We have room in our budget to do more—what should we do?

As one of the few instances with a healthy budget (from what I gather, at least), we really should feel an obligation to give significant support to Mastodon development.

I would really like to explore adding other services (my proposal would be to focus on social and add other fedi apps like peertube, for example), but I know that's not remotely feasible from the tech side until we build capacity, so I've rated paying working groups above that.

Why not do a participatory budgeting-type thing? People can propose a specific use of funds that they will be responsible for spending (via Open Collective, so transparency) and we vote for what we'd like to support? I would like to see more services or partnering with existing services, e.g. MayFirst.coop.

I think the continued sustainability of social.coop is a top priority, and that means (1) making sure that there are folks to keep things running (aka the working groups) and they are treated fairly, and (2) the barriers for new users joining social.coop are as low as possible.

Working groups are the core of the co-op without whom nothing is possible. They deserve rewards and aknowledgement, and relying on volunteering is precarious. So I'm for raising their payment.

Hosting a Nextcloud instance would be nice too so we, as a coop, could provide integrated services to all members. Write Freely could maybe also be on the table according to a recent discussion here on Loomio.

I'm less into the other suggestions (helping other projects development is nice, but I already donate personnally to interesting projects).

A timely poll. With my Platform6.coop hat on (we provide the fiscal hosting service through Open Collective to social.coop, free of charge thus far, I've been meaning to get in touch for some time to suggest that social.coop might like to consider making a contribution. This could be by becoming a member of Platform 6, enabling social.coop to take an active role in the stuff we're doing there, and by so doing helping to boost international cooperation, or if that isn't appropriate we'd be open to a straight donation 🙂. Having said all of that, my top suggestion is to ensure that the people doing work for social.coop are fairly compensated for their labour.

I suggest more emphasis on face-to-face meetings. Geographically local outreach groups. Education about what coops are and how they help build communities and their strengths. Education on the history of how coops, labor unions, consumer boycotts, and the people's press have lost so much power in the last 50 years, and how to make them strong again. Re Mastodon: it's too much like twitter and other single-platform corporate owned social networks. It encourages bad behavior.

I think a working group for community development and marketing would be A++. Weaving the different people and cooperative endeavours together in a more intentional, supportive way would be good leverage.

Making our infrastructure more solid and resilient is important, that's why I put 1st paying a bit more to our current people in the WGs. From there, collaborate with the Commons movement follows. Adding a new service as creating a new WG -from my POV- depends on our needs, not so much on available resources and that is why I put them after.

Cost of membership is already low (again, from my POV) so I wouldn't lower it more. If someone can't pay that is another issue and can be accommodated (as we did it always in the school cooperative with some families that couldn't pay).

Last but not least, if we donate to development, Mastodon is not the 1st or more valuable project that may need some help. Hometown or Bonfire may be more interesting for reasons related to diversity of functions, higher community participation and Fediverse potentialities added... :)

Great to hear we've got some money to work with! I'm not sure how working group members are doing, but one of the most common challenges I've experienced with community tech projects is overworked, underpaid folks. So that's my top priority.

I looked at the Mastodon sponsor levels and there is one spot remaining for the Gold Tier at $200 a month. It sounds like we're not there but it might be a stretch goal we could reach if we did a bit of outreach to current members. I'd help with that if we decided it was worth pursuing. The next tier down is silver at $40 a month, which seems doable.

For my "Something not listed here" vote I was inspired by this post about community entrepreneurs. I think our community would benefit from some more attention and support for this kind of social work with the platform.

The rest of the options are much lower priority to me.

With Twitter in flux, I think Mastodon and other other open means of communication, like chat, are priorities.

Hi there! Thank you so much for starting this poll!

I'm currently a member of the Tech and Community Working Groups. I chose 1. Add a new service and 2. Something not listed here as this seems to align best to a topic we discussed in the last meeting for both working groups (minutes: anagora.org/go/twg/minutes, anagora.org/go/cwg/minutes). This is: we believe it could make sense to invest a bit more monthly in a secondary/experimental server which we could then use for the following:

1. To test restores (from backup) in an isolated environment. This would have the side effect of letting [[twg]] new members ramp up in a relatively safe environment. Also, it is a hidden "top priority" in my opinion; we need to keep our setups reproducible by existing tech group members to do the right thing for the community.

2. To run possible improvements to existing services so that the community can try them in an 'alpha' environment and optionally express an opinion on whether they are worth investing on long term. For example, some people are interested in trying [[Hometown]] instead of 'core' Mastodon.

3. To install and run new services, like hosted chat.

4. To potentially set up a stable primary/secondary layout with the existing server, Runko, so that any service we provide can be failed over with high certainty in minimum amount of time should one of our servers give up the ghost :)

To further analyze and develop the plans that could be unlocked by dedicating some monthly sum to an extra server, please refer currently to https://anagora.org/mastodon-upgrade (edit link in the Hedgedoc interface: https://doc.anagora.org/mastodon-upgrade; we will likely move this plan to https://anagora.org/go/twg/wiki once it stabilizes.)

The estimated cost of an extra dedicated server should be in the ~40 EUR / month recurring range.

Thoughts? Happy to start a new thread if that helps. And thank you again for putting this to a vote!

Hell ya, having too much money is the best problem to have. I'm always in favor of compensating ppl who do the work of maintaining the coop as much as is feasible, within the bounds of operating costs and balanced against reasonable fees. I'd also like to see us try and expand capacity to accommodate more ppl given any new influxes from the boidz0ne.

I am with flancian, having an extra dev server to try and expand operations seems like the next best use to me. chat sounds great, like running a matrix node, or running some public service like a signal proxy, tor relay. it might also be nice to have a gitea instance of we dont already have one, and another public service use there could be to use codeberg's static site hosting tools to provide a non-platform host with however large of a public sign up we can manage.

I wasn't really sure what co-op development meant, so that's why it's so low, but I'd be interested in this if it meant setting aside some startup funds to help new co-ops to get off the ground.

Re: lowering fees- I also am a big proponent of this, but it's low here because I think we should talk about a sliding scale system: I don't want fees to be a barrier to cooperation, and I know there are some of us that could pay more to offset allowing some people to not pay fees that can't. there are lots of different ways that could look, but I would prefer that to a flat reduction in fees.

My instinct was to lower the membership cost, first and foremost, but many have made compelling reasons here why that's maybe not as much a priority. I'm new-ish here, so paying working groups more does seem to make sense, as a trade-off. As I become more familiar w/ Mastodon, that also seems like such a critical resource to contribute to. A new service def seems hard to justify, in my mind, since I'm a little unsure of the current service line-up as is, and feel like that could just further mystify newer users like myself, so that's why I put it last.

The "Something not listed" is Matt's (and perhaps others') idea of participatory budgeting. It's great to have the freedom, when you stumble on an idea that just needs a lil $ to make it go, to be empowered to propose it while the momentum is still moving forward.