Been busy this week catching up with things. Done some work on the Think Twice conference website. You can now find transcripts of the talks from the last conference.

On Monday I made a CD with a Windows installer for Mozilla on and a local copy of the Cambridge Oxfam Group website. Chris, one of the group members, is taking on the website from me. Actually, I stopped updating the site, and when you give things up, if they are important other people do come along to take them on. On Monday evening I showed him how to use Mozilla composer, so now he can update the site. Hopefully he’ll become adventurous and put a bit more imagination into it than I have!

Working out how to write up Ghana. Can’t find a good “story” to make it into an article; I have lots of interesting things to say but they are quite bitty, and it takes time to cohese them into something that isn’t too boring to read.

There’s no more work for me to do at Ravenbrook at the moment. On Friday I’m going to finally sort out a backup system for the Harambee centre…

Pete, the excellent Half-head challenge chief poobah and bean counter, has finally got to the end of working out how much money we made in September by shaving our heads in half down the middle.

Pete says… “In the end, we raised a rather large �1333.73 to split between the Big Issue Foundation and Jimmy’s NightShelter, so sincere thanks to everyone who either sponsored myself, Guy,Francis or Pete, or donated online, or donated on the day, or generally helped out with any of the organising bits and pieces. Even better – after Gift Aid (which allows the charities involved to recoup from the government 28.5% of money donated if the person donating the money gave their permission), the total rockets up to over �1600! Excellent stuff!“

Thank you to everyone who sponsored us!

And congratulations to Pete for organising such an original and successful event. It was his first charity fundraising, and I don’t know about you but I’m looking forward to seeing what he manages to do when he’s a wizened veteran. Storming!

Hello! I’m in a cool, chilled internet cafe in Accra (capital of Ghana) at the moment, catching up on the news from the BBC website. It’s the end of the trip, and I don’t feel too physically exhausted, mainly because we’ve managed to get plenty of sleep. I’m sipping Mirinda, a fizzy backcurrant drink.

Even though phyiscally I’m not too tired, mentally I’m exhausted. We’ve travelled all over Ghana, from the colonial slave forts on the coast, to the remote village of Funsi in the Upper West Region, and back. My digital camera is bursting with over 200 photos, and my mind is full of lots of new things. If I can work out how to organise it all I’ll write a separate trip account next week…

This afternoon I’m going to visit an NGO called CODAC; I met someone from their London office last month at a Harambee centre event. It’ll be interesting to see their Ghana office, and find out more about what they do. Then I’m going to try going to the cinema to see an African film, a real treat that you can only do in an anglophone country.

We fly back very late tomorrow night, arriving home Sunday afternoon.

Well, I’ve spent all week in a mild state of packing stress, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got everything now, and it’s all packed. It’s noticeable that the only things I’ve got which I like were recommended to me by someone. So in return…

Some items that I would recommend: Travel towel (they’re much smaller, and seem really good), Teva sandals (Terra Firma, recommended to me by Ben, thanks Ben!), shaving oil (it rules, a tiny bottle lasts forever, and I think it’s a nicer shave than overly-visible, but underly-useful foam).

What travel kit would you recommend?

The coach to the airport leaves at 5am tomorrow…

I’ve been away round the UK visiting friends and family last week and the start of this, and have just got back. This evening I met up with Stuart and Graham in London for a planning meeting on Ghana. We leave early Saturday morning.

I’ve read all the instructions on my digital camera (thanks everyone from Creature Labs for giving it to me!), have a spare set of batteries, so perhaps I can upload some pictures here from Accra, or else I’ll do a proper write-up afterwards.

Last Wednesday I went to visit Microrobotics as part of my research into co-operative businesses. This one being particularly relevant to me as it is high tech. Their website describes it as “employee-owned”, which is accurate, although there is lots of interesting history to this. Karl kindly explained it to me, and there are some much more gritty lessons than I got from the CCDA the week before.

A summary and some interesting things:

• The business first took on a co-operative structure about 7 years ago, when it was in dept to the tune of �50,000. The events which give companies the opportunity to become co-operatives are important to me. There aren’t very many co-operatively owned companies, so the process of becoming one is too hard at the moment. In this case there was a political culture inside the company supportive of the change, and the existing owner had nothing financial to lose by giving it away.
• They chose to incorporate as a Friendly Society. The CCDA had advised me that these are no good, as proved to be the case (see below). So some learning is going on in the co-op movement.
• It took about a year of paperwork and decisions to carry out, and shortly after the Managing Director (MD; for young people and Americans, that’s the old British word for CEO) left. It’s not clear how much this was a deliberate get-out plan, how much he found he didn’t like losing overall control, and how much it was for other reasons.
• At this point they lost two software engineers, most likely because everyone in the company was being paid the same. IT was really picking up in Cambridge at this time, so they would easily have found better paid jobs.
• After a while, it was clear that the new structure was no good. There were three main reasons:
  
  1. They needed a differential pay structure. Otherwise they couldn’t hire and retain staff, and they didn’t make enough money to pay everyone the highest rates. This seems plain as a pikestaff to me; they were being a little idealistic to think that they could pay everyone the same.
     
  2. Sales had an unusual difficulty. Friendly societies appear in a different section on the Companies House register. This meant that other companies didn’t trust Microrobotics. They would search for them as they would search for another company, and wouldn’t find them.
     
