to move the funds from the event the project budget automatically.
* Nathan: Recommended that going through the developers is the appropriate step here. OCF can articulate priorities to the developers that our initiatives would like to see.
* Sebastian: Recommended events as a really great tool for bringing attention to the platform.
* Joe: Open Collective is open source and SPEC is interested in connecting with the OC team to support platform updates which may not be in the roadmap because the resources are not present. SPEC would be interested in collaborating to send researchers to solve problems that may be blocking other collectives in OCF.
**Offers and Needs Market**
* No space for OANM this week.
**Closing**
* Nathan: Highlighted the incredible value of mutual aid and that OCF is here to support your work. We are an ecosystem for problem solving within the staff and also within the other collectives we hosted.
* Robin: Advised initiatives they are available to support project storytelling.
* Mike: Spoke about the bounty which is available for authors of blogs about projects within the OCF ecosystem. Caroline is also engaging artists within the solidarity economy and would like to make art which responds to the work that OCF projects are doing.
* Sebastian: Suggested that there be some extension of default messaging tools to other social media platforms to help extend the conversation.
* Tessa: RP Free Store has merged with another mutual aid group in the neighborhood to address overlaps in their work. This has increased available funding.
* Luc + Jacq: Will be releasing a winter newsletter soon with their recent updates. Working on growing membership, fundraising, and preparing for winter survival which will include a big funding and resource drive.
* Vicky: Working on 7th user panel connecting people from marginalized communities with tech ecosystems. Also about to launch a study project with the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce to talk to SMBs about technology gaps.