Advogato blog for slef

Co-ops at the North Somerset Initiative

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 08:07:34 GMT

On Wednesday, I went to a meeting of the Business Initiative for North Somerset for Cooperatives-SW (our regional cooperative cooperative). It was the first time anyone from the cooperative and mutual sector was present.

Conference

Bank of England

The first speaker was Geoff Harding from the Bank of England, who talked through topics in their agents’ summary and related news.

One interesting graph showed a steep rise in the percentage of household income being saved. Answers to questions suggested that more of that goes to mutuals and building societies, but they find it difficult to be competitive while the banks are keen to increase their balances.

There was mention of “employment hoarding” – businesses short-time working, redeploying or shutting down temporarily to keep trained workers under contract, rather than make them redundant and rehire later.

People from both the Federation of Small Businesses and the Hoteliers’ Association made strong comments about the banks claiming to government that they are willing to lend, but still offering deeply unattractive depth-of-recession rates and terms. If the regional agents get details of such cases, they pass them to the central bank.

South West Regional Development Agency

The second main speaker was Ann O’Driscoll, who covers business development for the “West of England” (what many people call CUBA – Councils that Used to Be Avon). She introduced their four strategic priorities:-

Low Carbon Economy – apparenly our region has good wind, wave and solar experience. However, Vestas were mentioned and I know that when Vestas closed the UK’s only wind turbine blade factories in August 2009, the RDAs were criticised for not acting against “the subsidy-chasing, socially irresponsible conduct of Vestas” and related companies continue to worry workers. If Vestas is one of the praised companies, I wonder whether we’re attracting sustainable work to the region.

On a related note, North Somerset Council and NS Enterprise Agency are organising a Climate Change forum on 1st April, but it’s at Cadbury House Hotel, which is awkward to get to except by car: no footpath to the door, a mile-and-a-half walk along a busy road from a train station, bad roads for biking, wheelbending speedhumps on the drive, I can’t remember if there is bicycle parking and its website doesn’t say…
Successful Businesses – SWRDA funds our rather poor Business Link service. Does someone in the South West have some good news about Business Link? If so, please leave a comment on this article.
Prosperous Places – intervention in areas like south Bristol or central Weston.
United Approach – co-ordinating with other regional groups.

The main activities introduced were:

Area Action Forces – eight of these facilitate the closure of branches by large private-sector employers, gathering the various government departments and agencies together to help find the workers other jobs or fill out social security application forms. It probably helps, but I was surprised there wasn’t any example of a regionally-owned “phoenix” company arising from a branch closure to continue the service was mentioned.
Talent Retention Project – finding new employment for unemployed specialists in their own sector in this region. New startups were mentioned briefly. Not one mention of helping those specialists to co-own existing businesses.

The questions were fascinating, except for mine. The best one was probably about the forthcoming election and the Conservatives pledge to shut down the RDAs and Business Links. The answer was that much of the work will still need to be done somehow, so it’s more a question of who will do it, rather than what the name on the door says. So I don’t think axing RDAs is going to achieve more than shuffling people between organisations.

When allowed to ask a question, I got too excited and ranted a bit about how the Co-operative Group’s co-operative enterprise hub is doing work that Business Link should have been funding, but the RDA doesn’t understand social enterprise and treats it as a ghetto service. I’ll try to take that up in a more coherent form later.

Overview

I think Cooperatives-SW were invited to the North Somerset Initiative largely because of pressure from software.coop for co-ops to be represented better in the Local Strategic Partnership, which has treated us badly. NSI holds one of the three business places on the partnership board, with the other two being held by NSEA and Bristol International Airport.

I think it’s a bit off that a private company and an enterprise agency are both represented by other groups and also have their own board seats while co-ops don’t even have a collective seat, so that pressure for a representative organisation for co-operatives and mutuals to have a board place (in line with national government guidance) should continue, useful though the NSI meetings seem to be.

The other thing which would really help is some funding for co-operative business development specialists to work in North Somerset at strategic tasks like this, instead of it being left to ordinary workers from other sectors. I don’t know where that funding will come from and until then, I’ll continue to try my best. We need to make sure that local strategy at least does no harm to the sector.

SPI March 2010

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:03:56 GMT

The meeting agenda is already posted for tonight’s (Wednesday’s) SPI board IRC meeting which will be at 2000 UTC.

It’s another pretty lean meeting, with only some minutes to approve, so why not come along and let the board know what you think they should be doing to promote free and open source software?

