Summit Reflections & Restructuring of Global Coordination, from Fran
Now that the summit is one month away and I’ve had some time to reflect on the discontent that was voiced there about the management of “global activities”, I’d like to share some personal reflections about what happened and make a proposal for restructuring global coordination. This is important in my view because I feel some key misunderstandings occurred which we need to address if we want to become a true learning organization.
To better understand these conclusions and the next steps I think it is useful to briefly summarize how we got here, making sure we all have the same information and can better understand the evolution of our roles and structure as they exist today.
In short, I am proposing that we:
1) replace global coordination as a role held by one person with one that dynamically distributes tasks among numerous people
2) establish a regularly scheduled meeting where changes in roles and tensions can be discussed on a regular basis
I’ve put this discussion in public mode, so that it can be shared with non-Connectors as well(which I urge you to do). A proposal for changes to the global budget for the rest of 2015 that takes these suggestions into account will follow shortly after this.
I apologize in advance for the length of the post....
What happened till now…
Before Sep. 2014:
The first global budget of OuiShare was created in September, thanks to funding from our first two global partners, la Maif and SNCF. Before this, there was no budget for coordination, community building and administrative activities. These activities have always existed, but were not yet clearly defined, structured nor put into roles. They were carried out voluntarily by a few members of the core team, who subsidized this work through their other paid OuiShare or non-OuiShare activities. All Connectors that received money from OuiShare before September 2014 were working on a specific project with it’s own funding, such as OuiShare Fest, OuiShare Europe Tour, and Sharevolution. Essentially, we were trying to run a multi-national organization without having built a foundation to run it on.
Sept - Dec 2014:
With the first global budget, we formalized and gave priority to this work for the first time. This entailed looking at the roles that had emerged organically until that point and the people filling those roles to build the global budget, which was then reviewed at the London summit in December. The role that had been defined for me was called “Global Coordination & Community Management”, with the following task description:
- Offline and online community management
- Developing kits and knowledge and insights on how to manage communities
- Making community thrive
- Mentoring Connectors
- Managing Global Facebook Group and Connectors Group
- Coordinating other connectors who were managing local and topical groups
Shortly after starting to work on these tasks, I discovered we had overlooked “operations” and the need to create an initial structure and processes for them, which needed to take place before I could properly do community management and mentoring (see what I mean by operations here ).
Instead of doing what was originally planned, I started working on operations, while gradually delegating the community management and Connector Care to Jocelyn, as well as parts of English communications (like monthly newsletters) to Khushboo. The latter activities had not been budgeted anywhere till then and were based on volunteer work. Thus we went from 1 to 3 people doing a large part of global community management, communications and coordination (though of course others were contributing to these as well). Neither Joss nor Khushboo were paid for this work while I was delegating it to them from Sept - Jan 2014.
Jan - June 2015:
After 3 months we held a first “retrospection” session with all Connectors being paid from the global budget to share insights and feedback. During this meeting we discussed that I was not able to carry out community management as planned and that coordination and community care need to be separated (an observation also made by regional coordinators cc @davidwe).
>> See all topics raised in this meeting here.
Having established that we need to move from 1 to 3 roles, Joss continued her work on community (you will get more details about her work in a post by her that will follow) and received a small part of my “global coordination & community management” budget. Khushboo’s work was temporarily subsidized by the Fest. This is when we start thinking about what “operations” in OuiShare means, but failed to specifically define which activities my role should include. >> Here’a drawing of this process
Key reflections & reactions to the summit:
Looking back, this lack of clear role definition made it difficult to constructively discuss feedback on global coordination at the summit.
- I arrived there keen to share all the issues I had identified with my role and with this area in the past months, expecting to have a constructive discussion and find new solutions together for what was not working well. As I saw it, this was a first test run of global activities and it was clear we would need to make a lot of changes. Unfortunately I feel we never got to these discussions(for which I and also Joss had prepared a lot), because tensions had already grown to such an extent that it was difficult to remain constructive. In particular, what surprised me was how quickly this tension arose towards a model that had only been in place for 9 months, which seemed like a short time to me taking into account how small the budget was and how many other things everyone involved in was doing (which I know is another larger problem here).
