Hey everyone, in accordance with what was agreed last year, it’s time to fund our general operational costs for 2017.

To get an easy overview of the full budget, you can look at this spreadsheet. Behind each activity, you can see the direct link to each bucket on Cobudget, labeled [GL 2017] to fund all these activities.

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Overall, all activities and budgets remain the same as in 2016, with the exception of a few new roles. Read more about these in the section below.

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In 2016, 100 % of these costs were funded by OuiShare France, however the aim is that as we have more communities with financial resources, this % goes down and distributes itself among more communities.

Even if only symbolic amounts, it would be great if our other communities with legal structures, Spain, Germany and the UK could add some funding. Individuals can too, of course!

Outlook: as you may have seen, I launched the following proposal for us to find more resilient ways to fund our global activities through paid memberships.

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Next steps:

1. Read & comment: Have we forgotten any critical activity that needs to be added? Is there something you don’t agree with? Add your general comments about the budget here on loomio, and activity specific comments next to each bucket.
2. Fund: I suggest that all communities who intend to contribute funding have a meeting to agree internally how you would like to distribute your funds, and then do so by December 31st. OuiShare France can give about 30 000 € to the global budget, and will add its funds after that, so we can simply fill up the remaining buckets.

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What activities are we talking about?

All these buckets concern infrastructure, resources and activities that are used by all OuiShare communities together. They part of our commons. You will notice that most of these concern communications in English and tech infrastructure.

This includes:

1. Communications in English: social media, newsletters and our online magazine
2. Our website and tech tool costs, tech & web maintenance / support. Examples: Website hosting, Mailchimp account for newsletters, Soundcloud pro account for OuiShare Radio.
3. Financial & operational support to ensure the above activities continue

I’ve put up buckets for each of these activities individually, so that communities can use funding to express how important they think each of these activities are. If something is not seen as relevant by anyone, this would be a sign that we should stop the activity.

POINT OF DISCUSSION: Ypu will notice that the only communications we are funding “globally” are English ones. Till now, we could say that this has been a strategic choice of OuiShare to have a strong international presence and be accessible to people from anywhere in the world. This means that the financially stronger communities are subsidising English comms for all the small communities that do not have the means to fund communications in their language and keep local members informed (i.e. Portugal, Sweden, Netherlands, Eastern Europe, Lebanon, etc). Does this rational make sense? Let’s discuss!

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New coordination roles added

There are some new roles you will find in Cobudget that I propose to add for 2017, which are part of the general topic of “Global Coordination”.

• Global Ops team Facilitation: Lead & Support the process of renewing / ending contracts for all team members of the global ops team + ensuring people are replaced when needed. Facilitating retrospective and feedback with each team member. // Work that happens once annually.
• Cobudget Steward: a person that makes sure our cobudget is “clean” and supports administrators with tracking, training and onboarding new users // http://cobudget.co/#/buckets/416
• Website Steward: a person who makes sure the OuiShare Website is functioning and regularly updated with current events, projects (by reminding community members to do so and informing tech maintenance team if necessary).

Inspired by Enspiral, I think we could call everyone working on these things the OuiShare Ops team.

Important, to be differentiated:

• Some roles are remunerated, others are not
• Some activities happen once annually, others are ongoing
• One role cannot only be held by one person. We can recombine roles based on people’s time and skills so that one person can also have several roles (this is an effort to make roles less bound to specific individuals and make it easier to find replacements).

I propose that the guideline to decide when an activity is remunerated by default or not, is whether the activity is 1) critical for OuiShare functioning operationally or 2) just nice to have or about improvement (vs. sustaining). This includes governance!

See the image I attached to visualize what is meant!

Background on why I’m proposing this evolution

To give the brief overview, here is the evolution I see in the area of global coordination that we have gone through:

1. We realize we need to verbalize and fund thus far unexpressed roles and thus create the roles of community and global coordination – August 2014
2. After 1 year we realize it does not work and is leading to Core Overload - June 2015
3. We distribute community & global coordination, and as a first test, do not replace it by anything other than a resource hub for the time being – November 2015
4. PRESENT: The distributing of community management and onboarding is working quite well and is a work in progress, but there are roles within the area of global coordination that will not happen and are needed for OS to function that I think we need to verbalize. These roles may not all need to be funded, but it is important that they are at least defined and attributed to individuals.
   

[Read more about steps 1 -3]((https://www.loomio.org/d/xQeZvliG/summit-reflections-restructuring-of-global-coordination-from-fran)

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All Connectors should have already received access to Cobudget. Search your inbox for an email from Cobudget if you have never registered. If you do not find it, send me an email.