Week 825

Week beginning Monday, 4th November 2024.

Business development

This was the main focus of the week as we continued to contact former clients, people in our network, look for advertised opportunities, etc. We haven’t had any luck yet, though. Drop us an email if you know about any projects we might be able to help with!

Financial forecast

Every month we use an excellent spreadsheet that Chris L originally created to try to build a financial forecast for the co-op. While this has mostly worked quite well, we recently felt as if a few significant inaccuracies might have crept in. Chris R did some amazing sleuthing and worked out where the problems lay.

Individual pots

The work on the financial forecast (above) led into some discussions about what we call our “individual pots”. I’m not sure we’ve mentioned them before, but they’re our home-brewed attempt at keeping track of the varying number of hours that we’ve each worked and how much we choose to pay ourselves. I think they’re a bit like individual capital accounts which are used by co-operatives like Mondragon, although there are at least a couple of differences.

Rather than periodically distributing money out of our surplus (i.e. net profit), we distribute money out of our current account into the individual pots every month based on the number of hours each of us has worked in the previous month. This work can include work on internal projects, company admin, business development, etc. We use an internal day rate for this which means a significant portion is effectively retained in a “shared pot” which is jointly owned by the three of us.

Unlike with typical individual capital accounts which are used to periodically pay a bonus, we use our individual pot to cover our individual employee-related expenses (i.e. salary, PAYE, NICs). The idea is to give us a lot of flexibility in terms of how many hours we work and how we remunerate ourselves while preserving a decent level of fairness and securing the financial viability of the co-operative.

So far this has been working well, but it hasn’t really been battle-tested and we try to keep it under continuous review, tweaking things every now and again.

Tranferring domains

For as long as I can remember, we’ve used Gandi.net as our domain registrar of choice. However, having read about the enshittification of Gandi we decided we’d like to move our domains elsewhere. Intially I was keen to move them to dnsimple, which we’re already using to manage our DNS records. We’ve found dnsimple to be excellent and we’re pleased to be supporting a business which uses Ruby on Rails!

However, dnsimple doesn’t currently support the .coop top-level domain, so we had to look elsewhere. It was then that we came across domains.coop which is run by DotCooperation (jointly owned by The National Cooperative Business Association and the International Cooperative Alliance) with a mission to “unite and strengthen the cooperative community through a shared and recognized online identity”.

It seemed like a no-brainer to transfer our .coop domains there and I finally got around to doing that last week. However, the domains.coop user experience wasn’t brilliant, so I’m thinking about moving our non-.coop domains to dnsimple as originally planned.

RubyForge redirects

Chris R continued to make good progress. We’re really pleased that a couple of the relevant Ruby Central folks have joined us in a Slack channel to coordinate work on the project, but understandably they’re all a bit busy this week with preparations for Ruby Conf in Chicago!

Co-working

Chris L joined his friend Ezo for a couple of hours on Wednesday at the Hoxton in Holburn. Ezo is working on a stealthy developer-tooling-for-AI-powered-applications startup. Chris said it was quite eye-opening seeing what was possible in this domain!

Firefox extension

Chris R used GitHub Copilot to create a Firefox extension that displays any of his Joplin notes matching the URL of the current page in a sidebar. He says it took about 45 minutes to do the whole thing and, although nothing about the code was particularly complicated, it would’ve taken way longer to achieve the same thing by more traditional means (e.g. searching for and reading documentation).

I think we’re all wrestling with moral questions about the massive energy usage of AI and the detrimental climate change consequences, but putting that to one side it’s undeniably impressive what can already be achieved.

Until next time!

– James