Roles

Rotating cooperative-wide roles

In the interest of distributing types of work equitably and skill-sharing, a number of tasks ideally rotate— weekly, or monthly, or somewhat randomly.

Meeting facilitator

  • Standup facilitator (all regular meetings)

  • Monday/Friday planning facilitator (can be different than facilitator in standup part).

  • Worker-owner meeting facilitator

In practice standup facilitator has been Keegan 95% of the time, with Chris and Sanjay a bit more likely to pick up the planning facilitation.

Timecop

  • Checks to ensure people get their time in each day by the end of Monday planning, mid-week daily standup, and Friday shipping. Works with people individually after the meeting to get the time in.

In practice, we have not done this for a while.

Scribe

  • Write one sentence about each person’s main activity in a week, summarizing our activities in an accessible way in blog posts such as “The Week That Was: Agaric’s March 30th to April 3rd”

  • As our main storyteller for the month, think about ways to weave the work we’re doing every week into a narrative; if we can’t fit our work into a narrative we’re probably straying from our strategic goals.

Never put into practice and we really need to.

Trainer/Educator

  • Write informative blog posts

  • Create curricula for trainings

  • Submit speaking and training sessions

  • Speak/training at events

  • Help organize trainings, camps and conferences

Primary: Mauricio, Chris
Secondary: Keegan, Ben

Infrastructure

  • Create and support working development environment for each project

  • Create and support staging site for each project

  • Maintain deployment workflows for each project

Primary: Chris
Secondary: Louis, Ben

Leads

  • Cold calls (we have never done this)

  • Future event scanner - list events of interest in advance

  • Respond to requests received by contact form or email

  • Write proposals

  • Coordinate estimates

  • Manage marketing-oriented pages on website

Marketing

  • Write blog posts

  • Post to social media

  • Coordinate sponsorship of events

  • Network at events

  • Take pictures and video

  • Promote events we are part of

Contractor Relations

  • Communicate hours and progress with contractors

  • Make sure contractors send invoice each month

  • Make sure contractors get paid each month

  • Check in on how contractors are feeling about their work and projects

  • Check in with Agaric team on how things are going with contractors they work with

Currently making no effort to rotate.

Primary: Sanjay
Secondary: Micky

Team Management

  • Review planned time usage on a weekly basis (start of week, based on reports in Monday team tempo meeting)

  • Make suggestions to try to ensure Agaric worker-owners combine for at least 60 billed hours a week (60x4x150=$36K/mo=clearing payroll).

    • Works with project leads to find recommended tasks.

  • Pairs with contractor relations for overall use of available Agaric time.

  • Implement Team Tempo process

Unfilled since Clayton left.

Project-specific roles

Lead

Client Relations

  • Hold monthly sensing and sprint planning/review meetings

  • Send monthly ROS and project update

  • Make sure payments from client are happening on time

  • Update Agaric team on how a client is doing and how their projects are going in worker-owner meetings

This role as described has not really been filled since Clayton was here.

Developer/Designer

Design

  • Create wireframes/prototypes

  • Create design mockups

  • Create styleguide using HTML and SASS

Primary: Unfilled

Development

  • Use contributed and custom modules to implement functionality

  • Translate styleguide into working website

  • Review others’ code

  • Test code

  • Deploy approved changes

Primary: Ben, Mauricio, Louis
Secondary: Chris, Keegan

User Research

  • Define and measure project goals and key performance indicators (KPIs

  • Define key user groups

  • Conduct research to learn users’ needs and motivations

Project Manager

  • Plan sprints

  • Ensure issues have acceptance criteria and relevant info

  • Facilitate project meetings

  • Facilitate key milestones such as security updates, redesigns and launches

Responding to Inadequate Performance of a Role’s Duties

  • Person noticing an issue address directly. If issue persists, call a meeting with the whole group to discuss a resolution/change.

Suggestions for role-fluidity

  • Define documentation requirements and tool usage for the role (e.g. effective use of GitLab for developers, detailed tracking in CMS tool)

  • Specific email addresses for particular roles

  • Document requirements of a role - hard skills, soft skills, and required resources (e.g. excellent communication, GnuCash familiarity, etc).

  • “Pair-programming” approach

Note

Related: Worker Owners