During the Ouishare Summit in Badajoz we discussed if there should be a mandatory or a voluntary contribution from the local communities to finance Ouishare global activities: tech (domains, servers, etc.), accounting, community management, global communication in English (global newsletter, articles in English), summits, investment in projects.

Main points of the discussion:

Should there be a fixed percentage that each country should give to the global budget (ex 2%, 5%?)

• Pro: simplicity, insures that everybody contributes,
• Con: if it is voluntary you feel more involved and more responsible. Also if local communities don’t value some global activities that’s an important indicator to maybe question the need for this activity? It creates also so much additional questions with no easy answer, like how much is the minimum? How is the percentage calculated?
• There could be a third way: not making it mandatory, but at least create scenarios about how much each country should contribute, and the country is free to contribute or not.
  

When should the budget be decided: November/December of the previous year or during the year?

• Pro: visibility of what is the current available budget for really important activities
• Con: not enabling the agility of a growing and flexible organization like Ouishare

How do you calculate the percentage?

• percentage of the national operating costs? Pro: easy to calculate and avoid double taxation
• percentage of the total budget of the local community (meaning operating cost + projects?) Con: double taxation… projects already give a percentage to the local community Con: very hard to estimate the total budget of a local community, as new projects arrive on a continuous basis
• percentage of the projects (that would then give x% to local community and x% to global community?)

The solution we framed:

After various discussions we realized that co-budget might be a very efficient tool that would enable Ouishare to both:

• insure the minimum activities really needed on the global community level to be covered for the year to come
• allow to create new activities/projects to be financed during the year, on a more agile/dynamic basis.

The way co-budget works is that you create buckets, that need to be financed. Each person/organization contributing with money gets to decide how to allocate the amount it is bringing in (which bucket to finance), so they are more inclined to contribute.
Example from Enspiral:

With co-budget** transparency is insured: you can see who has contributed and how much, and for which activity*. It also allows **agility* to stop financing activities that are not valued by the community, or start financing others that are really cherished by us. It also responsibilizes every community to do fundraising.

So the general process could be:

• in November of each year (this year we would do it in the coming weeks), we create the buckets for the minimum activities needed on the global community level (collective process). Every activity/bucket should describe, when known, who is going to work on the task (ex: we know for accounting that Julie will be the one taking the task, but for the summit we don’t know yet), and maybe distribute the opportunities for paid activities.
• Anything else (projects, other ongoing tasks that we think are important but not yet funded) is added on an on-going basis. This allows the agility and flexibility to have projects that keep coming up. Here is an example of a dynamic bucket raised in the Enspiral context:

At this moment only Ouishare France plans to contribute in financing global activities for 2016 (around 50.000 euros - representing 16% of its operating costs). If they were other OuiShare groups contributing, each group would decide how to allocate their funds to the global activities, but as still only the French team contributes, they will make a proposal on how much they want to allocate to each bucket, and create a separate Loomio post to consult the community. Then during the year additional buckets can be created and the entire Ouishare community (local teams, projects, individuals, why not partners?) could contribute to finance new buckets.

To sum up, here is the step by step proposal:

• Create a first proposal of buckets on OuiShare global co-budget and write a Loomio post to open a discussion about it. As only France is expected to contribute this year, the French team is going to make the proposal with the proposed allocation of funds and open up a discussion with the community. The next years, we can plan a call for funding
• Funds are allocated to buckets.
• The funded activities will happen, the other ones won’t, unless someone else funds them (or people propose to work on a volunteer basis…) After three months, we make a retrospective to reflect on this first experiment with this process and see if we want adjust or change it.
• If new money comes in from local communities in the course of the year that could potentially be allocated to global projects, we can make a call to the community to create new buckets for projects they would like to fund, to allocate these available funds.