The Sustainable CO-OP Store weekly meeting #5

All right, okay, so I'm go— I volunteered to be facilitator tonight and we can start with our icebreaker. Um, did anyone prepare an icebreaker for tonight?

I have.

Okay, okay, so by the way, do you—

should, should we have someone take the notes?

Um, uh, yeah, like I was We should do that after the icebreaker, but like, um, we can do it now.

Let's go.

Okay, so if he—

who, um, maybe someone that has not been a minute taker can be our minute taker tonight.

So I can do it if, um, no one else wants to.

All right, maybe Adam.

I don't know, Spencer, long and everything.

Take the important notes. Okay, Annie's gonna do it.

Annie, okay, Annie is gonna be your minute taker and Ulla is going to lead the icebreaker.

Okay, do you have a particular technique you do when you take the minutes? You were very good at it.

Oh, thanks.

Do you do anything special to, uh, no, I'm okay. Do you do anything special to, uh, You know, make sure that you capture the right things.

Just try to follow along and write down what strikes me as the— especially if there's any action, any vote or action.

Yeah.

Right. Make sure to write that down.

Got it. I don't know. Cool. Sweet. Okay. So that we get started, babe, you want to—

Okay.

I'm pinging Brad and Russell to see. Okay.

So I was thinking since we are going to be a store, we will be selling some food and everybody loves to eat, so we'll always eat. For the question for the icebreaker today is if you could cook— if someone can Jennifer, I think your computer picks up a little background noise.

Maybe you just mute if you can, if you don't mind. Thanks. Cool.

If you could cook a dish for the teammates, what would that be?

Dish for the teammates, okay. I can— you want to start? Why don't you start?

Oh, me?

Yeah, you're the one presenting it.

Oh yeah, I think I would make a zucchini chocolate cake. Well, because I just recently made it and it was, yeah, it's super healthy, uh, includes vegetable. It, you really cannot taste it, and everybody, almost everyone likes chocolate, and the cake is, is very light. And I think, yeah, I think it would accommodate almost everyone. Almost, I would hope for. And it would be healthy and sweet, you know.

It was pretty good, I tried it.

Adam?

Okay, so I assume the follow-up on this action item is that we're gonna send a zucchini cake to everyone? Is that it?

At least the recipe.

Yeah, if someone is interested, I'm willing to.

I'll say like a vegetarian paella. I did that recently and was pretty stoked on it. Well, that sounds really good. Jennifer, how about you?

Um, let's see, I, I would also do a vegetarian dish, maybe lasagna.

I haven't made any of those dishes, neither paella yet nor lasagna. No, not yet.

Okay, so hi Russell, welcome. We're doing our icebreaker and the question is if you Good. Or if you could cook a meal for the team, what would it be? Maybe, uh, maybe, uh, Vivek, you want to go next?

Sure. Uh, I think my original answer was pizza, but, uh, I think, I think someone else probably could do that well. What I would try to do is maybe like some kind of, um, Indian dish, South Indian dish that's less common, especially amongst this group. I would— I think maybe, maybe someone here is a South Indian specialty cook, so I don't want to assume, but I'm assuming the rest aren't, so I'll probably do, uh, yeah, like upmau is something I make at home pretty frequently, so that may be something I would do for the group. Russell, what about you, man?

Hello?

Can you hear us, Russell? Are you there?

Maybe not yet.

Maybe he's connecting.

Can we make everyone turn their camera on?

Everyone put their— we want to propose the camera on? I mean, yeah, I mean, if folks—

If it's possible, it would be nice to see everyone.

Maybe Russell is listening up.

I don't know what's going on. Okay, well, let's skip Russell for now.

Yeah, Erica.

Erica, um, I will make chilaquiles, which is my favorite breakfast. Um, it's— there are many ways to do it, but it's basically tortilla chips with salsa, and you can add egg or, um, Chicken, I prefer with egg and beans on the side. And yeah, that's usually what I make when I visit someone or like, yeah, when I have to make breakfast. I really like it. And Ani, what would you make?

I would make a carrot top pesto that I just discovered now. And I think it really fits with the sustainability because we don't really use the carrot tops. And yet the other day, I remember somebody mentioned to me, oh, you can make a pesto with it. So I tried, and we've been eating in the last few days. Something that we can teach a workshop at the store too.

And it came out so good. Seriously, guys, if you ever have the carrot tops, don't throw them away. Make pesto.

Yeah.

Okay, thank you. So Russell mentioned he's having some trouble with his audio. So maybe when, when he's ready, he can share his. Yeah.

Okay.

So, uh, let's review our agenda for tonight. One second. So, uh, number 1, icebreaker. We did it. Thank you, uh, um, number 2, Vivek will share the high-level review of steps. To create a co-op. And then we'll have time, ample time for questions and answers regarding his presentation. And then Ulla and I are going to talk about membership, which was like our action item last week. And then Annie and Ulla will share with us the Miro board that they created and guide us through it. And we're going to discuss how Slack— how does Slack go? And finally, we'll have some time to say how the meeting went. So before we continue, would anybody like to add an item to the agenda for tonight?

I feel like I had something, but now it's escaping me. Uh, maybe, maybe if it's okay, uh, I can bring it up a little bit later. It'll probably come back to me. I'm sorry, guys, I should have made a note of it.

Yeah, you can, you can, you can add it when you remember. Ulla?

I was thinking if we can add at the end that we designate the facilitator and icebreaker person, like, already at the end of the meeting for the next time.

Okay, okay, so I'll add it here. Okay. Remind me if I forget. Assign roles for next week.

Okay, cool.

All right, so we can start with the second item. Vivek, I pass it to you.

Cool. Okay, give me a second, guys. I'm to give full access to. Um, you have to make it the host.

Cool.

Okay guys, um, cool. So, um, So yeah, this was something I wanted to go over two weeks ago. Before I do, I just want to quickly say— one second, I think there's some feedback. Yeah, so I just wanted to say I got a chance to watch the video from two weeks ago with— or last week, sorry— with everybody and It was, it was really encouraging. I felt really thankful for all of you and your commitment to the project, and, and, you know, just, uh, it made me feel that if we're even more confident in this, uh, team and our ability to, to create this vision and actually have a real impact on, on this particular problem. So, um, you know, while sometimes these things in the process can feel like we're not making quick progress as we'd like. I think on the, like, just seeing every, all of you coming together and assemble and working together better and better just was really encouraging. So I appreciate everyone's continued commitment to this project and input and suggestions. And yeah, I know this may be tricky and, and risky for some folks, um, in some ways. But I think the process, as we all outline in the next couple steps, will provide clarity on how we get to— from where we are today to a point where we have a product that we are excited about and hopefully customers are excited about. And, um, and, you know, if there are concerns along the way, obviously we We'll be able to talk about them and address them as a team. So, yeah, once again, just thank you. Thanks again to everybody for their help last week. Okay, so getting into it, I'm just going to go to presentation mode. Cool. Everyone see the screen okay? Okay, so I was, you know, I want to provide more clarity. There was questions about the steps of going from where we are today to launching a product. Um, and so I did a bunch of research. Uh, I, um, stumbled on some material on a PDF a while ago, um, shared from that website that Erica found, the rules for ConsenSys, um, uh, institute.coop, which is a really just great resource for all this type of material and questions. And, um, And so they provided a document that clarifies the steps from A to Z. And high level, this is sort of the steps. By the way, Russell, can you hear us yet or you're still unable to?

Yep, I got everything working again. Thanks for asking.