  3. There’s no sense of ownership in a friendly society (I think nobody owns anything). There was also a feeling that new people shouldn’t have as much say as longer serving staff. Personally, I don’t see that as a problem, however it does depend very much on the size of a company.

• So they reformed the structure again! This took two years and was costly in time and legal fees. Microrobotics is now a normal private company with an unusual ownership structure. Everyone gets given shares proportionate to the number of years they’ve worked there. To my surprise, when you leave you still own your shares, and you are forced to sell them to the company. This is why “employee-owned” is a better description than “co-operative”. Needless to say, this structure doesn’t quite work, as it is almost an incentive to leave in order to claim value from your shares.

Apart from the ownership, the company is run with a fairly conventional management structure.

• Conflict resolution occurs within this management structure. It really is not much different from shareholder owned companies, in both cases the technocracy runs things.
• They had an MD who left recently, so top level decisions are made by the 3 directors while they find a new one.
• The best aspect is that they have no finance, no external ownership, so they are totally independent. This means they are free to make decisions.
• Over the last 16 years, the company has varied in size from about 3 people to about 15.
• Up to 6 people you all work closely together. Above that number there is a phase change, and you need management meetings. There seems to be another phase change at about 30 people, when everyone doesn’t know everything that is going on. I’ve seen either side of this at Creature Labs, and it is also the size that St Lukes, the advertising agencies which is a co-op, uses for its autonomous subdivisions.
• The ownership structure is still quite new, and the power of ownership hasn’t been used much. My thoughts are that it doesn’t necessarily ever need to be – very rarely do shareholders actually exert any power. Just the fact that employees own a company will change it.
• Customers like the quality of Microrobotics work.

The key lesson seems to be that you can waste a lot of time with this stuff when you should be trying to run your business. Trying to invent novel new structures is difficult, and error prone, even with lots of care and attention. Mistakes are costly.

The lesson is to get a standard structure from ICOM.

Last night the Think Twice nameservers and DNS transferred from Easily (where it was inelegantly forwarding to part of some Demon webpages) to a new account at Pepperfish. This means we can have mailing lists and things, when Daniel sorts them out (thanks Daniel!). Pepperfish rules.

Think Twice was a really good conference this year, and I recommend you go if you’re in Cambridge next spring. OK, even if you’re not. Mark was busily making some flyers for fresher’s fair this week. The conference date is Saturday 22 March 2003, and it’s on the general topic of social justice. What that actually means is that it’s about social injustice, and more importantly about what anyone can do about it. Rather than just whinging.

OK, I’ve decided not to write up my visit to Windhorse Trading as I don’t have enough of a journalistic angle on it, and the trail has gone cold. It’s a Buddhist warehouse business on the outskirts of Cambridge which I had a tour of a couple of weeks ago.

I am interested in it because it is a different form of ethical business. The ethics here comes direct from religious need and experience; in many ways the place is more of a monastry than part of the capitalist system. There are no laws to the ethics of Windhorse, instead they have belief which informs the taking of right-action in the world.

It’s interesting that despite this different basis the ethics of Windhorse (and their shops branded Evolution, such as the one on Fitzroy Street in Cambridge) overlap with those of fair trade, which charities like Oxfam promote. The CEO of Windhorse has recently talked to Oxfam; they were surprised/pleased at this common ground, and perhaps something will come of it.

One other interesting thing, the distraction of sex. Windhorse staff are segregated by gender, the women work upstairs in finance, and in the shops. The men work downstairs on sales, and in the warehouse on picking and packing. This is because sex distracts from what they say you are really meant to be concentratingon; that is the contemplation of the awe of life, and the meditation that leads to enlightenment.

Sounds like Creature Labs to me. Except only Pete Waudby became enlightened, and I have no evidence that the lack of girls assisted.

This week I did some more work at Ravenbrook, and I’m doing more next week. On the shelves there (or perhaps it was Zoonami‘s, who they share an office with) I found an excellent book called Creative Company by Andy Law, about an advertising agency in London which turned into a co-operative, equally owned by everyone who works there.

On Wednesday, Mark organised a planning meeting for next year’s Think Twice conference. Last year’s conference had excellent speakers, and was a brilliant day. However, Mark would like the next one to turn more people into action, to actually assert their democratic power. Rather than just whinging.

While eating pizza nobody came up with anything which actually fitted this. To my surprise, over tea afterwards, the group inexplicably reached a good consensus. The plan is to have a range of activities over an hour and a half at tea time. These vary from workshops and actionful field trips to stalls and just drinking coffee. The idea is to give people a choice of meeting local people who are involved in different issues, and also a choice of the kind of action they might be prepared to do. Hopefully lots of people will do something small but deliberately world changing, who have not done so before.

Yesterday I impulsively decided to go to Ghana with my friend Stuart. He used to work there about six years ago, for Wycliffe the bible translating missionaries. He’s going back for a ceremony to dedicate the completion of the definition of written language for the village that he was in.

I don’t approve of bible translation, because I don’t believe in God or Christianity. However, it’s a great opportunity to see another world, to see Africa, to visit remote and materially poor villages, and meet some people working in development. With a guide who is a good friend and knows the area.

We’re going the first two weeks of November.