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This is something that matters a lot to us and we should make it clear in our handbook.

Here are some tips and examples for getting our first draft: 10 Examples of Awesome Diversity Statements

When we were part of Lullabot (Education) we were "bots". Now that we have a new name, we need a new um, naming thing. (Demonym is the name for where you are from, so I've no idea what a company name is.)

One suggestion we kicked around at our retreat is osito/osita (also typed osit@ or ositx to be gender neutral). That means little bear or teddy bear in Spanish. (And we all know bears like honey, like the hive logo we have, right?)

The tricky bit with this is that it is gendered by default. We can use the gender neutral spellings for text, but they aren't easy to say that way. We could come up with another ending that suits our purposes though if this is the name we want to run with. Some ideas could be something like ositi or ositiari. Or we could adopt the non-gendered spelling into the word: ositat or ositex.

Any thoughts, please do share.

At the Sedona retreat we identified these 2 values as needing some more examples. From the Sedona notes:

Feed Creativity
Doesn’t do a good job of demonstrating how we encourage one another to do this. Maybe add an example of this. Come up with a specific example of a time when we’ve had an idea, tried it, and it failed. e.g.) Support memberships for Drupalize.Me or other things that demonstrate a willingness to experiment and fail.

Work together
This could use an internal facing example. The existing examples are both external. One example to possible add would be Amber jumping in and helping out with getting the heynode.com content done. Another example is everyone’s willingness to jump on the phone and help someone, even if it’s not your area of expertise.

We have agreed that we should have a company-wide inclusion waiver. We'll need to draft our conditions and have the team approve the final copy to be added to the handbook.

Trello card: https://trello.com/c/677k1HMp/162-create-company-inclusivity-waiver

This is an idea from Todoist, where each person on the team gets 1 month per year where they can focus on a personal, work-related project. It is different from a sabbatical because this is still working full-time and you have to have a work-related project with deliverables. It just means that your priority is a pet work project that may not otherwise get concentrated time to play with, and you do not need to work on other company tasks for that month (beyond helping unblock someone else, if needed). You can read a summary of the Todoist policy here: https://twitter.com/brennakL/status/1259966528830746632?s=19

This looks like a policy that we can accommodate, and I like the idea of getting a big block of time to really dig deep on something that we won't/don't prioritize in the company and let our creative/exploratory energy have a sanctioned outlet.

We do need to hammer out a few details to implement it. Here are some questions we should answer (please feel free to add more questions):

• How do we schedule these? Does everyone get an assigned month? Do we just stick with you have to state intent in advance and can't choose a time when someone else is doing the same thing (or on sabbatical)?
• Is it "required"? Should we just have this here for if someone wants to take advantage of it, or should we strongly encourage everyone to find a project once a year?
• In terms of planning ahead, does 2 months sound right? Too much, too little?
• When someone proposes a project, I think it should be shared with the whole team for feedback. Yes? What about final approval, does that sit only with me, or do we need buy-in from the whole team?

We are changing our name so we need to update the handbook to reflect this.

It would be helpful to people, especially those outside the company or new employees, to be clear on our values if we provided tangible examples of them in action within our team. We can use examples where you see it in action in some form (we do X) or through how we used the values to guide decisions.

UK holiday list for Charlie!

At the Sedona retreat we noted that Do Great Work can also encompass "do good". The effects of doing good aren’t captured in our current description.

At the Sedona retreat we noted:

• This could use an example that tells a customer story about how Drupalize.Me has empowered them to do something like get a job, or a raise, or complete a project, or whatever. An example like Amber’s story of learning Drupal through D.Me, and then getting a Drupal job, and then working at Drupalize.Me
• In general we felt the wording of this one could be improved and “could use a massage”.

On the README page for Benefits, we should have a brief overview of the main benefits so there is a concise list without wading through all of the details.

We don't currently define the expected work week in our handbook. We've decided to move to a 4-day/32-hour work week and we should clearly define that expectation somewhere. The specifics of it are clear, but I'm not sure the best place to add it since we don't already have a place for it. Is it considered a "benefit" (could maybe be added to the pay page?) or would it be better to address in the "welcome" section that outlines the basics of working with us?

This is an upcoming holiday, June 19th, that is very fitting to recognize. I propose that we add it to our company holiday list. It's technically a US holiday, but I think it makes sense to make it a company-wide holiday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth

(As it turns out, (real) Danish emancipation happened on July 3rd, 1848.)

Our sick leave is very flexible and "unlimited" but we should update the language in the policy to make sure that we explicitly cover the legal requirements of Minneapolis and Oregon.

My sabbatical time was really, really good, and I feel like everyone should have an opportunity to do that sooner rather than later. The whole thing also went very smoothly for the business as well and I think we're in a good place as a company to handle these. I think we should lower the eligibility period from 10 years to 7 years.

If we were to lower it to 7 years Joe and Blake would be immediately eligible and Amber will be eligible in October this year. (Since these 3 weren't expecting to be eligible so soon and may not have planned for that, we can extend the timeframe they have to take it beyond the normal "1 year from eligibility" to be through the end of 2021, so they have time to plan and prepare with their families.)

The next rounds after this year's eligibility would be:

• Addi, May 2022
• Joe, August 2024
• Blake, March 2025
• Ashley and Philippa, June 2025
• Jon, February 2027
• Amber, October 2027
• Addi starts the cycle again in 2029

So we'd have a little stutter step in the next few years as Joe, Blake, and I catch up to the right schedule since we're overdue on our first ones. (Technically I'd be eligible again in 2021, but that's just silly and too many people in the same year, so I figured I can push mine out 1 year off from the official date to make it space out better.)

I'm assuming folks won't object to this change generally, but does the way we handle the scheduling make sense to everyone? Are there other things we need to consider with this change?

From the 2019 Sedona retreat.

We would like to make sure that our vision reflects our desire to support and grow open source. It currently is reflected in our values, but not in the vision itself.

Part-time employee benefits will not be exactly the same as for full-time employees, so we should specifically define what they are (and how location may or may not affect them).

I feel like life/career coaching can be very useful to everyone on the team. I've benefited from it a lot. I'm proposing to add a new company benefit that will pay for up to $2400 in coaching fees per year for each full-time employee. (I'll work on a PR shortly.)

In order to receive the benefit you need to use the services of a certified coach. You can find whoever you like and pay for the service with the company card. When submitting the expense, use Personal Education and make sure you write "coaching" in the description.

While we know the current team pronoun preferences, we should add them to the handbook so that prospective/new employees know that we are aware that each person should be able to choose these for themselves, and so that anyone feels comfortable knowing which pronouns we each prefer when they interact with us.

After every 10 years of service each employee will receive paid sabbatical leave.

• 5 weeks (must be taken together)
• mandatory to take it within 365 days of your 10-year anniversary

We realized that while we've made the handbook publicly available and people can fork the code, we never officially added a license to be clear about our intention to allow free reuse/remixing. After internal discussion, we agree that the Creative Commons Zero license best fits our intent.