Yeah, cool, cool, awesome. Feel free— this presentation is going to be a sort of opportunity for people to ask questions. So just if you feel like you have a concern or question, just bring it up. So high-level summary of the steps. I'll just read them sort of out loud. The first step is collect information, clarify needs, and assemble an organizing group. This step basically is done. I'm going to go into each of these in more detail. In the next couple slides, the next 8 slides really, but that step has almost kind of been done. Potential members need to discuss needs and vision, coordinate and organizing business research, and then after that, conduct a feasibility study, present findings, attain a commitment to proceed. Fourth, prepare and review the business plan. And five, draft legal papers and secure membership and financial commitments. 6, hold the co-op's first charter meeting, define and accept roles. 7, implement management, prepare the business startup. And number 8, start operations, implement business plan. So as you can see, this kind of like takes us from where we are today to sort of launching a product on a high level. So I'm going to go through this real quick once again. Pull something up on my computer. Cool. So the first step, collect information, clarify needs, and assemble organizing group. So a lot of this has already been done. I did, I did a lot of this on my own and then brought this, you know, put out that event with the help of the various folks on this call. And, um, and so that got us all together. And, and, but where we are, the missing step right here is like sharing our objectives, understanding, uh, individual objectives, and, um, and for creating this cooperative. Not like our personal objectives, but like what we would like to see this cooperative do. Beyond just the mission that we define for this organization. So these are sort of like secondary goals, I would sort of think of them as. But yeah, so that's the first step. So the next step is— sorry, excuse me— potential members meet to discuss needs, vision, and coordinate organizing and business research. This step primarily is about enough, you know, seeing if there's enough interest to justify additional planning and research, which seems like we kind of established that, and establish a core decision-making group in selecting a steering committee. That's what this really, this step is all about. And for me, the way I see it is, I think Erica is going to talk a little bit to this, the group, this group here, including Brad, um, like seems like the steering committee. We're not, um, we're not, uh, like full members because we're not cooperative and we're not a legal organization yet, but we'll probably end up becoming the steering committee for this org. Um, and that's what this, this step's pretty much about, and we're pretty close to that. Um, we, we need to do some stuff like inventory of skills. Uh, Adam's talked about that in the email discussion, and We'll get to that, I think, in the next meeting or maybe through some other means, whether it's a Google Form of some sort or something like that. Next up is— so conduct a feasibility study, present findings, and obtain commitment to proceed. So this is going to be the probably one of the biggest steps we're going to do to— in our journey. This is where we're going to research if the proposed idea is feasible or not. It's not a business plan, but it's general research, but not in a formal document. It's— we will probably end up breaking up into committees to tackle the feasibility study, and on some degree of cadence, we will come back as a general group and present our findings, either whether it's in a presentation of sorts, maybe some sort of doc— written document, whatever it is that we decide is a method to provide feedback to the rest of the team, and then at that point decide if we continue to move forward with the project. And yeah, so that's, that's, that's that. Next is based on that feasibility study, assuming that the feasibility study goes well, then we will create a proper business plan. And we'll— that business plan will take all this analysis that we did in a feasibility study and put it in a more thoughtful document or more thorough document so that we are able to present that to external parties. So one of those external parties probably that will be important will probably be like a financier types. So imagine, you know, credit unions, banks, foundations, and other like individuals perhaps that want to support this organization financially, government orgs, things like that. As a matter of fact, to speaking to that, I actually was on two calls today that were related to financing worker-owned cooperatives, and I will say I was very encouraged both conversations. There seems to be a lot of different groups out there that are financing worker cooperatives. They themselves, as the groups that are financing them, are actually worker cooperatives even. And so it's encouraging to see that there's a lot of support there, and these organizations are not even working individually, like there could be one— there was on one of the calls, there was like 4 or 5 different organizations that fund worker-owned cooperatives, and they all kind of knew each other, and they oftentimes work together, especially if the amount of money that the worker cooperative is looking for is a large amount, which probably will be the case in ours. So anyway, so that was very encouraging, but having proper documentation to show that our plan is viable is a key component of that, and that's where this step comes in. Sorry. So then from there, we would draft legal papers and secure membership and financial commitment. So this step, yeah, it's kind of like what we— it kind of sounds like, but the team is more formally created. We put together the bylaws. We'll probably have to like look for some legal counsel at that point. We get written financial— we get written and financial commitment from the team. This will be for us to decide probably in our feasibility study or some point along the way. We will figure out like how much is, you know, for each to become a real member, how much is that to do that, you know. For some organizations, it's— it can be a few dollars, like it'd be like $100 or a couple hundred bucks, some, you know, $1,000 or a couple thousand bucks. That's for us to decide and, you know, to discuss. Next, hold a co-op's first charter meeting, define and accept roles. So, yeah, once again, this is pretty easy as it sounds. Like, this is where we are officially, you know, are, you know, a cooperative. We, you know, will set the articles of incorporations formally, and the bylaws, these are just more like legal documents that people, you know, external parties might look at, or, you know, when you apply to become a real corporation, the government just wants to see things like that. We will also assign a board, and this is for oftentimes, well, this is for our own management, And also oftentimes for external parties that want to know who's in charge, so some sort of board will likely need to be created, especially at that point we'll probably be a much bigger organization, so we'll need to have some sort of leadership. Next, 7, implement management and prepare for business startup. So yeah, well, while we'll have a board of directors, that board of directors maybe will likely be different than the management team. So the board of directors basically represents this larger team. Right now there's, you know, 6, 7 of us, but, and the board will represent those. Well, right now that's how many people are, but in the future I would imagine we'll have 20, 30, 40 100 people, who knows. And so the board really represents the workers, all the worker owners. And then from there, we'll have to select a team of managers that manages certain divisions, whether it's, you know, human resources or technology or marketing or whatever it is. And they will— that team will be responsible to answer to the board of directors. So That's where implement management comes into place. I mean, some of that— this stuff will come sort of naturally as we, as we develop, but these are sort of the high-level steps. We'll acquire facilities and necessary license and agreements so that we can, you know, start the business, and we'll secure our financing here and finalize agreements for all sources that give us financing. And lastly, yeah, we start the company. This is what we're all like, you know, we're all excited hopefully for and we'll be working towards starting the business, launch it, and work on determining ways to make us an enduring business. So once we have the things going, we start seeing where the business is going and how it's working just initially, We start setting up some steps to make sure that we go beyond, um, just, uh, uh, you know, an organization that lasts 1 year, 2 years, but can be an enduring business and making sure and sort of move out away from the mindset that we will probably have been coming from, which is like sort of doing a lot of research and preparing to, you know, a team that can last a long time on the, on the implementation side of things. So yeah, so that's high level the steps. I'm going to take a moment to pause and, you know, see if there's questions from the, from the group. And there's a couple more things I'll go after this, but I think this is a good time to pause. So any questions or concerns or feedback?

Um, my, my only question or cause for feedback would be the, um, how, how, uh, concrete the last 7 and 8 pages would be and how flexible your vision is for the business on managers and things like that. Because I've read about other worker co-ops and they're run a lot less like a company and a lot more like groups of companies. So like each division would kind of be like, you know, like if I wanted to spin off a division of the Sustainable Co-op, I would have, you know, I would have my own employees or whatever, and I would pay them out sort of way. That would be like one model. And versus like having like the hierarchical model where there is like, a CEO or president or a board, that like top-down, that top-down power. But I think that the top-down power is important because that's the part that we can kind of use as almost like franchising and like explaining how, how you go about building like a supermarket or how you go about building a distribution center. Like those would be our plans, but then like the actual people that are doing the work, like actually running, running the stores, I feel like they should be more of like the boss of that area, kind of. But I don't know if that, that fits. And that's kind of later on in like the— it feels later in the process than, than where we are now to like know if, if that's a deal breaker or not.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, totally. So, I mean, I don't think I know the exact answer to that question. I think what I've seen of like, you know, sort of a holding company for different worker cooperatives, I often see that as like much more like more established organizations. They've been around for, you know, decades perhaps, where there's like one central org and then there's a bunch of like new smaller worker-owned cooperatives that they pick up or buy or whatever. That's mostly been my experience on that side, but I think we can— I think the goal for me right now at least, and the way I envision it, is like focusing on just getting this one thing up and going. And I think we're going to learn a lot from that, and it'll, you know, it's going to take time to work through the kinks through that, and then at that point we can figure out, okay, like, how do we do a second one or a third one or fourth one or whatever, you know? Yeah. Is it— do we franchise it? We don't. Or like, you know, what does franchise even look like in that scenario? Um, so just getting the first one out, I think, is a tricky part.

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, because I guess it, it comes down to, like, this last slide really comes down to how do we want to How do we want to be managed and how do we want to manage, right? And I want to— like, personally, I would want the most— I would want the most autonomy. Yeah, right? Like, this is the, this is the part where we need to have a plan and then we need to have operations where, like, um, well, maybe it's the slide before this actually. What was the slide before this?

Oops.

Yeah, like the management team, like this sort of stuff, acquiring the facility, like that makes sense that you would have— I know you're going to need a manager, right? Someone's going to have to do the operation. Someone's going to have to know how to run a store and then teach and train and build a team. Um, but I don't know, maybe—

what's your concern? And you want to sit down?

Yeah, I was gonna say that does it have to be part of the co-op, like the manager, or like while you're hiring a manager?

Oh, hiring, hiring is not— that's sort of the language that this document uses. It probably should just say select, select, select, select, or choose, or delegate. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's all right. I, I should probably have clarified that. Yeah, it's, it's gonna be internal, you know. It's probably gonna be— I wouldn't see where, like, maybe In a scenario where we don't feel like anyone within the team has got the necessary skills, then we can, we can do some research. The board will probably go out there and research, uh, and try to find, um, you know, someone who's the right fit for that role.

I would feel like that, like, that person should be part of the board and they could help us guide, guide the company and guide the vision.

Yeah, that also happens also in normal orgs too. So yeah, once again, these are things we can decide down the road.

Mm-hmm.

Um, but yeah.

Okay.

That's a good question. But to be clear, what is your exact concern? I just want to make sure we addressed it.

Uh, yeah, my exact concern is I want like, not just, not just in the words like co-op, like I want to make, make it so that this, this business like does the most good for the most amount of people. And especially like the workers. And so this page forces us to think about how do we manage, how do we manage to do, to make sure people at least do the vision that we're setting out, right? There's like certain things that they have to do, otherwise we can't work with them or we can't partner with them. So, and then the rest is like, How do we make sure that we're all getting paid fairly or getting the ability to be creative and get the job that's perfect for them if possible? And that could be managing a grocery because I have friends that manage groceries. But I think that that work is equally as valuable. And that's where it comes to this part. The worker that's actually stocking the shelves, who's actually getting it getting the job done, I want them to have as much value and as like almost as fair share as, as any of us founders or whatever, if possible somehow. And if that's the case, how do you structure it? And is the— do we, do we even have a reference like at that level? I don't know if we do. And so we're kind of exploring new territories.

But from what I read, what some co-ops do when they hire employees, there is like a trial time, um, so the members of the co-op see if this person is, you can say, a good match. Let's say 6 months you work with this person and you consider their effort and how they get along with everybody. And then people vote on the person to decide that person is eligible to become a member. That's one option that I read. I don't know if this is what you're referring to.

