#Enspiral Labs FAQ
This is a work in progress, feel free to add any questions you want answered.
As the handbook gets extended some of this content will be extracted.
###Categories
###How do people join Labs? Any CXer can engage a contractor at their discretion.
Two partners from different pods are required to sponsor a contributor.
Significant decision of partners to appoint a new partner.
#People Collectively known as lab rats. ###What different roles are there in the company?
- Partner: an owner and steward of the co-op. Partners are all in and actively steward people, pods and products.
- Contributor: core participant of labs.
- Contractor: part of a delivery team.
###What systems can people access?
- Contractors: slack
- Contributors: loomio, my.enspiral, cobudget
- Partners: private loomio and slack channels
Any partner or CXer can invite people to slack at their discretion.
Partners are admins on slack, my.enspiral, loomio and cobudget.
###Are people stewarded? Yes.
- All partners co-steward each other.
- All contributors are stewarded by a partner.
- All products are stewarded by at least one partner and one CXer
###Who is in Labs?
The following people are confirmed.
- Partners
- Joshua Vial
- Susan Basterfield
- Kate Beecroft
- Damian Sligo-Green
- Dan Lewis
- Contributors
- Genevieve Parkes
The following folks are yet to confirm their level of engagement
- Dan Hassan
- Mikey Williams
- Sarah Rogers
- Ian Kirkpatrick
- Michael Smith
- Sandra Chemin
- Lucas Tauil de Freitas
##Partners Top
###What are the requirements of being a partner?
A partner is all in on labs and runs all their contracting and startups through the co-operative.
A partner is someone who has spent time to get to know the other lab rats, invested their time and energy and demonstrated good judgement and skills.
Partners are expected to attend monthly working bees.
###Do partners profit from labs? Yes. We are committed to using our surplus to fund the commons but the intent is that partners share in some of the surplus generated by the co-operative.
##CX (Customer Experience Steward) ###How are Cxers appointed? A standard consent decision of partners.
##Contributors A contributor is someone who works in labs, they might be a member or a pod or a free radical. They have full access to loomio, cobudget, slack and other systems in labs.
A Contributor is sponsored and stewarded by a partner or pod.
##Contractors A contractor is engaged to work on a particular project and is engaged by a CXer who is responsible for their engagement and performance.
#Products Top Principle is that everything Labs sells is a product
###How does a product start? Products start as prototypes, these are projects, programmes or software that are created and delivered in controlled environments. A product agreement is needed in order to sell that product. A consent decision from partners is required to start a product
###Who controls a product? The product stewards are responsible for on-going decisions for the product.
###Who can sell or deliver a product? The product stewards approve the CX people who are approved to sell a product.
###What is a product agreement? A document listing who the product stewards are, the basic overview of the product, who any investors are. Product agreements are started by partner consent, changed by advice process by the product steward. They also define how revenue from products are shared. Product agreements are listed in our handbook.
###How are product investors managed? This is the responsibility of the product stewards to manage.
##Finances
###How do financial contributions to Enspiral work? We contribute the same way as any other Services teams contributes.
###Is there an internal commons or collective finances? We currently have a labs account in Enspiral Services.
##Pods Top ###How do Pods work? A Pod
- Has at least one partner committed to the pod.
- Has intentional continuity (lives beyond just one project)
- Possibly incubating their own projects
- Pod members are financially interdependent
- Pod’s are financially independent - have their own balance and my.enspiral accounts
- Supports its members when they need holiday, provide a cash offer, provide support around work and upskilling
- Only a pod can offer an employment contract or sponsor visas
- Pods have their own rules and processes
###How does someone join a pod? They ask a pod and a pod says yes.
###How do Pods work with each other? We are still figuring this out.
###What about people who aren’t in a pod?
- Pods are the model we encourage for interdependency and security, but you don't have to be part of a pod to be a lab contributor or partner.
- CX members can sponsor a project outside of a Pod, and invite in contractors or contributors to work in Labs as part of a delivery team.
- When a partner sponsors a contributor or contractor they become their stewards
- The partners steward each other
###How do pods form?
- Pod decides to form
- One partner sponsors the pod and facilitates a decision amongst the Partners
- Pods are approved on consent of partners
##Misc Top ###What’s the deal with services? The Golden Pandas pod is currently based inside services and root systems inside EDA. When we form the new company we will migrate both pods to the new company.
The Golden Pandas have expressed interest in helping transition services into a services co-op and JV has put his hand up to sort out services but nothing is confirmed beyond getting services to a good place for whichever future it wants to go down.
###Who owns labs? The Lab Partners
###What is your legal structure?
We are currently a team in Enspiral Services and will be starting a LLC with a co-operative constitution registered in New Zealand. Intention is to start the company in September 2016 once we have determined our founding partners. Longer term we intend to be a multi-entity structure with companies in multiple jurisdictions. We aim to have a European entity soon and each of these will be owned by all of the founding partners In the future, we will look to issue different forms of shares for different products to enable investment. There’s also the possibility of shareholding in different legal entities.
Some of our products will become stand alone legal entities separate from Labs.
###What is the governance arrangement of Labs?
- MVB for legal compliance
- (G)overnance is done by partners
- Having good processes
- Monthly reporting
###What work does Labs do? Anything that is defined in one of our products which currently includes
- organisation consulting
- designing and delivering workshops
- web development services
- customer development, product development and entrepreneurship
- discovery workshops
- cobudget
###Where is labs based? Everywhere - the internet
No seriously, we are committed to location independence in our work.
###What is a delivery team? A temporary team formed to deliver a project. It will disband when it is finished. A delivery team can be formed by people from different pods, individual contributors and/or external contractors.
A CX role can assemble a delivery team and is responsible for its success.