Business Management Software

@josefdaviescoates we're fully on board.

We commissioned @matthewparsons to create his Co Pitch product as part of the ecosystem. You can read about it here: http://outlandish.com/blog/freelance-collaboratively-introducing-copitch/

We've been talking to Enspiral about integrating it into the ecosystem. We have an internal tool which syncs co pitch to Toggl to co-budget which i guess is the beginnings of an ecosystem.

excellent to hear Harry :) I'd read that about Co Pitch but it doesn't mention open app ecosystem stuff so awesome to know there is a shared goal to build and integrate such stuff... mostly it seems (from lack of activity in related groups) such efforts seems to have (at least publicly) largely stalled :-/

Love to hear others thoughts on all this, especially ideas about how best to support and move such ideas/ efforts forward?

I think one issue is that each organisation needs a slightly different eco-system.

E.g. we manage our surplus completely differently to Enspiral (and different Enspiral Ventures also handle it differently) so there's no obvious Co-Pitch -> Loomio -> Co-budget workflow and you need some middleware. Fine for tech co-ops but problematic for everyone else.

When we talked to Enspiral about productising my.Enspiral we found that we probably operate too differently for it to port well, and that even things like different laws would be an issue.

If we want to get to 3,000 tech co-op workers in the next three years then I think we need to make it much easier to take a business/operations model off the shelf and better tools/ecosystems/workflows are key to that.

and it we generally want to able to relatively easily enable everyone to take control of everything (like NEF's new focus see http://neweconomics.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/BUILDING_A_NEW_ECONOMY.pdf ) then better off the shelf tools/ecosystems/workflows that enable one click co-ops of all kinds need to exist too... (we're saying the same thing, I'm just re-iterating it and pointing out that whilst 3,000 tech co-op workers is a great bold goal, of course that is still relatively small fry given the overall challenges at hand...)

The need is definitely there and it would be brilliant if this existed. As Harry mentioned, using a few of Enspiral's tools might be trickier than it initially seems because we do operate differently.

I think the first step would be establishing a common/agreed way to operate and then introduce/implement tools that fit this. When Matt was building CoPitch, he spent quite a while scoping out our needs which enabled him to understand an organisation of our size, but he didn't tailor it too much to Outlandish. His own experience as a freelancer was really helpful because just like us, he'll be using the tool.

Indeed, as @harryrobbins says ; 'fine for tech co-ops but problematic for everyone else....' interdisciplinary working is a challenge even for related disciplines - say design and code - let alone the full scope needed to fulfill the demands of a large project.

And it goes further, things change (increasingly quickly) within a given discipline too;

My previous agency worked with (creative & design) freelancers for many years - 14 years in what started as an in-house, fully employed studio had become almost entirely remote freelance - and along the way, even tho we were still developing 'marcomms', not only did the type of freelancer change (eg graphic designers became designer/coders) but also the way they worked (in-house to remote, long term to 'on demand' etc.) changed as well. This meant management, admin, HR etc was in a state of continuous flux.

It is exactly this sort of thing that's a challenge to creating an integrated platform management tool. Still, as no one seems to have cracked it yet, surely a goal worth aiming for... Forza! #coops

In many ways this thread mirrors some conversations I'm seeing other places. This thread elsewhere on Loomio - https://www.loomio.org/d/NA2zSBJC/platform-coop - and also a FB discussion I had with Daniel Harris (http://daha.co.uk) some while back - both sparked by the recent profile of "platform cooperatives" as a response to the extractive network capitalism practised by the likes of FB/AirBnb/Uber et al - talk about not building platforms, but creating protocols for cooperation.

To my mind this makes sense - common open protocols that enable efficient (low transaction cost frictionless) cooperation. Would such an approach then facilitate the emergence of a range of tools that could be plugged together any which way, to suit the differing - and as @roybrooks says constantly changing - business processes of various business models?

Would seem to be a sound approach...

think this is one of the main problems https://xkcd.com/927/

Yes, the goal isn't so much a singular "integrated platform management tool" but a suite of interoperable apps (that are interoperable because they all use shared protocols)