Well, I think what Russell's referring to is like— I think your point is like, You're trying to figure out like, how do we take care of the team? Like, how do we take care of this team, making sure that the team founders and any of our employees are well taken care of and that's not compromised? And I think that there's lots of different mechanisms for doing this. We're not the— you know, one of the reasons I ended up choosing a worker-owned cooperative versus like other business models is worker-owned cooperatives have been around for a long time and there's a lot of great examples. You know, one of, you know, the poster child for this oftentimes is like Mondragon. Mondragon in Spain is, you know, the third largest corporation in Spain and one of the largest in all of Europe. They do a lot of trainings. You can even literally even, you can go visit them in Spain and they will give you a tour and like talk about how they implement their business and all this type of stuff. So, and we, and there's lots of other organizations out across the U.S. that are worker-owned cooperatives and they face these challenges of making sure people are paid fairly. And actually, quite frankly, oftentimes they get paid, we get paid more because a lot of money's not getting pulled out and going to investors that have nothing to do with the business. It gets to stay within the organization. And so I think, but these are real questions, and we'll— the, the— there's going to be a group when we split into committees, um, there's going to be a group that is going to look at it like sort of internal mechanics of the worker cooperative, like how do we, um, you know, like, you know, scheduling meetings, and how do we do further education for people, and how do we, um, um you know, how do we make sure that people are happy and understand if their happiness level— like, and, and that group probably will do what you're talking about. They're going to go— I would envision them going or talking to lots of other cooperatives out there, talking to the— like that woman Tammy who we had in that first call. I talked to on a weekly basis this woman Shelley, who was also on that first call from ICA Group, and, and asking those people those questions. Like, how do we do this? Like, can you give me some examples of this? Like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we'll— and they'll answer those questions and they'll give us input, and then whoever does that research will present it to the larger group. Does that make sense?

Yep.

Yep. Thank you.

Yeah, and once again, this is also part of the reason I chose a worker cooperative versus like a traditional startup. You know, I was just like listening the other day, you know, the poster child of capitalism, Amazon, right? Like it was like some lawsuit against them where they were literally stealing tips from delivery to people. Like one of the largest companies in the world stealing tips from their delivery people. Like I knew no matter what, I knew no matter what, if I started a traditional corporation, there would always be this opportunity for us to compromise our values, especially to teammates. But as a worker-owned cooperative, that can almost never happen, right? Kind of like baked into who we are as an organization.

Yeah, and I think that this— even this conversation is a testament to that, because usually not even like, get out of this meeting, Russ, you're causing trouble, right? Like, that's what it would be.

That would be the reality. I mean, I kind of wanted to say that, but yeah, no, it's true.

So I value it. I'm with you, and I jive with it. That's why I'm I'm happy. So thanks.

Yeah, of course. Any other questions?

I would just like to add that that can be one of our objectives, that people are treated equally, paid fairly, and all these important things that seem to matter to all of us.

Yeah, matter of fact, we're about to get to that. So that's awesome. You're giving me a little Head start. Awesome. Appreciate it. Jennifer, what about you? Or Adam?

Or Ani?

Ani, you're taking away furiously notes, I know, so I hope you're being able to pay attention a bit. I appreciate you taking notes, but any of you guys want to chime in or questions that I can try to address?

I'm just trying to keep an open mind right now about I like the idea of starting with our values, identifying our values, and working, working from, working outwards from there so that we answer the questions using our values that we've agreed on.

You want it?

You want to No, I wanted to see otherwise like—

See what?

The previous steps because that's what's going to be next.

Oh, the next step, yeah.

The next, the previous.

Previous ones.

The previous ones because that's going to be one of our next steps, no?

Actually, it doesn't say it here and I'm going to explain that point about values pretty soon. So assuming if Ani, Adam, or Ulla don't have questions or Erica, I'll move on with the presentation.

Cool.

Awesome. So, so this is where we— this is the high-level steps. So I think the next logical question is like, like pragmatically, how do we go from here? And so I kind of outlined it, and this, this is like a place for discussion, like real discussions. I'd like you guys to think about this and look at this very carefully. This is me taking some of my business background experience, looking at what other cooperatives have done, looking at the steps, high-level steps that I shared with you, and I'm— and then like listening to some of the conversations that we've had over the last couple weeks and trying to put them into a thoughtful mechanism so that we can streamline this process. Now this is not firm and stone, this is like open for discussion. And I'd like us to think about this and make sure that I didn't miss anything. I was really trying to be thoughtful, but obviously there's always opportunities for any, any of us to make mistakes. So, so I'd like us to talk about— so first step, agree on this vision. We, we kind of moving forward with this vision. The next thing is to talk about or determine our shared objectives. So this comes to the point that Russell's talking about, uh, one of the things that Russell was talking about Could be like a shared objective could be like, you know, making sure employee happiness, we're like talking about what is the ideal income, talking about how big of an organization we want to become, and we could be spreading cooperative principles. So just like thinking to ourselves, like what are some of these personal objectives, like some of the objectives you would like us as an organization beyond sort of the mission. A mission is like what we're going to be really super hyper-focused on, but some additional sort of objectives you would like us to, to accomplish as an organization. It may not be our, like, our number one priority, but we would like to see them occur kind of almost alongside the mission. So then upon, once we understand those objectives, we We honed in onto the objectives that we could share as a team. We agree on a mission, and the mission's a little bit different than the vision. It's very— it's more like a precise wording, and that will allow us to, like, come back to it regularly and say, hey, this is what we're working on, like, this is the priority. Other things are sort of ancillary and help us make decisions and be able to say no to things and say yes to other things. And, and those, that mission I, I see is should be within the bounds of our shared objective. Our shared objectives are almost like the rules, how we play. And, and then, uh, are we agree on that? We used that, that shared objectives to agree on the mission. Next is the, the business model canvas.

Um, sorry to interrupt. Would it be fair to say that our vision could change or be adapted, but our mission should remain like the same, or yes?

I would, I would probably say that, yeah. Okay. Yep. Next was a business model canvas. So the— this is something a step that Tammy talked about, Brad, I think Russell even shared a version of it. And so this is like a high-level gives us an idea of like how we're going to tackle this problem and like, you know, stakeholders and partnerships and go-to-market and some like high-level steps of like that we agree upon and makes kind of— we'll need to do further research on, but kind of gives us some direction, the type of customers we want to go after, things like that. Along with this, I just, for the sake of keeping it simple on this deck, I foresee this is where we will as a group also talk about values. As an org, we'll share this, and I'm going to get into the values component a little bit later in more detail, but we'll probably initially kick off some discussion on what are some of the values that all of us or individually, we— it's important to us. Next, we'll review the committees that we'll want to break into. And determine the committee's objectives. So yeah, it's not enough just to break up into committees, but also to think about what are the committee's objectives, like what are their targets and going after. After that, 6 is design a system for the committees to accomplish those goals. So think as a team, trying to think about once we break up into committees, like how can we make sure that those committees are successful? You know, it's not just about work, but like how can we make the— make it a system so that they can be successful, be efficient, uh, and then also even come back to the larger group and making sure that the larger group, um, on occasion can be notified. It doesn't have to be weekly, maybe it's on a monthly or every other month basis, be notified on what some of these committees are doing, um, so that there's there's buy-in from the larger group. And then after that, break into committees. And then when we break into committees, we'll be— we'll, like, start trying to break down and solving the questions of the feasibility study, and that feasibility study will lead to a business plan and so forth. So that's sort of the step. And then, yeah, so that's the steps as I see them sort of going from this point forward. And as I sort of, like, said I was going to talk a little bit about, but The value step, like being really clear about the value step. I've heard this a few times. So I think this will be brought up and discussed in the— during the business model canvas component, and I think that'll be a good time to, to talk about it. But I foresee the, the marketing committee, the external committee will probably fine-tune it, because every, every one of us can list like a dozen values that are important to us, so the number could get absurd. But I think a— the marketing team with some direction from the business model canvas can apply the values or hone the values that will make sense that we for us internally, hopefully, and then also externally that will allow customers to understand what we represent. And those values the marketing team will sort of hone and do some research on and then present it to the larger group, for this larger group, the steering committee, for buy-in. Um, so that's a step. Also, I would imagine in the next couple weeks, um, Adam, uh, brought this up in email, and I think he also brought this up in the last call. Is he brought up the step of like understanding the, the different skills that each of us bring. And I think, um, understanding those skills is really important. Probably it should happen, you know, in the next meeting or the week meeting after, where we're really clear about the skills we do or the skills we have and the skills we'd like to learn. And that will be helpful in identifying, um, individuals that we want to go back to into the, like, the larger email pool of, like, 90 people, maybe even beyond, and try to target those other individuals to perhaps come on board sooner to help fill in any roles or missing perspectives that this group is lacking. And so those are sort of the— this is— but this is kind of right, right here I see is, like, the big major steps, and the other stuff is sort of will slot in, smaller things will slot in. And I'm sure each of us will have agenda items or things that they want to bring up and discuss in between, and we will, will save time every meeting for that. But this is sort of the steps as I see it. I'm going to stop now and give time for folks to ask questions or bring up concerns. Jennifer, this is addressed to your concern about vision— of value, sorry.

Well, I'm trying to— it's— I'm trying to follow along with your slides, and it seems like each slide has like 5 or 8 things with it. So like each step is many steps. So how do we proceed next? I'm not sure. Where are we at? Is that where we're at?

Yeah. So you're breaking up a little bit, Jennifer, but I think your question was where are we right now? And yeah, it's determined our shared objectives. I mean, determining our shared objectives and agreeing on a mission. Where we are. Are we working towards really, really quickly?

Vivek, maybe it'd be helpful to like talk about the schedule of these, um, 6 points and, um, what we could do and maybe just this coming week?

