What were your main objectives during this reporting period?
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The needs of our participating cooperatives are incredibly diverse, and their readiness to adopt new technologies and platforms differs greatly. Our project's goals are ambitious, complex, and highly dependent on recruiting a community of contributors to help grow and sustain the effort. As a result, we are working very closely with our partner cooperatives and the larger platform co-op community throughout the design and development process, using iterative and open source methods. Our design process typically starts with the creation of the simplest possible intervention into the problem space—a sketch, a prototype, a workflow or journey—which we then share openly with co-designers and the co-op community to critique, help refine, and transform our initial assumptions. We build from small successes, and aim to design simple, constantly-evolving artifacts whose provisionality invites greater feedback and improvement from our community. Over the course of many iterations throughout the project's timeline, these designs are extended to provide new features, greater robustness, and to respond to emerging needs.
During this reporting period, we:
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A primary challenge during this reporting period, once again, was in recruiting team members to the project. We experienced delays in hiring a Senior Inclusive Developer to work on the project. Toronto is a highly competitive tech market, and we needed someone with experience working in our unique context—particularly with experience building open source software and contributing to open communities. We were lucky enough to hire Ned Zimmerman, an experienced open source developer who is a well-respected contributor to WordPress, PressBooksPressbooks, and other projects. This hiring delay resulted in a slower than anticipated start to the implementation of the new Platform Cooperative website, which how has now been launched. As a result of this delay, we had to push back the start of the Learning Commons and Labour Platform implementation by two months, and we anticipate having to reducing the scope somewhat and recruit outside help for the Cooperative Map deliverable scheduled later in the project timeline. We have also brought on an additional developer from the IDRC to the project to help with the backlog. Further, as discussed above, we will continue to address the larger gap between our capacity and the vast needs of the community by focusing on developing the technological infrastructure most needed by and most in common amongst our co-designers, and placing greater emphasis, as described above, on recruiting contributors and catalyzing an open source project.
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