Paypal and Ethical Business

Wed, 3 Mar 2010 08:05:14 GMT

DoctorMO is calling Paypal the Pocketing Police after this “Paypal [...] decided we were scammers and took our money” comment by Daniel Stone during the Xorg foundation election discussions.

Our co-op has avoided Paypal for a number of years for two reasons:

Paypal didn’t recognise UK company registration “numbers” that contain letters (like ours) for years after they first occurred, so we couldn’t register as a seller;
the terms and conditions are very unequal, there are shedloads of complaints like paypalsucks.com and I don’t believe they’re all fiction.

We’ve not boycotted it yet because there are two of our current suppliers who are very expensive for us to pay by international bank transfer, accept Paypal and don’t offer much alternative. I think I’ll go ask them again. At least one of them should be sympathetic to Xorg.

The Co-operative Development Review: a call for evidence

Tue, 2 Mar 2010 08:06:58 GMT

Cooperatives-UK Chief Executive Ed Mayo has asked Robin Murray to undertake a brief review of the potential for expansion of co-operation in the UK, and the infrastructure necessary to support it.

The review is intentionally wide ranging. It covers areas for innovation in methods of co-operation and its promotion, and ways in which the movement connects, reflects and supports itself in the era of the web. The aim is to prepare a report with recommendations and a plan for discussion during Co-operative Fortnight in June.

Anyone with ideas about the challenges and opportunities you feel the movement is facing, and what can be done about them – please email evidence to robinmurray AT blueyonder.co.uk by Friday March 5th for a first summary of the issues on Tuesday March 9th.

Fairtrade Fortnight 2010: Fairtrade and IT

Mon, 1 Mar 2010 08:05:43 GMT

We’re in the middle of Fairtrade Fortnight and it seems like the most advertised one yet, with Cadbury’s adverts joining the push of this year’s “big swap” theme: replace some of the stuff you’d usually buy with Fairtrade alternatives.

For IT workers, this is easier said than done. It’s difficult enough to find more sustainably-produced products, let alone fairtrade ones. Our co-op has failed to achieve full marks on “Prioritise and promote Fairtrade and other ethical and sustainable initiatives” so far and I don’t expect us to reach 100% any time soon.

Just last Friday, Greenpeace International reported on more toxic electrical equipment, which shows that IT’s environmental sustainability is far from a solved problem. Meanwhile, it doesn’t seem like the fairness side is being addressed much yet. There are no fairtrade electrical product standards yet. Isn’t there demand for fairer as well as greener production?

Anyway, if you’re looking for faitrade products this fortnight, you could try some fairtrade chocolate from the New Internationalist worker co-op. Food is further along, which is a good thing because it’s pretty fundamental to life…

Disaster Recovery, Local Strategic Partnerships

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:06:46 GMT

I am MJ Ray and I have not blogged for a week</bloggers-anonymous>

Sorry about that. Basically, it’s been hectic and I don’t want to write about some of the things that have been going on between the co-op and its clients (nothing bad for the co-op, don’t worry!), but I’ve one tip and one request which I’d like to write about now.

The tip: make disaster recovery plans! Have both a general set of principles and specific plans for any mission-critical services.

Think about reasonably common sources of problems and try to set policies to minimise the risk.

For example, would unauthorised access to your social media accounts be a problem? If so, teach your workers not to enter their usernames and passwords into sites linked from direct messages, like in the latest example.

For another example, do your workers have authentication details for your key servers? Plan what you will do about those passwords if a worker vanishes for a few days without warning after an argument at work.

The request: I’m meeting North Somerset Enterprise Agency about cooperatives and local strategic partnership representation – does anyone have tips or advice about this, please? If so, please leave me comments.

An Introduction To The Debian Project by Leslie I’Anson – Tuesday, 16th February, Manchester

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:31:27 GMT

This talk at Manchester Free Software’s meeting is covering the question:

“From the literally hundreds of GNU/Linux distributions in existence, what makes Debian special?”

For our co-op, it’s that “Debian GNU/Linux, like all GNU/Linux distributions, is the product of a massive cooperative effort” (in the words of former Debian project leader Branden Robinson).

Manchester Free Software has put recordings of some past talks online and I hope this one will appear there. I’m also looking forward to Richard Smedley’s talk on 20th April 2010.

If you’re interested in the background to debian, go along to Manchester and hear some other views! If you’re already using or developing debian, why does it keep you coming back?