Yeah, so I, to be honest with— that's a great question, Adam. Uh, I was spending a little time trying to think about it, um, and I, I like this next week. I, I don't know if there's a better way of doing it. Um, I, I like a shared objectives feels like something and We can perhaps do like online, I can, you know, maybe create a Google Form and we can, you know, fill it in and we can maybe one of us can sort of summarize some of the objectives and like talk about it in the next call, say, hey, this is what people put in. And even in the mission, perhaps also we can have the group work towards doing those things. Or we can even do it in the call next week. Part of me was thinking we just do this over the call. We talk about each shared objective, why people— why it's important to people, uh, and try to see, you know, people can say like, oh, like this was important to Russell. Yeah, that makes sense. And we can discuss it in real time versus like people putting it down on a Google Doc and then like summarizing it. Um, the, the other things that maybe in the meantime I would, you know, Some of these things just take time for us to get together and work through. But like, once we get to the breaking into committees component, we'll have a lot of work to do. But just like inherently, there's some of these like key things we need as a group to sort of like decide on. And so there isn't like a ton of— there is some additional work after this call that I could use some help on. I can talk about some of those things, like even reaching out to the the larger 90-person pool. You know, Russell said it well, like keeping that list warm. I've been wanting to reach out to them and I haven't gotten a chance to send them an email. It's like just kind of like letting them know that we've been making progress and having calls and meetings. You know, people rotating these roles, like whether it's keeping minutes and sending out those minutes, sending out emails. These are some of the tasks we need to get done. They may seem small, but these are— we're owners of the business. Theory will be owners of this business. So these are things that we all could be doing and could be helping. But if anyone— but Adam, also, if you think you have an idea on like how we could break up some of this stuff, like I'm all ears. Like this is— I sort of put this out here and the way I saw it is sort of chronologically working through them in the next couple meetings. But if there's a more efficient way, any of us, I'm happy to have it like think through that. Annie, Ulla, any feedback? Uh, Erika, maybe?

Yeah, I think it would be nice. I mean, it would be good to give a time frame for, for each of this. So then, you know, it's, uh, get us going and get us like encouraged to to get it done faster. You know, of course, if we go a little beyond, it's okay, but I think it will be good to give it a timeframe, reasonable, reasonable, so yeah. Yeah, I agree with that.

It's nice to have a timeline.

Timeline for that.

Maybe I see these as a timeline However, some items might take more discussion than others, obviously. And it will be hard to say, in meeting number 6, we're going to be building the business model canvas, because maybe agreeing on a mission took 2 meetings. But this should be our timeline, and at least we can follow, possibly on our next meeting, If the action items permit it, we can determine our shared objectives or start working on that, or an action item can be to start thinking of our personal objectives so we can put them together as shared objectives, but I'm not sure if you mean about adding specific dates. It might be a little tricky if that's what you were asking.

Adam, go ahead.

Oh, I thought I certainly wasn't— I was more interested in this coming week and what we as a group could work on, less so like saying, oh, break into committees on March 13th or something.

And, um, um, before you continue, so like, as far as, as far as like the business, uh, model canvas, we could, we could start building that like together, like, and it could almost be like a living thing that we, we work on, um, potentially. So like a lot of these could be evolving, and I'll go back to— I'll let you go back to that.

You, Adam.

No, that's, that's actually kind of my point. It's like we have— it's, you're, you're evolving the structure of the co-op on one side, then you're working out the practicalities of the business on the other side. And so like you were saying, like, you kind of want all of them to evolve together.

Yeah, so I guess my only pushback on that, I I can see that there— you guys are being valued. I think it's just a little— it feels a little tricky for me to feel like we could do the business model canvas like super well when we're not 100% precise on, or like, what is our agreed-upon mission and some of the shared objectives. It's just kind of like it's almost a baseline, like we build upon that. That said, maybe you guys take a crack at it. Or one or two of you take a crack at it, or three of you, whatever the number is, take a crack at the Business Model Canvas. And if it requires some adjustments after the mission has been more defined and the shared objectives have been more defined, then also that's also fine. It's up to you. But I think there's some wisdom in, or value in, trying to hone down and nail these things down, understand why these things are important. And being really clear on what they are so all of us have something to sort of hang our hat on, and then we can go on to build, build the business model canvas. But it's up to you, kind of up to you guys. If you want to take— if you want to start working on that, you can.

I was just calling it out as one of the things on the list. I think there are others that might be on— like, we could do on parallel as well. Like, I think what we're trying to say is, like, at the end of each meeting, it would be nice if we had actionable things to do. Like, for example, when we left the last meeting, like, one of the things was let's, let's actually get Slack running so that we can communicate and see if that's useful. And so we ran with that. Those sorts of things, like anything on this list that we could poke at, even if it's very small or minor, any, anybody on the team could potentially do. I think that's—

There is things, this is like, but this is just like the higher level. Like I mentioned, like there's an email that needs to go out to the broader group. I really could use some hand, like a hand with that. I wouldn't, you know, like I'm gonna do it myself. Maybe even thinking about creating, yeah, like that's something that definitely needs to get done. And, like figuring out a mechanism. We can talk about that in this call or, or at the end of this call, we like figuring out how we're going to get these shared objectives. Like literally, how would we do that? Like the process of doing that, that could be— that's definitely a task that needs to be done. I haven't figured that out whether I was going to do it in the next meeting or try to organize it through a Google Doc. That's— these are both like real, real problems. Like, the agree on a mission, like, that's also, how do we do that? Like, do we like all sit around and talk about it? I think it's probably more wise if like one or two people took a crack at like honing a really thoughtful mission and then presented it to the group and like have a talk about it. Is it missing certain things? Is it, we add this thing to it? These are real concrete things.

Yep, yep, you're right.

I wonder, like, if, for example, because we really want to, you know, move forward, so just give it this as really, uh, like a homework that actively people, like, we would, uh, determine our shared objectives and, uh, just, you know, everybody would write it in whatever, wherever we agree for. And when we meet already next time, we have everything summarized and we don't go, you know, it wouldn't take us longer than half an hour without a discussion because the sort of discussion would be already like online.

Well, I think to that point, I think to that point, if someone wants to volunteer, like I would love, I would love, this is, yeah, I think I get your point. I sort of get where people are at and I could tell from the last meeting too. Is there people who are sort of like, working on? So like, why don't we do this right now, just saying like, does someone want to take on determining, like, determining how we actually capture people's shared objectives and kind of create like a sort of a, like a way for us to talk about them? And because obviously shared objectives, we have to be thoughtful. It's almost like values. Like you, we could, you can be an endless list of shared objectives. And I think we need to be like thoughtful that they're reasonable for a business, not just like a group of people hanging out, but a business to tackle this, them on top of our mission. So if someone wants to take up that, I can help them because I know a little bit about like kind of what's reasonable of a shared objective, and I can help that person. So like, and the way I'm foreseeing it is either we do it via the next call And when people talk about them, we like type it on, like, real time, or do it through a Google Form or something like that. But whoever, if someone wants to take that task up and try to figure that out, that's something I was going to do. So that would be amazing if someone else did that.

Also, Vivek, Ani and Uli are going to present the Miro board. So Uli is right that it would be helpful, like, instead of like discussing everything in a meeting, at least putting it out there, writing it there, and then someone that can volunteer, it can be me, like summarizing the objectives. Maybe some are overlapping or maybe some are referring to the same thing, and then that person can summarize it in the meeting and then we can either like add new objectives or say we don't agree with some, but have some kind of background that we are not going to, okay, I'm just going to present this from the beginning because we already read it. Let's say we use a mirror board.

So someone want to take that? Russell, you want to give a thumbs up? You want to?

I was just saying that I agree with Erica. I liked her approach.

Okay, thank you.

You've been taking a bunch of things on. I don't know, maybe someone else wants to take it, take a, take, take a crack at it.

I'm not gonna do the icebreaker next week.

Yeah, I'll, um, I'll try to take a swing at it. I think maybe I'll try to use Trello. And that will— maybe each one of us will just have a card on a Trello board and we'll just try to keep it a simple board, a very simple board that we can add to. And we can have more than one card and you can just like maybe hit thumbs up on a card you like, or if it has that. Would that work for everybody?

You know what, Russell, you and me can talk about it. I think that what you just said sounded pretty good. Why don't you and me chat this week, like tomorrow, or we can talk about it and we can figure out the mechanism. But I think that's reasonable. I'm happy to help. I would love that. Yeah, I'd love to help. And I would like— yeah, it'd be great if you could take the lead on that. All right, cool.

I'll give it a shot.

Sweet. Amazing. Uh, and now on the mission, does someone want to take a Take a stab at, you know, give me a first shot at like writing a 1 or 2-liner mission. Me? No, you've been doing a lot of things, babe.

There's nothing for me to do for the next one. I'm not good at making business model canvas.

I don't think so. Well, we can see if anyone else, Jennifer, Adam. Either of you would like to step up on, on taking a crack at.

Yeah, I could do that. Um, or if anyone else wants to, uh, do that as well, um, it could be like, um, go back and forth during the week and then present something we come up with by the end of the week.

Yeah, and I'll— and I'm sure me and Vivek will, when we're getting our objectives squared away after interviewing everybody, we'll try to get, um, We'll try to get that data to you so you can— if, if, if any of that, because, you know, the shared objectives, they're going to help you, uh, figure out that sentence that, or that couple sentences that really gets the core essence of it, right? So I think as we gave you that data, it might, it might actually shift, shift you. So yeah, interesting to see how that works.

Yeah, then maybe that's a point. Maybe, maybe we should hold off. That's a good point. Should we hold off, guys?

No, I don't think so. I think we go forward, and then if Adam— when— as Adam gets more data, he, he can, he can shift, try to shift it.

He's trying to work his poetic nature.

It's poetry, it really is.

Yeah, yeah, I like my alley.

Perfect, perfect. Okay, sounds good.