- Overall I felt hurt by this situation, but I lacked the room to express this feedback at the summit. From my view, although some good lessons were learned, the way they not were expressed in a way that would enable me to move forward with more enthusiasm in the future. We need to remember that people tend to bring their full selves to OuiShare (which is what we want, right?), making them much more vulnerable than in most traditional organizations. If we want people to continue to do this, we need to think carefully about how we give feedback, especially when we are in large groups. Learning in OuiShare should not be hurtful for those involved, and I think we can do better.
We should give more recognition to everyone’s achievements.
I feel we often forget to do this, which surely also has to do with our culture of wanting to always move on quickly to the next challenge. At summits I think it’s important to acknowledge what’s working more consciously before launching into critical discussions. The lack thereof made me feel quite demoralized and discouraged to continue my work, because the message I received was that everything is dissatisfying. Especially if we want to encourage a culture of experimentation, it’s important to express appreciation for work done, even if it fails. That creates a great basis for then discussing what went wrong.
This is also one of many things about our culture that Joss made me aware of, which shows how important it is do the community work and consciously build our culture.The position of global coordinator concentrates too much responsibility towards the collective.
Since my activities had not been clearly defined and I was the only person being paid for the area of global coordination, I have felt responsible for ensuring OuiShare runs (and keeps running) smoothly on a day-to-day basis and sort of became the go-to person for any unplanned work that came up. I experienced this as a huge pressure and responsibility toward the collective. Only at the summit did I realize that it was too much for me to take on, but also that the rewards for the work did not feel like they were in proportion to the responsibility it entails. I am aware that I also have myself to blame for this pressure, because I created and chose this role myself and have the tendency to feel responsible for more than I should.
In conclusion, I no longer want to fill the position of global coordinator as it currently exists. At the Summit I heard the wish for this to be a collective responsibility, which is why I suggest below to distribute this role.
In line with the aim of giving more responsibility to the collective, Joss and I have also come to the conclusion that community activities such as welcoming, mentoring and knowledge transfer cannot be done by one person (because we simply grow to fast for that and it’s not sustainable). As part of our culture of learning and openness, such activities should be done by everyone, but with the help of a “faciliator”, the Community Connector, whose job is to create the framework to enable us do so, give impluses and be there for support. This important post by Joss goes into more detail on this.
Proposal for next steps
Based on these reflections, I would like to make the following proposal:
Replace global coordination as a role held by one person with one that dynamically distributes tasks that arise among numerous people. Most of global activities so far can be attributed to specific areas such as tech, community, communications, so it would also make sense to move these activities into the respective areas and increase those budgets (which many not be possible unfortunately this year due to our tight budget). Below I’ve linked to a document with all my activities from the past months to do this more easily.
Start funding part of global operations on a dynamic basis (as proposed by Simone) by having one global activities pot from which we take funds when a need arises. Whoever does the work gets the funds. I say “part” of global operations because we need to differentiate between ongoing tasks (that I would continue to fund on a 3-6 monthly basis) and one time tasks, for example creating memberships, designing the participatory budgeting, organizing a summit.
For global community I would keep the current 3-6 month model for now, because the role I see needed here is an ongoing faciliator who observes what is happening and is available to support the community.
There are however some challenges with the dynamic attribution of funds:- we will need to put a €€ value behind each new activity, which is often hard to do
- the dynamic distribution offers little financial security for those who depend on this money to earn their livelihood
- We will also need a process for defining, evaluating and distributing the tasks that arise, which brings me to my third point:
Establish a regularly scheduled meeting where changes in roles, activities and governance can be discussed on a monthly basis, to avoid tensions from accumulating and then exploding at summits. There have already been attempts to create a similar type of meeting, the weekly “Global Coordination Hangouts” with Core Connectors. These did not work very well in the past, so we need to give good thought to 1) what the purpose of such a meeting should be 2) who should attend 3) whether it take place off or online 4) how often it is necessary
Global coordination activities from Jan - Dec
Check out this list of all global operation activities I have been working on as global coordinator.
