Shouldn’t that be… every day? — At WAO we often notice how much some of our clients enjoy having meetings with us. Which is weird, right? Who enjoys meetings? Meetings can be useful though, depending on a) how the meeting is run and b) why it’s being held in the first place. Many organisations run status…

Stretching an analogy? Maybe. — Metaphors are powerful things. They can help people understand new concepts, and they can also help stretch our thinking about the art of the possible. In this post, I want to use Sim City 2000, one of my favourite childhood video games, as a metaphor for Open Recognition. For those…

Open Workplace Recognition. In practice. — We’re publishing this in the wake of mass layoffs in the tech industry, with some people finding out in particularly cruel ways that their employment has been terminated. With that as a touchpoint, in this post we want to dig into what Open Workplace Recognition actually looks like in practice…

Documenting our first IRL meetup since the pandemic — Last week, four members of We Are Open Co-op, plus one collaborator, descended on an American-style villa in the Netherlands for a meetup. We left with three members, two collaborators, a new pair of socks, some plans, and great memories. Our aims and ‘rules’ for the week, such as they…

Organisational strategy and architecture for n00bs — “The purpose of an organisation is to enable common people to do uncommon things.” (Peter Drucker) WAO works with complex, multinational clients as well as smaller groups containing just a handful of people. …

🤩 Convening systems for maturity and development — Overview This post outlines different types of work that needs to take place when planning, sustaining, and developing a Community of Practice. It is informed by work that WAO have carried out with Participate around the Keep Badges Weird community over the last 10 months. 📚 KBW Case Study The stages…

💼 + 🤗 = 🚀 — Yesterday, the draft Verifiable Credentials for Education, Employment, and Achievement Use Cases report was published. It’s worth a read for anyone interested in Open Badges, microcredentials, or certification. The next version of the Open Badges specification (v3.0) will be compatible with Verifiable Credentials (VCs). …

Collective imaginings of what is possible (or desirable!) — In a previous post, we looked at a typology of Open Source communities. This got us thinking about other indicators that could be plotted against one another on 2x2 grids. Tools like this are useful when deciding as a community how you want to interact. The idea here is not…

Towards a new typology of projects based on user and contributor growth — I’ve just finished reading Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal (now Nadia Asparouhova). I discovered it via an a16z podcast episode entitled Learning from Open Source Communities. People often use the term ‘Open Source’ in a way that downplays the extremely heterogenous…