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Meeting with Equal Care Coop August 29, 2019

Meeting with Equal Care Coop August 29, 2019

Aug 29, 2019

  • Dana: Background of project - learning commons, hub, Co-design with other partners, where we are at with each of them

  • Emma: Hub focused on worker needs is interesting - e.g. worker can make a reasoned judgement for themselves to look at income and decide if they should be better off being self-employed

  • Emma: 

    • we are a multi-stakeholder coop, not just workers (care-givers) but care receivers and family too

    • But prioritizing these two sets of interests above all other interests 

    • We are in Alpha stage - flat prototype - formal version of MVP - loads of emails, google calendar starting off with a booking tool off the shelf, combining with other off the shelf tools and making it all work in the (physical) “back end” (office/admin)

    • Overall plan over next 6 months or so

    • Tech expertise - working with local agency - doing lots of co-design with them

    • Have raised up to $ 600,000

    • Creating a governance structure within the coop to deal with co-design of the tech

    • Mindful of how tech products tend to be developed - users as active participants in dev of it, proper voice and veto power, ongoing maintenance too

    • Because we are  multi-stakeholder: Design experience and lived experience together

  •  

    • 2-3 months it will take

    • Next 18 months big focus on the user-experience - needs of worker and person getting support and their families

    • The “how” will form part of those considerations - big picture...bring in some really important values that are not that common to how services are delivered in UK

    • People getting support are encouraged to give it too - everyone is on the platform! They all have profiles on the platform

    • We’ve got enough money to prioritise:

      • Good and ongoing governance on the co-design

      • Recruiting into the core team

    • Not so much/need support on:  Infrastructure and architecture that’s behind that - using Sharetribe flex until we can build onto it - something that the platform can sit on - shared with other labour-based platforms(?)

    • One of the larger coops - members of coop group in UK 

    • Our main interest - talking through potential governance structures to keep coop accountable to members, keep participation high

    • We’re not intending to employ a backend developer

    • What are the core things that platform coops will need around the world - really good scheduling , etc - core things that everyone is going to need - want to focus on these

    • What is it that all that sits on top of 

    • Bringing in CTO support 

Dana:

  • Interested in your co-design process and also the idea of ability for receivers to become givers and vice versa in the platform

  • I think where we can best support you will be in the co-design process

  • And Michelle can say more about the tech side of platform

 

Michele:

  • We’re building a hub - build this infrastructure

  • Finding existing tools

  • E.g. scheduling is super important but every space is different in terms of what is needed

  • Best to look at an ecosystem of tools and how they can work together

  • In next couple months - build the hub and try out some integrations

  • Emma: What kind of existing tools ?

    • Scheduling

    • Loomio

    • Expense tracking

    • What else - (we need to keep a list)

  • Emma: We’re trialing Vcita, but have trouble finding open source tools

  • Michelle - it will be a combo of proprietary and open source

  • Emma: 

    • Moving on to caregivers etc

    • So far only made a few detailed guesses

    • Haven’t done co-design on use of data form worker perspectives

    • It’s basically medical history and very personal - this is massive for us  

    • The data ethics need to be prioritized

    • HappyDev - Frech dev coop - sounds a bit like what they are doing - a dashboard of using separate tools discretely https://happy-dev.fr/

    • User testing - people receiving support mostly until now

    • Sounds like we can slot into quite readily for hub/dashboard

    • Co-design for dev and maintenance going forward

    • Keep the focus on worker needs for the dashbaord/hub

Jutta

  •  we have been grappling with this on other projects too

  • A diversity of perspectives and intent - how do we preserve ethics

  • Ethical risks, governance issues, privacy, ethical data use

  • It aligns well not just with this particular project but with others too

 

Emma

  • structures of mutual consent

  • E.g. Working with profile layers - interested in having someone support you - you can see a level of their profile info, if you book with them then you can see more, if you’ve worked with them for longer time, more data is released etc 

  • It cuts both ways- workers and customers too families, etc

  • Knowing who can see what and why - instead of this very real thing that typically happens where huge swathes of the “back office” can see a huge amount of stuff

  • Jutta: Transparency, agency, 

  • Emma: Nominated individuals to show your data to

Jutta

  • We’re working on an ISO standard that serves to negotiate who can use what

  • Has similar goals and aims - this meshes well with the work we’re doing

 

Moving forward:

  • How many and who in the room for co-design?

  • Jutta - we want to focus on people who have difficulty using tech - gnarly edge issues

  • Emma - we’ve got loads of that!

  • Kate: The mistrust goes very deep - this is key - a deep mistrust - rather than “I’m unable”

    • It should be easy to get people in the room who will be critical and engaged

    • September is impossible - October - middle October - Tuesdays and Thursdays good for co-design 

    • Fewer people but digging deeper (8?)

  • Jutta: if we have more than a certain number - break into smaller groups

  • Kate:

    • Top out around 8 people - this is what we’ve been getting

    • Usability testing - we had 6 people throughout the day - super engaged and tons of feedback - almost not enough time for 6 - we have a lot of people who are committed

    • What about remote facilitation? How does this work?

Dana: we have been encouraging facilitation to come from the members/community but we can talk more about what this could look like

  • Let’s schedule next meeting for beginning of October (Monday, Oct 7, 8am PDT / 11am EDT)

  • Then we can probably do co-design towards end of October

  • Jutta:  In the meantime we can send info about the hub and the questions that we have, the uncertainties, as well as ways we can support your work 

  • Emma: anything you need from us that would help

  • We will see Emma in November at the conference!