Sharing my Spreadsheet For Calculating Ticket Prices One of the challenging things about running community events is how to manage the finances. If you’re hosting an event with an unknown number of guests, you will usually have a significant outlay to secure a venue, and then you have to hope and pray you sell enough tickets to…

Yesterday I was scrolling twitter, and saw someone shared a clip from your Roseland NYC video. I didn’t even have the sound on, just recognised the picture, and immediately my hair stood on end, goosebumps head to foot. So I took that as a sign it was time to watch…

OpenCollective is a financial & legal toolkit for grassroots communities. It’s awesome! We’re using it to transparently collect & spend money in the Microsolidarity Network. Anyone who contributes to our fundraising is welcome to join our monthly members meeting. Until today, whenever a new member joins the Collective, I have…

The making of an amazing online course — Nati and I are putting the finishing touches on the course design for our guided learning program: Patterns for Decentralised Organising. I’m feeling totally jazzed because I reckon this will be our best training yet. …

How to take care of people at an event that could kill them — Hosting events is a big part of how I earn my livelihood and how I do my community-building work. My year started with a plan to hold at least four retreats, each with around 40 people living together for a few days. Then the pandemic happened and we had to…

Running the Finances for our Freelancers Collective with One Awesome Spreadsheet — This is partly a tutorial about how to make awesome spreadsheets, and it is partly about how we manage a flexible profit-sharing agreement for our collective of freelancers (The Hum). If you’re familiar with “microsolidarity”, this is the point where things get really spicy: sharing money between peers. We currently…

How to: record great-sounding podcasts over Zoom — I’ve been experimenting with different methods for improving the audio quality of my videocalls, both for meetings and for recorded conversations like podcasts. So I have a few suggestions to make your next call sound less like a laptop, more like a studio. I’ll start with some microphone basics. Then…

Engaging volunteers; learning loops; decision-making; care; celebration — Today I had a call with Manu Alzuru from Fight Pandemics, a brand new volunteer project enabling peer-to-peer mutual aid in response to COVID-19. I gave him 30 minutes of rapid-fire advice, some of the “top tips” for a new self-organising network like this. …

Updated March 21st — I’ve been producing my own charts to understand the Johns Hopkins coronavirus data. Here’s the situation on March 21st. Reported Deaths Here’s all the countries with 100+ reported deaths. I have zoomed in on the first 4 weeks since the 10th death. This linear scale obscures what’s happening. We need to switch…