Yeah, sorry, but important that all of us, we really do it quick. We don't wait till next week to give you guys, you know, the objectives.

Oh yes, I think so.

So we have to do it within, I don't know, agree next 2 days, deliver it to Russell.

Yeah, that's— I think so. Russell and I will get together tomorrow. Russell, you have some flexibility in your schedule tomorrow?

Uh, I can try to fit some, some in. I can do a lot of async as well. If you want to just send me chat messages on Slack, I can. Okay, I'll try to reply and get back to you.

All right, sounds good.

Um, you guys will, like, after you guys talk, then you will let us know, like, we're supposed to do something, right? Our objective.

Precisely. And then finally, guys, it's like a top, like ideally a couple day timeline to get it, like to share your stuff. So hopefully people can agree on, it's like, is that cool from everybody? Like we give you guys like maybe 2, 3 days. Like if we ideally, hopefully Russell and I will be, we'll talk tomorrow. Well, by end of the day tomorrow, we'll figure out the mechanism for getting input from you on your shared objectives. And if we gave you guys, say, 3 days, 72 hours, is that sufficient time for folks to share that? Or do you guys think you might need more time than that?

No, that sounds good. Yeah, that's good.

That sounds good.

Jennifer?

Yeah.

Is that what we're talking about?

Say that again.

You're talking about the Trello part?

Well, we're talking about, would you, would you, would you be able to get your objectives? Like if we started, if you started thinking, would you be able to get your objectives in the next couple of days?

Sure, yeah.

Okay, then that will work for us. And then those objectives will feed into the report we're collecting, and then that report will help Adam and Erica and everyone else form a— agree on a mission statement that is concise and fits everything we need.

So am I right that that's— we're doing that on Trello?

Um, we probably— if you want to start on Trello, if that works for you, that's great. Um, everyone's gonna have to get notes, so I was thinking to— at the end I was gonna try to compile it there, but if, if you have a better place that you'd like to to form your ideas, by all means use it.

Trello works for me.

Yeah, I mean, what—

yeah, because, you know, later we will talk about Miro, and I think actually Miro could be very good for that if we decide to go on it.

If not, okay. Yep, and I know you guys were working on that, so yes, that's fine too. Wherever Jennifer wants to put her ideas, that's fine, and then we'll compile it into a into a place, and it might be Mira.

Yeah. I mean, you can always— we can always— you can write it down on a notepad for the time being, and then you can always copy-paste it. So let us get back to you, and we'll certainly provide direction as soon as we can.

Yeah, and it would be— Jennifer would need that. Adam's going to need to do it. Everyone's really going to need to do it.

Yeah, yeah, of course, of course, of course. Everyone, yeah. Yep. Cool. Is that like, feel comfortable in terms of like being able to get some work done and get some stuff?

Well, there's the issue of the email that you asked help with. So yeah, I'd like to volunteer to reach out to the big group of people that RSVP'd for the original event.

Sorry, I'm not following.

The email to the broader group, like, remember we're gonna just keep the broader group sort of warm, the 90, 90, like, email list.

Yep.

And so we need to send an email to them sort of keeping them warm, keeping them updated on progress.

So it's a quick Is the question like coming up with ideas?

No, no, can someone help me with that?

I can do it.

Okay, cool. Erica's also been helping a lot, but I think we have a small group, so kind of like it's gonna be some overlap right now. So cool. Uh, okay, so I think that's good for, for now. Um, Unless anyone disagrees, does this seem reasonable? Russell, Adam?

Yeah, let's do it, guys.

Cool, awesome. Uh, I just wanted to, um, I want to set—

what about the roles? Because you are talking about skills also, but like, do you have like an idea of what kind of roles need to be Not yet, I think it's coming later. Yeah, it's gonna come. You also have to think of like what kind of skills to apply.

Yes, we're gonna do that later. I think it's not one of the things that are detailed right here, but it's probably gonna fit into the next meeting or two meetings where we're gonna like request, you know, from like people to just get more clarity on what roles people can do and what jobs they can do. And then that will help us reach out to the broader group that you guys talked about you wanted to relaunch or whatever you want to call it, but coming back to the broader group looking for particular skills in different, different roles, but different roles. Cool. And this is the next slide. It's like, was one, two last slides really quick. This next one is like something to think about. It's not right now, but I think, I think about this a lot in general in my life, and I think it will play an important role. I mentioned it a little bit here for, you know, design a system for the committees to accomplish their goals. And it's like, how do we design a system for success? You know, keeping in mind allowing us to move quickly but thoughtfully. You know, speed, I often hear speed a lot, but we can be like moving quickly in the wrong direction. Where we can move maybe slightly slower, but in a thoughtful and the right direction. So, you know, thinking about creating a system for us to, to do that, to avoid blind spots, and for us to overcome different challenges and hurdles and be able to utilize technology so that we can collaborate and work together efficiently without a lot of noise and confusion. So this is, this is like a broader conversation. It's not for us to think about, decide now, But I wanted to put this seed of thought into all of our minds for us to be thinking about is how do we work well together? Like, how can we work well together? How can we sort of go out there and be autonomous and solve problems on our own and come back to the group and share and do that efficiently? We're like, it's early on in our journey where we, these things take time to progress, but long-term, if we can do that, we can avoid having individual successes in like doing a business model canvas and individual success in, you know, some little marketing campaign and instead actually create an organization that is like continually built for success over and over and over. And so creating a system, I think being really thoughtful about a system that allows us to do that, it's almost like, it's almost like, creating the walls for a stream to go downhill. You sort of block everything out and allows for water to sort of flow naturally as it will in course of success, towards success. So just something for us to think about, I wanted to mention. And then lastly, it's just like, I saw this on Instagram the other day. It was this post, as you can see, like this guy in India, I know this is actually a true story, This guy has been planting trees every day for the last 35 years and he created a forest larger than Central Park, which is pretty insane. And I just like, I think it speaks to the power of patience. Once again, like I think startups, businesses always think about speed, speed, speed. And I think oftentimes like we, and this is my own experience too, and working for startups and starting my own businesses, we often like work fast but in the wrong direction. So, but like patience oftentimes is such a powerful tool. Like how can we work thoughtfully and smartly? And if we are patient, there's really nothing that stops us. So yeah, that's it. That's it for me. And hopefully this has been helpful. Any questions? Anything else before I stop sharing my screen? Okay.

All right, thank you, Vivek. Okay, so our next item will be, uh, Ullan and I will talk a little bit about membership. So Vivek, if you— oh yeah, I can share my screen now.

Good.

Okay, so I'm just quickly gonna share my screen. And, um, last week, uh, my action item was to like do some research research on how to become a member, basically, because there was this question like, yeah, we need to be members in order to have a vote. And, well, after doing some research and talking to Vivek— and he already talked about it, too, in his presentation— we saw that we are— I'm going to share. OK. Oh. So if you can, Vivek, you can click where it says share your screen. There's an arrow on the right, so you can— So everybody can share it without switching hosts.

Yeah, hold on.

Like advanced options.

One second.

Okay, cool.

So yeah, and I just want to share this, um, quickly with you. So yeah, this is where we are now. We are in the organizational development stage and this is what we need. You need to form an organizing or steering committee with people who represent the cooperative's potential members. Identify your mission and core values, which is what we talked—

we just talked about.

This is what we are, we are the steering committee and potential members. And I just wanted to clarify this because I'm going to talk a little bit, and I'm going to use this, this term when I, when I show you what was the research that Ulan and I worked on. Okay, so when, when I was Yeah, trying to do some research, there was a lot of information on membership, specifically some examples of membership agreements, rights and obligations of members of our co-op, and there wasn't really much on where we are now, the steering committee, not much information. So this, let me just share this with you.

Sorry.

Okay, are you looking at a presentation right now?

Yep.

Okay, oh, sorry. Okay, no, not this. Um, sorry, click the wrong button.

Okay, here. Okay.

So these are the 3 questions that I had to answer. So what is the process to become a member of the co-op? Then there was the issue of some members— some members would have invested more hours of labor than others once the co-op becomes profitable. So what do we do with this? And then how do we make important decisions if we are not official members of the co-op? So these were hard questions to answer, and when I was doing some research to answer these questions, I came across an article that really helped me, and I'm not going to talk about the article. I'm just like, it's about narrowing our focus, and here is a link. I will share this with you in case you're interested in reading it, and it just says that when you have like a big— in the article, they call it problems, but I like to call them questions or issues. When you have like a big issue or question, try to turn it, to make it into a small question that you can answer now and you can find answers for now. So yeah, with a narrow focus, it's easier to gain insight that you can apply to the big problem. So I asked Ulla for her help and then Together we kind of like changed these big questions into smaller questions and we came with some answers. Some are like things that we did research on and some are things that we thought would be a right answer. So we're gonna share this with you and then we'll— we want to hear your input, of course, on these questions and answers. So, Ulla, you can start with like the big the first big question and then you can just read it. Thank you.

Okay, so the main question for us would be, what is the process to become a member of the co-op? So we narrowed it to a smaller question, not calling it a problem. What initial commitments are required during the steering committee stage? And like, according to some research and what we think it can be. Attend and actively participate in 75% of the meetings, follow up on action items, do research on co-ops and the business market or vision, and share their research with the team. Work on finding solutions to the problems that might be presented during the startup process. And the last one, participate in consensus. So that's like as Erika said, that there was not that much information since we are just on the stage of steering committee. But we still have to have some kind of rules who is allowed, who, I mean, who is actually a member of the steering committee. So now, what do you guys think about it? Because while we were talking about this and brainstorming, my question— this question popped for me. What if someone cannot attend the meeting, but is committed and actively dedicates their time and follows up on action items and consensus on other platforms? Would we accept that person as a member, you know, active member of the committee? Because on the opposite side, we could have someone who is present on each of the— like, on every meeting, but is not really active. So why to kind of not allow the person who— let's say maybe someone is in different time zone. This is very theoretical, but it's good to be prepared. So theoretically, imagine we have someone in different time zone, like Annie is going to move. And she can't be, because it's middle of the night for her to be on the meetings. What do we do with this kind of member?

