Cooperation

• The action or process of working together to the same end.
• Assistance, especially by complying readily with requests.
• The formation and operation of cooperatives.

The essential core of this project is the idea that all cooperative effort must have well defined aims and that translate into goals and thence to tasks, which the persons cooperating perform to achieve those goals and aims.

The aim of this project is to provided a platform for recording these aims, goals and tasks, and then to allow a record to be kept of other related events which determine, ultimately, if the aims are being (or have been) achieved.

All for-profit organisations have at least one aim, to be profitable. How a for-profit business achieves profitability is usually the subject of a business plan. So this project could be used to create a business plan and monitor its execution (probably through integration with an accounting package). [Large organisations usually employ complex software to assist in this called 'Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)' systems.]

A not-for-profit organisation with an on-going source of funding won't have profitability as an aim, but will have other aims. So its goals should relate to maximising the achievement of its aims within its fixed income.

A formal cooperative organisation, one owned by its members, will also have defined aims and these must be stated explicitly to allow its registration as an legal entity.

There are three main kinds of cooperatives: producer, consumer and worker. In a producer and consumer cooperative the aims are usually going to be relatively simple. In a worker cooperative the aims are likely to be more complex and its goals need more careful consideration for such an organisation to succeed. If this platform assists in that its key aim mentioned above will be achieved.

Apart from this aim of assisting cooperatives achieve success, most organisations require cooperation between individuals. More specifically they require coordinated effort 'to get things done'. This platform can assist in just that simple aspect (in fact its scope can be restricted by configuration).

In all cooperation 'human nature' is a factor, put simply individuals are strongly influenced by their perception of 'fairness'. People will cooperate if they see the organisational aims aligning with their personal values and aims, and that the effort of all towards achieving the organisational ('common') goals seems fair. So, another aim of this platform is to assist individual cooperators in maintaining that alignment and sense of fairness over time, and so for their cooperation to continue.

Another aspect of fairness is reward. Getting fair rewards from cooperation is probably more flexible than fairness in contributed effort, people will volunteer time to some organisations. Individuals may see a cooperative as a way to gain non-financial rewards that they cannot achieve individually. So in terms of cooperation generally and in forming and operating a cooperative specifically, this flexibility in rewards needs to be considered and managed carefully.

The Application is essentially a data-management tool with a focus on facilitating cooperation. The data-model entities (from the conceptual model) are described, and screen dumps shown, in the Entities section below.

The essential first step is to create an Organisation, and then one or more People are linked to an Organisation.

People entities are actually application users, created by self-registering [to come] or via the menu. So a logged-in user is both a Person entity and an application user.

Anyone can create an Organisation and in doing so becomes an Administrator of that Organisation. Administrators have write control over the organisations details and the ability to link People to the organisation. The creator of an Organisation can add other People as Administrators via the top menu.

A Person has access to just one Organisations (which they created or have been linked) at a time, but they can switch their 'current' Organisation via the top menu.

As described in the Introduction above, an Organisation (whatever that may consist of) can have Aims and Goals, the Goals once achieved satisfy the Aims. Goals may be created singly or as part of a named Plan. There is a 1-1 relation between an Goal and an 'Primary Aim' at the moment, but a Goal could derive from several Aims.

Tasks are created from the Goals to work towards achieving the Goals. Tasks can be allocated to one or more People, those that can be chosen for allocation are those linked to the Organisation.

A Person allocated to a Task can log Effort, which is simply a time interval record for work done on that Task.

An Result is something achieved in the process of working on a Task. The relationship between Efforts and Results is flexible, Results can be created independently of Effort records, or from an Effort record, or an new Effort record can be linked to an existing Result.

An Outcome is somewhat similar to a Result, but more significant. Outcomes are expected to be used for determining the achievement of Goals, also [as a later feature] the determination of Rewards for People.

The most simple usage possible is to log Effort against some Tasks belonging to an Organisation [need to be able to export Effort data easily], maybe this can be thought of as a top-down management use.

In terms of encouraging cooperation within a self-managing (horizontal management) group, having agreed Aims and Goals is essential for long-term success. The intention is to develop this aspect further.

An aspect of the application not yet developed is Rewards. This aspect was a primary motivation for building the application, but is not done as yet.

Depends on expressions of interest.

Some ideas include adding Task Scheduling and simple Task Lifecycle capabilities.

A formal on informal group of cooperating people. Individual Persons are linked to specific Organisations and view one linked Organisation at a time.

A general statement of what an organisation intends to achieve through cooperation.

A specific statement of how one or more of the Aims are going to be achieved.

A statement of ongoing or one-of work that can be assigned to individuals for completion.

A named grouping of Goals with an associated set of Tasks, most likely relating to a time period.

An individual cooperating person. Each person has a single user 'account' in the system.

A record of a Person's time (interval) spent working on a Task on a specific date.

A concrete result of one or more Person's effort working on a Task.

An achievement (or not) that can be related back to a goal, likely relating to several Tasks and Results.

An allocation of cash (or some other non-monetary thing of value, or a combination) as payment to a Person for their Effort in a period.

This project uses the Java web-application framework Apache Isis.

It can be enhanced relatively easily by customising its Java Domain Model and/or integrating standard modules from the Incode Platform.