They are structured into areas to help us delegate them to the community (see proposal above). I would be willing to continue some of these activities, but only a few. More details will follow in the proposal for changes to the global budget of 2015 that will be posted shortly after this.
I’ve also included a description and links to concrete outcomes, so that it’s clear what work I am talking about. Since I’m not sure all these activities are even necessary or take a high priority, please feel free to comment directly on them in the doc.
Thank you for your patience in reading to the end! I look forward to your feedback!
David De Belleville Tue 18 Aug 2015 5:19PM
- on tasks : happy with decentralization of responsabilities; if the community sees value in the roles & tasks, it will choose to finance them.
- on feedback : it seems we still collectively need to improve both how we provide feedback, and how we receive it. [difference between conflict and hostility]
- on personal involvement : "We need to remember that people tend to bring their full selves to OuiShare (which is what we want, right?)" I would question this. Participatory governance generates (healthy) conflicts. If I bring my full self, I might sometimes feel personal failure/rejection instead of merely acknowledging disagreement. xxx
Simone Cicero Thu 20 Aug 2015 3:20PM
Hi!
This is - as always when it comes to your stuff - incredibly complete, clear and well explained.
I think now everyone has a clear understanding of the work you've been doing to keep OuiShare together in the last 2 years.
I'll give a short feedback now but this discussion is really key to OuiShare survival in the form we know it now and as an evolution of it. If we fail to have an healthy discussion and to evolve on this topic OuiShare will likely revert back to a small number of strong, independent, local teams (which may not be a worst case scenario) sharing a community feeling, a brand and some knowledge assets and relationships.
I also think this is 100% overlapped with the subject of the discussion that the team led by @myriamboure is going to do on Collective Improvement of OS Governance https://www.loomio.org/d/qCDRWJYv/collective-design-continuous-improvement-of-ouishare-s-governance
Some Key Feedbacks:
1) I share with @daviddebelleville the idea that I'm not sure we should aim to have people working in ouishare 100% of the time - this is not really in line with what's happening in the world of work, organizations and innovation.
2) having only governance activities as unbundled while keeping other (semi-governance related, key ones such as communication or even tech support) activities as bundled in fellowship is probably not the right choice.
As you already pointed out, working this way (liquid and proactive) is going to be challenging because will push everyone to work on a way which is:
- Value Driven and Deliverable Oriented
- Collaborative and not independent/self managed
- since there's no money attached to showing up, this modality provides that contributors have a STRONG relations with the overall objective of the organization and a STRONG commitment. Typically - in other context in which i see this happening - customer facing/market facing (like OSFest or Partnership management for example would be in our case) are typically better paid and managed more simply (eg: hierarchical)
There's a lot of talking for example about backfeed and we're excited about that but we should understand that adopting such a model, basically means pushing this approach to the limit (all activities, all contributions). Are we ready? Don't think so. Can we evolve into this way of working? Only if we strongly believe in this approach.
So that's why I always advocated that we adopt such a model more widely - I can resume in few words the pillars:
- a shared board of work items for non customer/non market facing work (all internal work, communication, governance, etc...)
- an extended team of contributors (not only connectors) that shows up weekly
- a mechanism to do contribution accounting in retrospective manner for each task (could be P2P Value accounting adopted for example with Sharitories first release - emblematically the only one so far - and now with Content Strategy)
- a liquid, always available budget (with a budget stewardship)
My proposal is that:
- we isolate customer facing / project related work from this flow and leave that to be managed by Accounts and Team Leaders as they want
- we use a liquid model for all the rest of the work we do, privileging teamwork over single ppl and pushing for delivering tangible value items
- leave the decision to adopt fellowship or any other different compensation scheme as possible in every moment, but subject to collective decision
This will introduce the need to have stronger decision making process that is more based on member reputation and trust that can be easily linked to the amount of governance/liquid work (historically earned credit) - something that is now mimicked with "core connectors" that is definitely not working very well.