Are you looking for people to talk now or?

Yes, now is the time to talk.

Okay, it'd be kind of cool. Like I like these, I like these bullets, but I could see how it could be gamed or I could see how it would not be fair. So it almost feels like if they meet like, 3 of them or if they meet 4 of them, maybe that's enough, right? Like if they're participating in consensus, so that means they're voting and they're actually having a say, that's important. They're finding solutions, that's great. Like if they can just tell us what to do and we can go do it, like, okay, I want that person on the team. Yeah, so these are all great. Like, if they can bring like 3 of these, I'd be happy. So that's my bit. I'll let other people talk.

Great, thank you, Russell. Vivek, you want to say something?

Actually, I'll hold back for once. I think I often talk too early, so I want someone else to speak up.

Sorry.

So I think it's like, yeah, maybe create— I don't know if this was your first brainstorm, but yeah, create a list.

Yeah, that's basically what it was, a brainstorm of what we thought would be important because we as a steering committee are potential members, right? And we are like— basically everybody here is doing all of this, but we are thinking about inviting more people. It's still early. And we might want to tell them, okay, this is what we require of you, you know, to be at least starting to—

yeah, make a game out of it. Yeah, and then you get in the weekly, like a weekly report, you have like 7 points and you get 1 point for doing this, 2 points, some things are more important than others, so you accumulate a number of points.

Yeah, and like Russell said, maybe we cannot every week all of us do all 5, right? But maybe that's why we say like 75% of the time we're there. Like we all have like different things to do, but a consistency, I would say, it will be important to me.

And then like, it kind of gets ambiguous. Like, is attending a meeting, watching it digitally later— like, that person that's on another time zone or is just not able to meet a lot of, a lot of the time, right? Watching the video back, if we're, if we're, if we're going to be honest and keep recording like we are, then that seems like it would be good enough for them to just listen or at least fast forward through it and But maybe they're—

they, for instance, like they would have to write their objectives, right? And then they're like, they just watch the video, but they write their objectives. And maybe they, they write an email, you know what, I volunteered to do this, like, or, um, that, that's like, so that can potentially happen. It hasn't happened yet, but maybe we should like, uh, prepare. In case it happens, right?

Yeah, because I have to be honest, like, if I— I'd like to do less meetings and more like more strategic things later on. So that would be like a goal of mine is to shift more towards the different bullets. But, you know, but right now I realize that meetings are going to be— are so vital because we have to figure out what we're doing.

Yeah, that could be something that can happen when you— when we break into committees, which is like We meet every 2 weeks, or like we will have to decide on that.

Yep.

Okay, so anyone else would like to say something about, or has like an additional commitment that we didn't think of, or some, or maybe one commitment doesn't resonate with you?

I might just comment. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Oh, wow. Okay. No, I'm used to seeing the little green outline of the box go to me, but I guess it doesn't. Anyway, so as this thing evolves, say, 3 years from now, and the thing is running, right? And you were accounting for everyone's time, from the guy stocking the shelves, he works 8 hours a day, we account for that. And then whoever's managing, we account for their time doing this and that. Whatever it is, evolving to that point, what do we do now? You know, so like between— in the next 6 months, are we accounting for our time and sharing that with the group? Like when we go off into committees, since we're not going to see what each other is working on as much, like you know, at what point are we going to like get a little more strict about like sharing that kind of information?

Yeah, that was like the hardest question to answer, and it's actually like the next one and the next slide.

And we—

I would say like once we are ready to like to start with like official membership, then we can talk about that part of like being members. But in the meantime, what I found, which was like the big issue, right? Some members will have invested more hours of labor and others once the co-op becomes profitable, right? Is this what you're talking about?

Right. So I assume this is talking about like Are we valuing our time now, or is that only going to start later on in the process?

Well, I would like to, I would like to say yes, we are valuing your time now. And the small question that I thought it was easy to answer is how would the steering committee—

Can I go back to the other, the previous slide? So Is that possible? Because I didn't feel like this was resolved yet in my book. So I hear what the points you're saying. I just can't— I don't know if I feel like this— it feels a little like— there's a couple of problems I'm concerned about. A, who's tracking this? Literally, who's going to be tracking all this information? That, all right, or Russell didn't show up or whoever it is, like, who's doing that? We need to create that kind of mechanism. So I think I would like to like figure that out. Secondly, I think, I think this feels a little, perhaps I could be wrong, but this, like having 3 or 4 of these and like, what are the 3 or 4 or all these? Like, maybe I'm wrong, but that could be too like, like more cumbersome track than required. I would, I would like to urge you, the two of you, or Erica, or whoever, to perhaps go back and try to reach out to perhaps, whether it be like Shelley or Tammy, or perhaps directly, or perhaps, um, I've done this on multiple occasions and it's always been really well received, like reach out to some worker-owned cooperatives, like, um, in the US and ask them how they, they do this, how, or how they did this, you know, like how do they keep track of like members and, you know, before they're, before there's a financial commitment, uh, is there a way they do that? Is, or are they kind of like kind of loosey-goosey? It's like, okay, well, you know, people show up. I mean, the same people are sort of starting to show up anyway at this point and in participating, like, okay, that maybe like that's all we need. Okay. Like this group here, is cool, like anyone else that joins beyond this, like—

We vote them in or something?

Yeah, they have to be like, they can't really decide, and it's like, they vote it. And that's kind of my point. I think that seems like a reasonable thing. Like, you know, everyone in this group plus Brad, in my mind, seems like a reasonable group to have as a steering committee. And what would—

why?

Why? Because we've attended every— we've been attending almost every meeting, uh, doing these things. Yeah, yeah. So we've already attended, so it's not like it's not to be tracked going forward. It's just like, okay, they are— they're that, you know.

Um, maybe we— maybe we say that these commitments are required for, um, at least— at least 4 of these commitments are required for voting in new members of the steering committee. Yeah, maybe, maybe.

Yeah, I cannot hear Annie very well. Annie, I'm here.

Yes, even if they're not tracked, it can be like the guideline, okay, just for for everyone to know, like, what do we have to do? Okay, try to attend as many as possible meetings, follow up on action items. And yeah, if we think that we cannot do some of those, just like step aside at some point. So maybe, yeah, maybe it doesn't have to be tracked and make a game out of it, how I like, with points. But I think it's good to have it as a guideline.

Yeah, I just think my point is guidelines is fine. I don't— I would probably just want to like urge you guys. I know you put a lot of work into this, but I would probably try to push you guys both more to like reach out to some worker-owned properties. I'm not even joking. I like called up like half a dozen worker-owned cooperatives before I like organized that first call. Like I just went out to websites and like they— I talked to like CEOs and and like, you know, senior directors of pretty large like workwear co-op, and like I picked their brain about random stuff, and they picked up the call, and they literally always spent time with me. I like, you just have to do it, and you'll be surprised, like, and they'll be helpful, and I'm happy to like, um, provide input, and if you don't feel comfortable doing it, I can also like, maybe I can pick up a call phone or two and call some of these people and ask questions, but, or you can just shoot them an email. Email that I found generally to be a little bit like a little bit slower to respond. But phone, they actually, if they pick up the call, they're like, okay, they'll make time because that's actually literally part of the ethos of a work-around property to help other work-around properties.

Yeah, it's part of the principle. So yeah, like basically this is like what we, like Annie mentioned, this was like brainstorming.

Yeah.

And the next question, the answer is not definite at all, is what I found, but yeah, online what's out there, not that I will go up and ask them, but I'm happy to do that.

I think, I think that because I just worry that maybe this is like reinventing the wheel. I could be wrong, like, but I get nervous that like this feels like I see some value in them. I'm not saying that they're like all these aren't valid, but I just worry that they Maybe there was just not much information. Yeah, maybe it's not public.

It's a stage, you know, just it's the stage before basically. Yeah, the official stage. So sure, sure, we can do it and ask what did they do before and how did they count it. Um, yeah, maybe we don't need to be that precise.

Also, was there information on what like the rules of— because like, uh, well, the members, yeah, if you remember, you like pay into it, but Yeah, there's a lot of that.

Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, and like basically the next one is just like what I saw, what I found there, but that's something that we'll have to agree on next, maybe when we're bringing the, the business model, maybe when we're sharing our objectives. It's like basically the way that I read that some companies been doing it is like they, they pay according to the length of service. How long people have been working on this. Like if we've been there from meeting one, from the beginning, as a steering committee and then members, like then you get paid accordingly. So if you've been for the company, if you started, you joined the company in year number 2 and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and that's how you will be accountable because it's hard to like keep track of like the exact hours of labor right now. But, but we, we are, but we are counting that we can count that we've been here from the beginning.

Yep. Um, I, I have a sort of non-sequitur question, but like, does this, does the steering committee dissolve once the membership start, or once the board starts? Okay, once the board starts. Right, okay, because usually the steering committee becomes the board in a sense.

Not always, but again, yeah, okay.

Yeah, you are potential members, and once we're members, we're not the steering committee anymore.

Yeah, this one gets into like shares and stuff.