SPI February 2010

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:10:41 GMT

The meeting agenda is already posted for tonight’s (Wednesday’s) SPI board IRC meeting which will be at 2000 UTC (an hour earlier than last month, back at usual time).

It’s another pretty lean meeting and I don’t know why. Last month’s comments suggested SPI needs better marketing, which has come up in the comments here before.

There’s a wish to switch the SPI website to git and ikiwiki which would allow more members to contribute. As I understand it, anyone can set up the git repository and ikiwiki, then announce it to spi-general (or spi-www) and start to port the website.

I’ll probably get there eventually (after porting Cooperatives-SW and NSCycle websites to django), but if you have a bit of time and would like to help this democratic free and open source software charity, please beat me to starting and tell me where to find your work!

The Phone Co-op 2010

Sun, 7 Feb 2010 08:04:04 GMT

Ed Mayo talking to the Phone Co-op meeting

Yesterday I had the pleasure to be at the Phone Co-ops annual meeting, as those of you who follow me on identi.ca or elsewhere will already know. The proceedings included a speech from Cooperatives-UK Chief Exec Ed Mayo that included the co-op pub in Salford, spurning David Beckham’s gift and this summer’s Co-operatives Fortnight.

As ever, the bits I liked best were the lively question-and-answer sessions, both on Ed’s speech and the annual report. I took notes and reproduce them below, but I didn’t capture every question, or every answer and none of this is verbatim. Questions to Ed about UK cooperation included:

Can people in the co-op pub smoke? – No, there’s a bit of drinking in meetings, but not smoking. Some heated debates in meetings are defused by a break to go refill the glasses.
Gordon Brown and Labour are starting to talk about cooperatives more. What should we do? – We need to stand on our own two feet, but expect to be treated equally. A “Mutuals Manifesto” will be out online next month. In regulation, having the telecoms networks opened up to co-ops and not be so limited would help. One interesting possibility is with football co-ops / supporters trusts: it’s been suggested that a fan co-op should have the right to buy a club if supported by 75% of season ticket holders.
With all the business collapses and Cadburys being bought, what is the temperature of interest in mutuals outside the movement? – Good. The only AAA-rated bank in the world is the Rabobank co-op, but remember that co-ops are not immune to failure. Cadburys is not a co-op and was always vulnerable to the current investor-led rules changing its ownership. People are not necessarily thinking of co-ops, so we need to reach out. It’s a cynical, apocalyptic age, so we need to prove what we’re doing. coops14 is an opportunity. The co-op bank saw a surge in new accounts after it was highlighted in one newspaper as an alternative to excessive banker bonuses. We need to encourage people to act. Reminded of a quote that “the trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat”. Research shows that Britain today is a brutal and competitive place to grow up in, with only 45% of children trusting their friends. People have heard of cooperatives. We should try to build a more cooperative nation.
Comment from the floor that the private sector won’t take substantial cooperative competition lightly. We must look behind us and never give them a chance.
Could the BBC become a co-op? – Yes.

Questions about the annual report asked about:

What is our target profit %? – No hard target. This year’s reduction was planned and it is still a profit.
Why are we using UKMail instead of the Royal Mail? – £10k price difference. It was a hard choice, debated by the board, but there is no co-op option and no particular preference for state ownership.
Why are we considering energy supply? – Telecoms is a deflationary market, so diversification is a wise move and energy supply is a top customer request.
What is our churn rate? – 1.5%/year, which is unsatisfactory to us, but still low by industry standards.
Was the Avoco acquisition price too high? – a good price by usual industry measurement (multiple of sales)
Will we support coops14 Free and Open Source Software events, because there is an overlap? – (I didn’t catch the answer)
Can we put leaflets in the shops? – Matt Lane is working on this and other opportunities
Can we encrypt bills and emails if customers want it? – exec will take and deliberate on that
Can we get some sales materials to Scotland? – details taken to send them out next week

Welcome to Koha-Community.org

Wed, 3 Feb 2010 16:04:12 GMT

At last night’s #koha community hand-over meeting, it was felt that the LL/PTFS transfer could easily delay community control of the previous koha website for 3 months, so HLT should register a fan site for community members to put the latest Koha news and information on the web.

So welcome to Koha-community.org which will mainly be about updates about new releases, support listings and the manuals until the previous website reflects the community again. Well done to all involved for getting it online so quickly!