Francesca Thu 20 Aug 2015 5:16PM
@simonecicero thanks for your feedback. Two comments and clarifications:
1) Maybe I did not explain clearly enough what I meant, but by saying we want people to bring their fulls selves into ouishare, I was not in any ways referring to them working full time. What I was referring is something that Frédéric Laloux talks about in his book, which is that most traditional organizations today only want employees to bring one small fraction of themselves to work, and "leave" the rest at home. So I was talking about us wanting people to be part of OuiShare with all sides of themselves, also their struggles and emotions - in the hope that this will help us create a more purposeful place to work, driven by organizational and personal learning. This may be a lot more difficult to deal with at times, but (at least for now) I am convinced that it is worth it. Bringing your full self in that sense applies to anyone, whether they are involved 5, 10 or 50 %. I realize though that this taps into a basic discussion on values and that we therefore may not all agree on this point (it sounds to me from your comment @daviddebelleville that you disagree)
2) We've had this discussion several times, but I'm still skeptical about "unbundling" all global activity areas right away, because most of these activities are continous tasks that cannot be packaged clearly and re-distributed efficiently on a weekly or monthly basis (for example Tech: answering questions from the community about using the website; Communications: running a twitter account).
This is why I think we should try unbundling one area first and see how it goes and how much additional work / management it creates. If it is a success and people start to get used to managing tasks this way, we can slowly apply the model to the other areas.
David De Belleville Thu 20 Aug 2015 5:51PM
yep @francesca I was also refering to emotional involvement rather than part/full-time. my comment has to do with our individual ability to cope with conflict. incidentally I believe Laloux addresses this too : if I invest too much ego in Ouishare, I might feel conflicts threaten my personal integrity when they are actually not about me but about a collective issue.
of course passion drives our actions -and it's great- but (some) detachment helps us protect ourselves & others.
Jocelyn Ibarra Thu 20 Aug 2015 6:13PM
Does anyone have any feedback for me?
I'm unsure how to take a lack of responses over there.
Simone Cicero Fri 21 Aug 2015 8:57AM
Agree in general with the idea to start from the governance and then expand! @francesca
Regarding feedback to @jocelynibarra post, on my end it's just a matter of time (still on my to do list, between changing diapers, cooking the lunch and dinner, etc...) and I want to give a thoughtful one! It's coming!
[update: https://www.loomio.org/d/SIqfkc3t/community-global-writings-from-joss#comment-764093]
Maud Tue 25 Aug 2015 1:43PM
Thanks Francesca for this very clear post on how things evolved! This is very crucial to document and keep available to anyone interested in joining OuiShare active community.
We are indeed facing a huge challenge, but we are, or at least I am, in OuiShare also to experiment new ways of working together so that's worth trying. I guess it joins indeed the matters that have to be discussed by the group working on governance.
And I also have the feeling that to make it work collectively, we each need to be very clear to ourselves and to the community on the following questions : what brings us in OuiShare, what does it ask to be part of it, why we are willing to be part of it, what are we expecting from it and how much are we willing to contribute, and under which conditions?
Looking forward discussing all that in direct :-)
Myriam Bouré Tue 25 Aug 2015 2:09PM
Hi everyone, and thanks a lot @francesca for those great inputs, that help me, slowly, understand a bit better how OuiShare is working... as I'm just a new comer here, so I admit with humility that I'm not yet very familiar with all the money flow, roles, etc. But I dive into it slowly :-)
Thanks a lot also Francesca to share with you not only what you think, but how you felt & feel now. It's not easy, we are so much better to tell about what we think that about how we feel... but I think most of our actions are driven by our emotions :-) I don't think tensions are a problem, because that's what makes us move and shape our collective, but we need to build a collective culture about HOW to express those tensions in order to cultivate also a caring community. I can't prevent myself to mention again NVC here, but I really see a huge value in that as a building block of P2P interactions, which are the basis of the organizations we build.
