# 2019-08-14: Agaric Show & Tell

:date: **Date:** Wed, Aug 14 @ xx UTC
:dart: **Participation:** https://meet.jit.si/showandtell
:bar_chart: **Slides:** ... https://fiqus.github.io/FIT-talk-2-en/
:arrow_forward: **Video:** ...
:family: **Who's here?** patcon@hypha, micky@agaric, greg@equality, abraham, agustin@fiqus, hng, clayton dewey@agaric, rahul baisane, colombene, nico@fiqus +1 anon

Note-takers: patcon, clayton, ...

## Intercooperation Notes

Part 2 today.
Part 1 presentation: https://fiqus.github.io/FIT-talk-en/

FIT ~= Intercooperative Workflow Area (translated)

### Communication Tools
* Mailing list
* Mattermost specific channel - daily activity
* Monthly meetings
* CRM - track opportunities

### Advantages
* Strengthen other coops
* Exercise cooperation
* Increase scale of coops
* Build friendly relationships with other coops

### Challenges
* Low participation in maintaining the intercooperation group
* Only a few coops bringing opportunities into the group
* Answer: Bring at least one opportunity to the meeting if you want to participate
* Lower performance than expected
* Answer: Talk early with the developers struggling to meet expectations, talk early with client if things aren't going well
* Delays in payments
* Customer doesn't pay at agreed upon time
* Answer: Coops work in solidarity, not in "outsourcing" model. For example, sort out payment of what *is* available based on need, then work out remaining payment with client.
* micky: retainer. paid in advance. when gets low, send new retainer invoice. always cushion.
* nico: try, but not always possible.
* Estimations are off
* Under estimating leads to delays, lowers value of the project
* If it's a fixed price, have another coop review the estimate. If the other coop agrees then they've taken a shared risk of the estimates.
* Questions?
* colombene: question about FIT meetings - how often are they? what are the format? who keeps them going? (sorry if I missed this)
* once/month virtual meet. 2-3 coordinators of space. taking minutes. facilitating.
* projects talk more once started, outside meeting.
* talk about availability and estimates, or closing deals. genalk about availability and esti mates, or closing deals. general collab. training; how to. everything related to work/collab/tech.
* who is part of this?
* FIT is subset of FACTTIC.
* greg: how do you split revenue? everyone logs hours? or do you put a rice on a milestone?ow do you split revenue? everyone logs hours? or do you put a rice on a milestone?
* if fixed: paid according to number of devs orking on team if fixed price contract. not fixed, just log hours.
* if not fixed: log hours.
* argentina is more commonly fixed price. desire of clients to budget price in advance. though not the best way -- fuzzy undefined features. hard to estimate.
* abraham: customer pay the cooperative directly
* abraham: how do people inside the coop do payments?
* Coop is paid based on how much they work on that project
* Different options for how client pays
* Option 1: Client pays one coop that is maintaining the relationship
* Option 2: Pre-convo around cooperation benefits, and each coop invoices the client separately for their respective work
* preferred, so more shared. allows slow shift in relationship ownership over time when needed on long projects.
* abraham shared:
* Ditching hourly billing - https://www.ditchinghourly.com
* https://jonathanstark.com/hbin
* https://jonathanstark.com/podcast
* BONUS: thoughts on working with freelancers
* disclaimer: FACTTIC doesn't work with freelancers.
* 2 benefits:
* new relationships with devs
* reduce barier to entry. trial mode.
* expand capacity without hiring.
* downside: labour without being cooperator
* contrib dev capacity, but not ensured stability of co-op members.
* micky: agaric has experience with this.
* some freelancers paid more than co-op members. issue, needs discussion. so co-op doesn't suffer. realization: higher rate is like insurance, bc no stability of co-op.
* transparent about how large/small co-op wants to be. clear that maybe becoming member is not a thing sometimes.
* more about encouraging freelancers to start their own co-ops (though not everyone wants to start one)
* patcon: enspiral (a loose network of social good orgs base) used to be a freelancer network, but had issues
* main points: freelancer network was the right thing for the time, because let lots of people in and created lots of initial energy
* but was not sustainbable. very few ppl ended up carrying the admin and cultivation work in the middle. kept struggling when those people moved into other projects.
* eventually changed from freelancer network into larger loose network of organizations -- "livelihood pods" as they're sometimes called = small companies (incl some co-ops, but not all co-ops), some doing product and some doing services.
* all pay into "enspiral services" for core admin and upkeep of tools, and pay some share of revenue sometimes. enspiral services is like a separate company that holds it all together.
* this works much better than freelance network. see hanbook.enspiral.com for details.

* patcon shared link with Rahul after call, inviting to community.coops.tech and patio.ica.coop