What is Care Work?

"Admin work? I don’t know anything about/have never done/don’t like/really hate that. What is it, anyway..."

Introduction: "Admin" or "Organizational" or "Non-translation" work

OK, it’s time to have a heart-to-heart talk about "admin" work. What is it? Well, it hasn’t been easy to describe without looking very closely at the work we’ve done during this first “startup” year, but we think we have it worked out now, and we hope that this section helps clarify things for you.

One mistake we made early on was getting into the habit of using the word “admin” to describe everything that wasn’t translation work. This is totally misleading, so now it’s time to break out of that habit.

Types or Organizational work

Realistically, there are several categories of work. Some will be kind of obvious, but others might be more surprising or unfamiliar, and hopefully more interesting. The advantage in re-describing “the category formerly known as ADMIN” is that now the terms might be more representative. We hope that this will make it easier to figure out what work you’ll choose to do.

Related to Translation

The easiest to describe, and probably the most obvious, is "translation admin" (all this is outlined in greater detail in The Tao of the Guerrilla Translator, but We’ve included it here as contrast to other tasks.) This is the standard set of tasks done before beginning a translation, including:

• contacting the author
• working out details about the author bio
• determining which images will be used in the post including the license for the images

Work done after the translation is complete includes:

• formatting for Wordpress
• choosing social media extracts (creating a social media “matrix”)
• posting and promoting on social media
• publishing the post on the blog

Finally, if the piece seems particularly popular or relevant in a specialized way, we may choose to solicit specific websites that might be interested in republishing the piece, perhaps even for a little revenue.

This is all routine “translation admin”; exceptions happen, but this is the standard routine work we do.

Non-translation organizational work

Now, here are the other types of work formerly called “admin”. These now live on specific Trello boards, broken down by large overall category (category:Community, category:Sustainability, category:Web Presence), and cover a wide range of things including:

Co-op and Business development

This has included a lot of investigation and correspondence in the past, but now mainly includes:

• Correspondence and coordination with the organizations that support our co-op functions
• Managing, discussing and modifying our organizational model and structure
• Forging alliances and exploring partnership possibilities with other co-ops and organizations
• Seeking advice, mentoring and consulting with selected advisors

as well as promoting both the pro-bono and revenue-generating business, including:

• Maintaining active relationships with authors, publishers, bloggers, others, fostering mutually beneficial bonds (online and offline). Following through with our commitments (this is non-negotiable, as our reputation is in the hands of these people). This includes on time completion pro-bono translations we’ve contacted authors about; if we fail to do so after making contact, that makes it rather difficult to propose larger projects or “ventures”.
• Creating ventures with these individuals and entities, including planning, scheduling, budgeting, team creation, and communication, using our workflow tools and protocols.
• Taking part in online and real-time discussions, presentations, etc., establishing and maintaining our presence in an integral way - that is, not producing promotion or advertising, but rather being involved in other communities in the most natural and relevant ways we can.

We always anticipate the negative voice when we write things like this, so, with the idea that someone may read this and say, “oh sure, like we have all this extra time to go join (x group) and spend time with their asembleas or whatever, just to get more business for GT/GMC”…well, no, that’s not what we’re suggesting at all. We imagine that you’ve joined us for a reason, and that surely with your wide-ranging interests (activism, environmentalism, economic change, feminism, permaculture, political/democratic participation, etc.) you probably take part in some other groups whenever you have the opportunity. There’s a balance to be struck here. We’re committed to getting away from any old-model concept of a “sales pitch” or “sales” department. So clearly, we’re not suggesting that you join all kinds of groups just to get us more work –rather, what we mean is, we’re hoping to build new work on the strength of our real relationships. The heart of this would be to participate meaningfully and create opportunities for long-term projects as well as short-term work, and not just for “us”. So, with the question of balance, this won’t be a “full-time” endeavour for anyone, ever. At the same time it’s important to realize that this relationship-building process won’t be satisfied with only superficial interaction, for instance social media commenting and “likes” or +1s, in the absence of more substantive collaboration. Put simply, adding more Facebook time won’t really cut it, and as with everything we do, it’s not about time spent but about results achieved.

Actually, let us pull back the focus for a second because part of that last point is critically important. We aren't waiting for anything to come to us; we need to actively pursue it, even if we're still in the process of building the machine. It isn't something that any one, or two, or even three of us is going to shoulder long-term. Building the relationships that “pay off” both in support and paying work is not simple but it's the main reason we're going forward with trying to make this a gig we can collect on - because the reputation we've built has come hand-in-hand with a great deal of encouragement and offers of future projects. We can't rest with the few people who have extended that hand to us. There are many more, and we have to pursue them and engage with them.

Seeking work falls to all of us.

Website maintenance and Web Presence

This includes:

• Ongoing management of our web hosting, domains, any fees, upgrades
• Word Press maintenance
• Maintaining and monitoring our online presence

Community - Communication

• Issue exploration and consensus building (via Loomio and other tools)
• Working with the organizational model
• Defining and clarifying responsibilities, roles, and partnerships/working groups
• Project, task and schedule management (Trello)
• Procedure and protocol documentation (Wiki)
• Teambuilding, including working on familiarizing new people with our procedures

Online Tools and Technology

• Maintenance of tools, and supporting tutorial materials
• Working on contributing to the development of the Open Value Network system

This needs a little explanation: we will collaborate with the OVNS to help them modify their system-in-development, which will in turn help us to assign value to all the work we do (including the pro-bono work). This is so that some means of accounting for all time spent is openly accessible and assigned value, against which some future forms of payment (monetary or otherwise) may be applied. Note that there is a governance structure attached to this system, which means that the work we do with the OVNS crosses several fundamental parts of our model (and reality). This means taking part in conversations, practical demonstrations and giving feedback on our needs to their development team.

"So, where are those paid translations??"

The paid translation part is what comes as a result of all this, and this should be fairly obvious but the point in our writing this is to outline that whatever anyone thinks is "admin", which they may or may not feel suited for, expert in or, dare we say, interested in, may be surprising in its scope, volume and, not least, effort already expended by some of us. The paid translation part is what comes as a result of all this, which will be shared among us all as a cooperative. No one is asked to do anything we haven’t already done (or are doing) ourselves, or which exceeds any commitments any of you have already made. If you’re ready to increase, or need to modify, your commitment, now’s the time to talk about that. So – that’s work formerly known as admin!