I think we also have the tendency, culturally probably, to focus on what doesn't work... because we want to improve it, so it come from a good intention! But without attention to the people. So maybe we need to make space for appreciation time in the summit, and after events. There are awesome tools we can use for agile retrospective (an idea for a session at the next summit maybe?). I experienced and facilitated some (in an agile club I was involved in) that always finished by an "appreciation time" where we say to each other publicly "I appreciate you XXX because XXX". Powerful :-)
Regarding all the activities you have been doing @francesca, I understand how much pressure you felt on your shoulders, and you feeling responsible for the whole community to work must be a pretty heavy baby to carry (even if no diapers to change, hein @simonecicero ?;-)) I think we should all be "safeguards of our collective", as a shared role in the community, and anyone who identify/experience a tension should have a space to express it, and from there we should be able to open a discussion to work together on that tension.
We can all share the role of global connector, and I think that would even more hold us together in that collective journey. And it's ok if we don't explain it the same way, and don't have the same entry point. Maybe we need a global community facilitator (I will also read your post @jocelynibarra!) but I don't yet visualize it concretely. Maybe it could just be a post on a task dashboard to share that this request has been receive in that region, who can take it? Maybe I'm traveling there in a few weeks and will be happy to take contact. Maybe I'm a bit naive also and it's a bit more complicated :-) Maybe it can be a team of people who are ok to mentor individually new comers and the demands will be pushed to them? (That's how we work in OFN, we are 4 people sharing that role of community building & global connection (not coordination! which is something else as you say))
About a global activity pot funding global operations, I think it's great and I see that a bit in connection with an extended vision of the participatory budgeting experimentation. As you say, maybe there is a transition process, and maybe a hybrid model. I think I need to understand better how it has been working the last months before I can really share thoughts on that.
About Backfeed and similar protocols, I agree with @simonecicero that it maybe not yet adapted to our organization, even if we can still experiment to understand and learn about it. I shared a document I wrote on Backfeed for Open Food Network. Primavera still needs to give me a more precise feedback on certain details, but she sent me a very positive feedback on how things where explained there. If that can help... my personal conclusion is that for the moment Backfeed is still serving an economic model based on accumulation, speculation, interest, dividend, even if they do it in an "open contribution way" (so all contributors become "shareholers" in a way). For OFN at least that doesn't seem adapted (yet!) but it's just the start of the conversation. https://drive.google.com/open?id=13thf3jaQ8Vk-nja0TAlHaFpKWKnrbenvoQiaqpPYDOA (please don't forget: maybe not everything is accurate in that document, I will share a post on the topic when I get a more precise feedback from Primavera)
Also need to learn more about liquid organization.
About monthly governance meetings, I guess the how , when and who can be one of the topic of the governance design process. But I think it would be great to implement. Maybe the expression of tensions could arise from a "happiness index" shared spreadsheet (I can share some examples), that the "community facilitator" can check every month and organize hangouts on the tensions that has emerged with the different roles that are concerned by that tension? I think HO are hard when you have more than 7/8 people... And maybe we could have 1/2 to 1 day work on governance at each summit where we review the roles, flows process (of information, money) and decision making process? All that will be linked to the governance discussion so I stop here! I was very long too :-)
Lucía Hernández Wed 26 Aug 2015 5:20PM
Dear Francesca thanks for sharing your thoughts and feelings here and congratulations for the valuable work that you have been doing all this time. We are learning a lot about how to work in a distributed and multidisciplinary organization, not only from a operative perspective also in how to manage relations between people involved with our particular egos, needs of reputation, recognition, money, family and personal situations, expectations,.... it's not easy and it's very very hard, but it seems that it's the world that is coming. It depends on us to improve the conditions of our organization that allows the personal and professional development of its members.
We have to learn from mistakes and make it better. We should focus on improve how we operate (decentralized structure), professionalize our skills (have a clear idea of what members can offer) and help others to do it and attract new talented people. #OSLove
Marie-Anne Bernasconi · Tue 18 Aug 2015 10:21AM
Thank you for sharing Francesca. It's good to read all this, and I feel I understand you more. Once things are stated, it's easier to work and improve them (like for example shifting to a culture of encouragement).