Posted on by

2020 Hindsight

Hindsight is not about regret. Its about lessons learned from experience that we can carry forward with insight to foresight. Its a kind of intelligence.

Every decision is a return-on-investment decision. The outcomes of your decided actions have to be worth more than the inputs. At Wayfinders we have made considerable progress as we develop, incubate and test a number of processes. Our outcomes are laying the foundations for a major shift in economics and business models.

2020 Gratitude

Gratitude was the theme of our successful Seasonal Celebration on December 14th. It continues in this year end review.

We now have our Founding Fifty! Thanks to Leo Campos for recruiting most of you from his vast social network!

Thanks to David Boroditsky of Arrai Innovations, for donating a number of computers that we can use as servers for our platform!

Thanks to Our Many Volunteers

Wayfinders has been almost completely dependent on the spirit of volunteerism. As you can see, some people wear multiple hats. If you’re not already working with us, we encourage you to get involved one way or another and apply your experience and expertise to meet our many needs.

Board of Directors

Thanks to the leadership provided by our board we are developing and implementing strategies!

  • Klaas Rodenburg, Vice Chair (past)
  • Janet Kluthe, Director (past)
  • Litzy Baeza, Director
  • WIlliam Fritzberg, Director
  • Darryl Heuman, Secretary
  • Randal Adcock, Chair, Treasurer

We continue to need directors on our board. In particular, we need people with backgrounds and interests in business administration, finance, accounting, fund-raising and marketing. Co-op board governance training is available. Please let us know if you are interested.

IT Team

There is a lot of IT work being done quietly on a weekly basis. The IT Team is responsible for defining our Members’ software needs, finding open source software that we can use, custom programming, testing, documenting and maintaining the software installations. Now that we have hardware the Team is also working on setting up the hardware and operating systems. We also have a special thank you to Dave Yadallee, of NetKnow, for accommodating our yet-to-launch “wayfinders.coop” domain name.

Thank you to our regular IT Team members:

  • Ye Liu, Web Designer
  • Shun Li, Web Designer, Programmer
  • Jessica Manirakoze, Web Designer, Programmer
  • Alain Katihabwa, System Administrator
  • Veronica Olkotun, Web Designer, Project Manager
  • Bratatti Bhattacharya, Quality Assurance, Business Analysis
  • Linshia Baby, Project Management
  • Preet Grewal, Business Analyst
  • Yogesh Patel, Programmer, Business Intelligence
  • Peyman Hessari, Business Intelligence
  • Liam Manese, System Administrator
  • Carlos Campos, Business Intelligence
  • Jenny Lucas, Lead Business Analyst
  • Casey Strong, Lead Programmer
  • Michael Boroditsky, Project Manager
  • Darryl Heuman, Chief Technology Officer
  • Randal Adcock, Chief Innovation Officer

Finance Team

The Finance Team is responsible for overseeing the budget, bookkeeping, and production of financial statements. We could use additional financial expertise, especially in financial planning and funding proposals, including crowdfunding campaigns.

  • Kirsha Campbell, CPA
  • Evelinne Teichgraber
  • Randal Adcock, Treasurer

Membership Team

Our new Membership Team has been working on a subscription model for online services as well as our New Member Onboarding package/program. The Team is planning more videoconference events and activities, similar to the Cafe. This may include business coaching, webinars and maybe even a symposium on the future of work. Let us know how you would like to be involved. You should expect to see a Member survey very soon.

The Member onboarding package will help new Members fully navigate the services and the co-op governance system, to receive full membership benefits.

Thank you to:

  • William Fritzberg
  • Klaas Rodenburg
  • Litzy Baeza
  • Jenny Lucas
  • Preet Grewal
  • Katrina Ingram

We also need people with experience in social media management, hosting online events, human resource management and crowdfunding campaigns.

2020 Events

This year we set up a series of Cafes to connect with various thought leaders and hot topics. We are grateful for our guests’ contributions to help grasp important issues and build greater competence:

  • Jenny Jones, Mental Health & Wellness in Stressful Times
  • Mark Anielski, Economics of Happiness and Well-being
  • Amanda Knight, Leadership Post Covid-19 & the New Normal
  • Beth Sanders, Building Healthy & Authentic Communities
  • David Dodge, The Future of Edmonton’s Environmental & Economic Transformation
  • Laura Cunningham-Shpeley, Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues
  • Hazel Corcoran, Co-ops for the New Normal
  • Litzy Beaza, Tapping into Cross-Cultural Intelligence in these Global Times)
  • Melissa Halama, Mental Health and Covid Fatigue
  • Louis Grenier, Why Co-operative Advantage?
  • Hussam Tungekar, Starting a Business During the Pandemic

Creative Cluster and the Impact Series

Leo invited a number of “creative types” among Wayfinders to form a creative cluster. Starting  December 2019, Leo, Paul Cheung and Randal  put together a short series of interviews with local community leaders. These can be viewed here.  Thanks go to our guests:

  • Doug Piquette , Edmonton Regional Immigrant Employment Council
  • Leo Wong, MacEwan Innovation Institute
  • Barbara McKenzie, The Business Link, and
  • Martin Garber-Conrad, Edmonton Community Foundation

Recently Wayfinder Paul Cheung has been hard at work putting together a series of podcast interviews with Members. You can look forward to meeting these Members and getting to know their businesses in this series with the working title Marketplace. Maybe you would like Paul to feature your business.

Software as a Service

When we started our current websites, none of us knew how to create a WordPress website. Our fantastic IT Team made a lot of progress this year. We developed and posted a very good landing page for visitors, and working prototype for a Wayfinders community site. We also have new prototypes for a job board and crowdfunding sites. These help us to understand how these services work so we can develop better integrated services using our new web framework.

With the addition of volunteer Contributors Michael Boroditsky and Casey Strong, we have adopted the site development framework called Django, which is written in the programming language of Python. This framework will allow us to develop our complex platform using a common user interface that precisely meets our Member requirements. The result will seem like a single management console for each of our Members.

We are developing the following software applications on this platform:

  • Member directory
  • Bulletin Board (announcements)
  • Time management (calendar)
  • Value management ( workflow, finance, social benefits and maybe barter)
  • Business match-making (and gig job board)
  • Discussion forum (social media)
  • Event management
  • Videoconferencing
  • and more

Summary

Wayfinders is developing its management capacity. We are using a variety of tools such as Slack, Basecamp, Zoom, and project management, and gaining expertise in their use. Over this coming year we will migrate that activity to our own integrated cloud platform.

As volunteers working on teams we are creating our own communities. The best rewards of volunteering are the sense of belonging and the sense of contributing something of value that is appreciated. Isn’t that what a business community is all about?

Beyond these immediate benefits, Wayfinders is building a unique platform to support small business management so our Members and future Members will be able to focus on what they do best and depend on each others’ complementary skills, talents and interests. Hopefully we will be able to resume in-person meetings and networking sometime in 2021.

Best wishes for a successful 2021!

  • Randal Adcock
  • President
  • Wayfinders Business Co-operative