Just to be clear, I mean, the reason why a steering committee may not become a board member is you literally may not want to be. Yeah, you might not want to. I, I'm not quite certain, like, I would want to be. I could see myself wanting to, you know, just be a worker or something like that, right? Like, there's a lot of responsibility that comes with being a board member, but maybe you do, and maybe we will. Like, I think we will, we will get there when we do, but if that's not clear.

Gotcha. Sorry.

I mean, so I just want to ask Jennifer what she thinks because this is kind of answering her question that she had last week.

Yeah. What do we do with the compensation for this time dedicated now?

Yeah, the question about commitment, what kind of commitment is required to be a member? I was thinking more in general about general membership of the Worker Co-op, and I'm wondering if there can be a category for volunteer, or is there room— is everyone a worker, or is there a category for volunteer?

That's a great question.

I'd be curious, like, why are you thinking like all of us should be volunteer? Or like, are you thinking like one of us or some of us would want to be just volunteers and not compensated for this time? Is that why you're asking the question?

Well, me in particular, I'm in a situation where I can volunteer, but I can't work for less than like $30,000 a year. So I, but I can volunteer as much as I want. And so, so unless, unless I can, you know, have some kind of full-time job with benefits and $30,000 a year, I'd rather stick to just being a volunteer personally.

But do you already know it, like right now at this stage when we all kind of like, we are all building it, or let's say within like next 3 months where we already have the board of members, or I don't know, 6 months or whatever, that you could decide, or you need to decide now.

You think I should decide now?

No, we're saying that you might not necessarily— so like this Like if you wanted to continue to earn nothing, because like I'm earning nothing in the steering committee right now for all intents and purposes, that's fine. I'm volunteering at this point. But at a certain point, it'd be nice if we could build in some sort of way to pay us back for our labor that we're giving for free at this time, right? And if that's the case, then how do we pay us? And sometimes that's shares. Where there's a certain value attached to something that the person can sell to get, like, recoup what they've gotten, you know, and what they've put into it. So you wouldn't necessarily be taking a wage until there was, like, an event that caused you to be able to get, you know, compensated. Right? Like, that could be like 5 years from now. I'll pause.

I can— I'm just trying to be mindful of time. I'm gonna— I can address some of these things. Just hope you guys don't mind. Um, so, so, um, Jennifer, I think you can, um, like, you could— we can decide that probably in the next week or two. We can talk about that. I think you— there's probably a way for us so that you, if you really didn't want to get compensated you could be a volunteer. I think reality is a salary of $30,000 or more is very realistic in my perspective. I haven't done the exact math on every single person, so I don't want to say without 100% certainty, or I don't want to say with 100% certainty, but I think it's very reasonable. And the way this would likely work is As Erica, I think, is insinuating or sort of trying to clarify is we will generally keep track of our hours. Like, we can talk as a group that say like, we're just going to broadly say that everyone who started from the first presentation onwards— there's a little bit of an echo. I'm going to mute you, Jennifer. Okay. Everyone who's, you know, started from the first presentation onwards basically, like, I'm just saying, making up numbers here, is like automatically qualifies for 100 hours, okay? And then what ends up happening is once the company is profitable, those people will, uh, those individuals that were part of that group will, uh, get paid out, um, some number that we decide as a steering committee, um, over the course of weeks and months. So like, the amount could be like $20 an hour or $30 an hour, whatever the number is, $15 an hour, whatever the number is, we decide, and they will be paid out over that period of time, over a period of time after we're profitable. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. And Yeah, I think the equity component, like, yeah, there's just like that. And this is actually to address this equity component because it really isn't an equity component in a worker-owned cooperative. When you leave a worker-owned cooperative, you don't own anything in that worker-owned cooperative anymore. You're no longer a member. You don't, you don't get any— there's no like something you can sell. So, um, you— that's why actually compensating us right now is important because we We, um, or compensated is in the future for the work we do now is, I think, is an important thing. Um, and we can work through that as a, as a, a topic of our agenda item we can talk about in the next couple weeks. And in probably something, once again, Erica or some other teammate who wants to do some research and help can help, um, Erica and Ulla like research and potentially call or reach out to worker-owned cooperatives and asking that agenda, like that item, like how did you do this, like how did you pay back. I've heard different models done for different worker-owned cooperatives.

Cool.

Cool.

Yeah.

Erica, you're on mute.

Sorry, I'm just gonna finish this quickly so we can, uh, go on with with the next item because we don't have much time left. And basically, the next question Vivek already answered. So it was, how do we make important decisions if we are not official members of the co-op? And the small question is, how do we make progress during this steering committee stage? And these are like the steps that Vivek mentioned and that we've talked about. Today. So unless anyone else has something to add to this, I can pass it on to, to Ulla and Annie so they present the Miro board that we're hopefully using this week.

Oh, my bad.

Cool, thank you.

Okay, so I can stop sharing, right?

Unless someone else has a question, I want to be done. Adam, you any questions, concerns?

No, I'm good.

Okay, thank you guys.

I think, I think you should do yours.

Yeah, you guys are on mute. Sounds like—

I think so.

Do you want to—

yeah, I'll sit. You sit here.

You sit here.

Okay. Yes, yes, yes.

Are we unmuted or not?

You're unmuted.

All right, all right. So how we are going to do it, I created— I mean, I opened an account for under my name. And I created with Anis' help a few frames to show you how we can kind of manage all our— like how we can organize everything in more visual way. Can you see the screen?

Yes.

So basically a Miro board is like a gigantic whiteboard where you can add many topics as you want. So we're just like at the beginning here. We said, okay, let's make a little frame. So we frame something as a meeting and we started with our meeting number 5, and then you design it the way you want. There's all these like sticky notes that you can put from— do you see my cursor?

Yep.

From this sidebar, you got your sticky notes here. You can write text, there's templates to choose, you can add connection like lines and so on. So we made this like template, actually we use the template, so it was easy, it was not even like fully created by us. And then, and then you can add as like everyone is familiar with Trello, you can add a little card here, I can just add Another one. Yeah. So it's called a card. If you will show you later the whole like Kanban, which is like actually like Trello. So you can add a card. So you click on it and then you can type something. What else do we need in a meeting?

Icebreaker.

No, icebreaker. And then you can assign somebody. And these are the people that are in the Miro board already. Like so far it's just us, Erica and Vivek, and you can add the link, you can add a date, today and so on. So now you have your little card here. Make it smaller. You can expand the card and you can have the exercise here. What, what do we do? Like, what is your favorite dish.

And basically, it looks like Trello. You just, you know, we would have it here.

And then we have the agenda. So you just go zoom in and zoom out. You can go from like the smallest to like really big. You can also eventually, you can follow the person's cursor. So if it would be that somebody is the facilitator, you would just click on the person cursor and then you will see how they move around the board. Okay, yeah, okay, so that's that. You can add any presentations, so we said, we thought, we have the presentations here that it's easy to access from the same place, so they can open directly on the screen on the screen, you don't have to change the tab, right? So if you present something, you can go directly here.

Then if somebody wants to, for example, see one of the presentations before, doesn't have to, you know, look, search, where is it? It would be just all the presentations would be here.

Yeah, everything in one place. So we have the presentations from today as well. And here on the, on the bottom Right corner, you also have the map of Miro boards, so you can move a little bit, like you can just click on the map where you want to be, but as well you can move with the arrows or with the mouse on the screen, zoom in and out. So here is something that would— it's a Kanban, so it can be something as Trello, right? We didn't make a lot of progress because we wanted to see if you guys want to use this before like adding, adding the items from Trello. But yeah, the same way as we said, like website, like who's in charge, you can assign it. You can also add tags and then later on you can search here, oh, where were we talking about website? And then everything pops up with the website, or like search the tag. That we use. So you get everything here easily. So I guess this, this could be pretty— yeah, you're pretty familiar with this because of Trello. Then we added a few other things, like there's a million of templates, like there's ideation and brainstorming, so you don't have to create everything. There's a lot of building blocks. You can if you want, you can do everything by yourself, but there's also templates. So for example, we said here, like maybe here we can be, I don't know, for example, actually, for, for, uh, what do we say, what is our homework, the objectives. So objectives can be Anyway, yeah.

Yeah.

And then you can like just add, you can add another one. Yeah.

Of course we can also like, like multiple people can add to at the same time.

We can also work at the same time. So for example, we take 5 minutes in Zoom to say, okay, let's write down something. Let's write down our objectives. So you can do it live or you can do it as a homework.

Even at home. Yes. But still on the same one. It wouldn't be—

I created this on the go while we were on the meeting right now with like values. Let's see.

Hi.

So for example, like maybe we can decide to like write on sticky notes here outside of the circle. We can write our values. Integrity or something. And then we try to place it. Where is it? Where is the most important? Is it primary, tertiary? You can, yeah. So you can use these kinds of things for brainstorming. I also created on the go. That's why I was asking also a little bit about the roles because I created a grid. A grid is super easy also to manage because you can just add add a column, you can add, yeah, this thing, you can resize the way you want it. And for example, here I just put everyone's name. So it would be a skills grid. So everyone's name and like marketing, for example, you take a sticky note from here and you just place and you say, I'm expert in Mailchimp. Or something. And that can be bigger. You can give it a different color, so it's very visual. And yeah, you can add emoji. I never do that, but can be also emojis. Uh, one more.

Great.

We also be mindful of time, guys.

Just maybe you want to go on.

Yeah, so if, if everyone likes or like if we want to use it, yeah, for example, we can also have feedback on the meeting, like add some couple of things here, like what I wonder, for example, I don't know, objectives, very different, and values. And yeah, it would be also nice to get feedback on the meetings in this way, what I learned, things that I Learn what I know, like wish, wish, like learn. There's like different ways.

