Financial Working Group

Scope

The Financial Working Group (FWG) was proposed by the Board in Nov 2016 to help distribute responsibility for finances to the wider network, provide greater transparency and more ways to get involved, and to keep the board minimal. The FWG takes recommendations from the board and helps to operationalize them, liases with the board (which oversees financial solvency and compliance) and Enspiral Ops regarding recommendations and ideas from the wider Enspiral network, and works on general improvements to Enspiral’s financial operations and transparency.

Discretion: the FWG is not a decision-making group, but rather helps to operationalize decisions made according to Enspiral’s core agreements and normal decision-making processes. In particular, it does not make decisions about spending, unless a particular scope has been given according to the above-mentioned processes. But it can be given mandate to implement decisions made by the board or network, as appropriate.

Examples include

  • Amounts and Allocations of individual Enspiral Contributions
  • New approaches to financial reporting for the network (in progress)
  • Process design and compliance for recurring memberships and one-off contributions, to allow greater flexibility in financial contributions from contributors and friends of the network (in progress).

Membership and Participation

Current Members

  • Susan Basterfield
  • Jessy Kate Schingler
  • Rob Guthrie
  • Michael Arnoldus
  • Kate Beecroft
  • Malcolm Colman-Shearer (as ops rep)
  • Silvia Zuur (as board rep)

Get involved

Join the slack channel and let us know what tickles you. We’re also very open to hearing your observations about things that could work better, and (constructive) gripes.

Communications and Rhythm

  • Slack channel: #wg-financial
  • Task tracking: we use the Improvements board for task tracking. Here are the tickets for the Financial Working Group (labeled wg-financial).
    • It’s possible we won’t keep the Improvements board entirely up to date. If in doubt, holler in #wg-financial on slack with any questions about current projects.
  • Rhythm: we keep an eye on financial happenings in the network, discuss their finer points and implications, and activate on a case-by-case basis based on inbound requests and our own observations.

Reporting

  • Our main slack channel is public
  • Feedback is solicited in other channels as appropriate
  • Loomio posts are made in accordance with any formal decisions proposed