1 min read
Wed 30 Sep 2020
Writing
How is it the end of September already!
This month, we contributed to some events as part of The World Transformed festival, continued our partnership with Progressive International , started working with Peace Insight , and adjusted some internal practices to be more intentional about our work.
The World Transformed ran their 2020 festival entirely online this year. We supported them by converting their existing "read-only" website to be more interactive. This included building new functionality to enable visitors to log in and RSVP to events. We also helped them set up a forum and generally advised them on how to make the shift to a digital-first event.
Shout out to Robbie Blundell for once again bringing the π₯π₯π₯ identity design.
We were also involved in a few events as part their Brave new digital world stream:
We continued our collaboration with Progressive International , this time shifting our focus towards member engagement and participation.
We did desk research, consulted with some experts, sent out a survey to individual members and interviewed representatives from a few member organisations.
We used the results of this discovery work to identify where we need to focus our attention over the coming months.
We highly recommend checking out the videos from their inaugural summit: Internationalism or Extinction.
We began an exciting new project for Peace Insight , an initiative run by the charity Peace Direct, which highlights the invaluable work of local peacebuilders around the world.
Peace Insight focus on sharing and amplifying grassroots perspectives β an approach that really resonates with us. We're going to be working with them over the next month to build a new website fits with this strategy.
We've begun a new practice of keeping one day a week free for internal work. So far this is going really well β it gives us more space to focus on the co-op in a more sustained way, and gives us a more realistic picture of the amount of time we actually have to spend on consultancy work each week.
We've been working on our public-facing playbook and have begun sharing this with prospective collaborators.
Some of this has been based upon the one that dxw put together, which we admire and reference a lot. Theirs, in turn, was based upon thoughtbot's playbook. We particularly liked their post on Time :
We maintain a sustainable pace of productivity. When a team become tired and demoralized, they get less work done. We achieve a higher pace over the long-term by ensuring that we maintain an even productivity level over time.
Working a sustainable pace doesn't mean that you never work longer hours. Instead, a sustainable pace means that you have the energy to surge when it actually matters. In our work, there will certainly be times when it is important that we do this, and we have the energy and flexibility to rise to the challenge.
We've also been trying to apply the principles of Hyperfocus to our work, for example:
We've also started setting collective intentions for each week, based on our Vision, Mission and Values .
We're currently cycling through the cooperative values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity.
This has been a really good opportunity for us the think about these more deeply β each week we discuss one of the values, and try to redefine it to better suit our work. Some of these are pretty complex ideas, so it's been an interesting challenge to distill what they mean to us.
We've discovered the key to success in remembering these is⦠wallpapers!