And then, yeah, after, right, uh, whoever is active on it, like when you come back, it will show you who was active and where.

You see the highlights, yeah, like of the changes as well. I wanted to share with you here, if you go on frames, it organizes everything in frames the way we framed it on the screen. So you can go directly, yeah, here, the frame, and eventually you can also export all these, save as PDF, and you can have a PDF with all the information that is on the board. And there's many more, yeah, this is just like a short intro, but you can do a lot of things, especially like you can do, you can brainstorm live, no? It's like, okay, let's take 5 minutes now and discuss this now, especially now where we're moving on to less of like presentation, more of co-creation. So it's a really good tool for co-creation and yeah, it's unlimited. It's, oh, it works with Slack as well. So you can have notifications also from Slack. You can, yeah, you can have notes here on the side. No test. We're trying it out. Trying to go eat, sleep, and repeat. And then you get notified of all those like notes and everything. What else? Yeah, I don't know.

So is it maybe, maybe we should, should we like ask folks to—

So we can, we could invite everyone to this board and maybe we can have one action item happening there. So in this way, like, everyone can familiarize with it and see if you guys like it, and then see do you want to use it or not.

It's kind of similar like with Slack, but also I think it's very important that we can like connect, link it with Slack.

So for example, I can— if you go on my Miro boards on my computer, yeah, you can also see like I can follow you, like I can follow myself here and then I see where Vivek is going on the board and you can like zoom in, zoom out. Yeah. So, so it's nice to do it live. Yeah.

Cool.

Then you can hide. Yeah.

So now Vivek is controlling your screen.

Exactly. So while I was like following him, you just have to click on his icon, whoever is going to be here. So yeah. So, but that doesn't mean that I don't have control. I can still, I can still do something, but if he wants to present something and take me on a journey, he could.

Yeah, well, seems really, really helpful. I think we should give it a try and maybe next meet we give it a try as an action item and next meeting present something here also.

Yeah, is that cool with everybody? Like an action item?

So another thing that, yeah, for example, yeah, action I wrote here action items, so this can be in our meeting. So here we can list, or also from the minutes that I took, like we can just list as we said, um, with just the cards. So what was it we had? We have some action items there.

I can, I can do that since I was facilitator, um, before we We finish, I can review the action items that we agreed on, and then I can try to add them to Miro, so we don't have to do it right now.

Exactly. Just like, yeah, to show them the same way you can attach like two people to it. So Erica and—

Okay, but just because—

Yeah, so—

So is everyone cool with taking up this as an action item, playing around with Miro?

Yeah, I can at least log into it, so that's what I'll try to do.

Okay, perfect. So what about everyone?

Yeah, I'm okay with it too.

Yeah, I'm okay with it.

Yeah, um, any tool that will foster collaboration outside of meetings, I'm definitely down for.

Yeah, just if everyone could spend like maybe like 5-10 minutes, because that way we get a feel of like people want to use it or not. We have a lot of tools, so we don't want to just—

As you said, it's good to find the tools that work better for the future.

Exactly, exactly. I'm not saying that this— I think it'd be helpful for all of us to get some feedback so the next call we know if we should move forward with it or not.

Maybe 5-10 minutes is a little too little. You have to discover something. Have to kind of, you know, I don't know.

We will send an email or maybe when you write an email, we will send also a link with like a, one of them, like a short tutorial, which will really help.

I think if you, if you just come up with a, like an action item that is compelling for people to try, that might be cool too. Like click this box, yes or no here.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Whenever you guys are are asking for objectives, for these personal objectives. That can be one option.

Maybe that's what we try, Russell.

Yeah, and then everyone can write their own objectives. And it can be also like a scale, like very important, feasible, and then you can place it where the objective is personally for you, for example. Yeah, we'll co-create something together here. 3:00.

Okay, sounds good. Uh, just be mindful of time, so we're like at the mark. Maybe we get everyone to hang tight for 5 minutes, maybe.

Is that cool?

Or—

yeah, that's okay with me. Um, thank you, thank you, um, Annie and Olaf for creating this.

Um, should we review the action items and assign Jennifer and Russell and Adam just like maybe 5, 5, 7 minutes?

Yeah, I'm good for—

yep, cool. Sorry, Jennifer. Good.

Yeah, I talked over her. I did it again.

Jesus. Okay, let's go, Erica.

Okay, so, um, action items. We have, um Rosal and Vivek are going to talk about, organize, send, like, get together tomorrow so they can give us some homework on our shared objectives. Adam is going to start thinking of our mission and maybe writing a sentence or two. Everybody, we should think of our objectives and follow up on the homework that Vivek and Rosal assigned.

Assign us.

I'm gonna help to email the larger group, and also then I reach out to worker co-ops to see how they are compensating the members that have been there from the beginning. Is there anything else?

I think they're going next. I just would be like mindful of like, you know, feeling like everyone's grabbing some work, taking up something. Jennifer, do you want to grab like something? And whether it be helping Erica and Ula or—

Sure, whatever, however I can be helpful, I'll try to be helpful.

I think that could be helpful because since we have to kind of like reach out via phone call, maybe we can spread it between 3 of us and reaching out to different existing—

Maybe the 3 of you guys can coordinate how to do it.

Yes.

Okay, so the best way to reach you is just to email you or to call you?

We can use Slack, right?

Yeah, we can coordinate on Slack and then we decide, look, I'm gonna reach out to this co-op and so on.

All right, that sounds good.

Okay, so I'll add Jennifer to that one. Okay, and finally, all I wanted to assign the roles for our next meeting. So we need— it would be good to know who volunteers to be facilitator, someone that hasn't done it. Minute taker and the icebreaker because we decided last week that we don't need a timekeeper. Okay, so should we decide now or should we write it? Yeah, okay, cool.

I can do the icebreaker.

Okay, Adam, icebreaker.

I can do the minutes.

The vague minutes.

And who's going to be our facilitator next week?

Annie, yes, yes.

I have one more week on this time zone.

Okay, cool. So Annie, awesome.

Where are you moving to?

Portugal. Whoa.

That's great.

I mean, I've been there since May last year already till December. So I spent like half of the year there and I'm all, I'm starting a project there. So, but now it's more, yeah, it's official. I'm moving my stuff and everything.

What part of the country?

Um, Alentejo, like south of Lisbon. In the rural area.

Nice, that's awesome.

Yeah, come visit, guys.

Okay, so finally I would like to ask, um, go around and ask each one of us how do you think this meeting, uh, went. So let's start with, um, Russell.

I'm happy.

Okay.

And then you can pass it on to someone.

Jennifer.

Not too bad.

Does anyone want to elaborate on these?

Yeah, I'll just be like, okay, sure, I'll go a little deeper. Um, I think this meeting was productive, just like the past meetings we've had, and I think it's fun to figure out how to build this with y'all. So I'm glad for the time we've had together so far.

Jennifer, would you mind elaborating?

Oh, I would say it feels like we're learning as we're going along. So it feels— I'm optimistic. Optimistic about the possibilities, the potential.

Who should go next, Jennifer?

Oh, who do I go—

Ola. Yeah, I think it went swift. It was good it went swift. And it's nice that everybody is such a good listener.

It's like, yeah.

Someone who thinks—

me?

Yes, sure.

Okay, yeah, yeah, I was happy too. It was good to see all the big Yeah, like the view, like the steps where we're going and having more clarity on what to do next and specifically how to make progress even though we are not official members, because that was a big question in my mind. And next, Adam.

Uh, went good. Um, Vivek, I liked your presentation today. Um, it, uh, it's nice how it, um, kind of set the future a little bit. Um, but yeah, all positive. Um, and I would like to see— I look forward to when we do collaborate more outside of meetings, um, because I feel like that's when we're gonna get more stuff done and accomplished. But yeah, at this stage, this all makes sense to me.

Oh, who—

Vic, how'd you think the meeting went?

I'll pick Ani. I'll pick Ani. Yeah, so I think the meeting, I felt, went good. I feel like it could have been great, but I feel like I took a little longer than I wanted. Not that I feel I know, I mean, I found the time schedule, I pushed too long, so I need to work on being a little bit more brief, but I'm glad that I was able to present the steps and people seemed to be generally in agreement, so I'm happy about that. I'd love to you know, you know, just work on some small like things, you know, just working on folks being on time. We need to just make sure the meetings are timely and thoughtful. So, and I really loved the interest and excitement people are taking up of wanting to take tasks. So overall, I feel like It was good and we continue to improve and we're working in the right direction. I think folks are really enthusiastic, so I'm really happy.

Oh, is that me? Yeah. Yeah, really, I mean, really nice. I think I'm learning every time and I guess this is the phase for learning because we kind of know the direction. And yeah, it's nice to have a clear, like, clarity on the steps and not to feel like we are behind or like, where are we going? Or like, why does it take us so, you know, why this process is so long? Well, because it is. It's not easy to jump from. It's much different if you just start something with like, you know, two friends that you see each other all the time and it's something down the block and you don't— this is a bigger vision. And I think, yeah, thank you, Vivek, for reminding us about patience. It's very true that applies to, to this kind of adventures, inventures, cooperative, owner-worker cooperative. So yeah, it was good. I'll be here with you next week, and after that it'll be hard to catch up, but maybe we decide to have a different time for the meeting. I also have to see what are my commitments, my personal commitments to it. I'm passing it to Ulla for the final—

do we want to do it?

Yeah, I think we, we should be thoughtful about people's times leaving also as we're entering and also leaving.

So I keep this idea for the next time when my turns come.

Cool.

Thanks everyone.

Thanks guys.

Bye-bye.