Contribution Accounting Survey @meetcoop

Dear meet.coop members

Even at this early stage of the commons.hour programme, some significant questions are surfacing around recognising the contributions, and privileges or rewards, of different kinds of members within the coop, as a multistakeholder organisation.

A hands-on session, Dec 13th

At the close of session#2, Ela Kagel (Supermarkt Berlin) offered to help us map and describe our web of contributions, as a first step towards a practice of explicit contribution accounting. To do this we'll hold a commons.hour special session, on December 13th (Second Monday in December) at 18:00h UTC (usual commons.hour time).

This replaces the regular Fourth Monday commons.hour session, which won’t be held in December because of the Christmas/New Year holiday season.

Note: Bob Haugen and Lynn Foster (valueflo.ws, Mikorizal Software) offered to contribute in this area too. We see this survey and hands-on session as a first step, leading perhaps to using valueflo.ws techniques and software tools in the future. Bob and Lynn work with Guerilla Translations in this area and, with Silvia López Sanchéz of GT, will lead a commons.hour session on contribution accounting later in the series (session#6, April 2022).

Survey

To prep for this hands-on session we have a short survey, aiming to identify the kinds of contributions that members are aware of within the dynamics of meet.coop, and also the ‘locations’ and channels where contributions from all kinds of members get recognised and rewarded (including, but definitely not limited to, payments for work hours and payments for subscriptions).

We’re inviting all active meet.coop members to complete the survey. Your vision is important to design the practice through which we value members’ contributions, and what kinds of incentives and compensations we need, to help our organisation and our community to grow up.

Before filling the survey, you might like to scan this Note on concepts.

‘Active members’ includes all operational members, all members who’ve participated to date in commons.hour, and any who have posted in Forum threads to date.

We need to get results in from this survey quickly, to be ready for Dec 13th. So please DO IT NOW if you can - sorry to pressurise you! We’ll close the survey on Dec 10th, 17:00 UTC, to process the results.

The survey has three stages: About you, Contributions (kinds of, value of), Care work (kinds of, locations of)

The questions and issues

The questions might seem a bit fuzzy or puzzling in places. We apologise. But we also feel this reflects the general difficulty of being clear about contributions, and how a multistakeholder organisation values all its contributors? You're welcome to comment on this, at the end. It will feed into the Dec 13th session.

You might have a view, too, on how clear or helpful (or otherwise) the Note on concepts has been, in its present draft form?

Note that this survey doesn't enquire about your usage or priorities for improvements of the provision of the service as such. That will be the subject of another survey.

Thanks in advance for taking the time to fill out this survey!