Sources of Revenue

This is the basic toot-length proposal (with #'s pulled out of the air) that I posted to Mastodon a little while back:

Members pay a $1 membership share to join, and commit to paying a $0.10/mo subscription via #Gratipay (a platform co-op). If there is surplus beyond costs, members can propose platform improvements to create bounties for, and then vote on their favorite proposals. Top vote-getters get funded. Members also may propose & vote on instance policies, adjust monthly fee & pay patronage refunds.

@ntnsndr noted that Gratipay does not currently identify donors, which could be an issue, and suggested we look into OpenCollective, which could work, though the fees are high. Definitely open to other options as well...

Ultimately, as we'll almost certainly want a legal entity which can have a bank account (unless someone want to get all fancy DAO), so I'll be talking to Victor of Seedbloom next Friday about both the possibility of a campaign on their equity crowdfunding platform (which hosted the Resonate campaign) and their thoughts on the optimal location to incorporate a platform co-op.

Such small payments are going to be a problem with any paypal-based system. Gratipay accumulates them before processing. Glad you're talking with Seedbloom, that could be great if it works.

Nice thing about opencollective, two, is that the use of funds is transparent as well. Also, it handles incorporation for you. So it may be worth the cost.

I also think we could charge more. $1/month, plus the option for redeemable investment shares.

@ntnsndr after a bit more reading on open-collective, it's something that we could start by using their hosted service until we reach a scale where we need to internalize that function, at which point we could host our own opencollective instance connected to whatever legal entity we come up with in the long term. I'm liking that possibility...

To pricing, yes, I think we need to align pricing to the business plan that comes out of this work, so we need to get a sense of the contours of the supply capacity and demand level of the "co-op nerd" market. ;) I do like the idea of sliding scale based on self-reported income, so as to not exclude the participation of cooperators in the Global South/marginalized community.

I like the sliding scale too.

I think US$1.00/mo is too low for most USAns and many Europeans, but agree with the sliding scale concept. I have no problem with ten cents a month in appropriate circumstances.

Handling micro-payments is always issue (unless we go a cryptocurrency route) so paying for membership per-year would make sense

I know Gratipay handles small payments by delaying them until they reach a certain level. Not sure if OpenCollective does that.

Shall we start setting up an OpenCollective instance to test? I'd be happy to do that if y'all like.

And another question: Can members create more than one account?