Toward an annual budget

Draft budget (£15)

Finance WG (£1)

• Stipends

Tech WG (£10)

• Open source contributions on Open Collective, to be determined by the TWG with input from the membership (£5)

  • E.g., Mastodon, Wikimedia, Matrix, Bonfire, Hometown

  • What others?

• Expenses (£2)

  • Meet.coop £90.00 GBP / month

  • Hosting (£1k)

  • Domain (£100?)

  • May First ($250)

  • Loomio ($100)

• Labor stipends (£3)

Community WG (£4)

• Stipends

• Governance transition process

Reserves (£5)

What is going on here? A plain language explanation:

Generally, how would you like to see Social.Coop spend money? What kinds of projects should we fund?

What should be our norms for budgeting processes within Social.Coop? How should the Organizing Circle influence budgeting? How can members influence budgeting?

What about labor? Who does the work of Social.Coop? Who is a volunteer and who gets paid, and how much money is fair?

The Finance Working Group... we think Social.Coop can contribute funds to open-source projects in our “ecosystem,” such as Mastodon, Wikimedia, Matrix, Bonfire, or Hometown. It's solidarity funding and relationship building. What do you think?

Currently, some of our hosting costs or Loomio expenses may be paid by individual members, so we will move them to Social.Coop expenses.

Hi, Caitlin. Sorry if I should know this already, but what's the relationship (of social dot coop) to meet dot coop?

@fm2279 The relationship is collaborative. All Social.Coop members can get a Meet.Coop membership for free as part of being a member of Social.Coop. I think the relationship is current. I have a free Meet.Coop membership as part of being a Social.Coop member. ... Meet.Coop provides a video meeting service, like Zoom or MS Teams, and you can share screens and have breakout rooms. Meet.Coop uses Big Blue Button.

@fm2279 Yep, as @Caitlin Waddick, CaitlinWaddickSocial.Coop says, social.coop is a member of meet.coop, with a multi-user account at standard meet.coop rate, which enables social.coop to create individual accounts for social.coop members at whatever rate social.coop determines (actually, zero :) ). It's a fraternal coop-to-coop relationship in federated provisioning of digital infrastructure. Thank you social.coop from meet.coop :) Great that social.coop has a surplus - go for it, expand services and capacity!

So what am I missing -

"We currently take in far more than we spend; our current balance of £22k, for instance, exceeds our total spend over 5 years of £21k. Our current estimated annual budget is £15."

makes absolutely no sense to me - if our estimate for 5 years is £21k then I'd expect the current annual budget to be £4,250 rather than £15 and how can a budget of £15 be meaningful.

Similarly in another comment you've got expenses total of £2 but the breakdown underneath comes to £1190 + $350.

I'm presuming these are typos, but I can't figure out what you really mean so I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds it impossible to engage on the topic.

@Mitra Ardron I think we are so accustomed to looking at budgets that are conrestricted and over-budgeted. Social.Coop is under-budgeted. The Finance Working Group's proposed annual budget is allocating more money for spending than we have ever spent before, and we still end up with extra money sitting around. We seek your ideas for how to spend money, both specifically to meet our needs as a cooperative (i.e. let's pay certain people more for their roles) and more generally, how to process our budgeting ideas, say, by using participatory budgeting tools, or by designing a contest, or having a quarterly poll for the related services that we want to contribute to (such as Wikimedia or Mastodon or Matrix). For extra money, do we want to invest it into social impact investments that support allied cooperative causes?

What is it that we want to do as Social.Coop? How can we use our money to support the values and mission of Social.Coop? How can we use members' resources to build the cooperative fediverse?

@Mitra Ardron. 15,000 pounds total for one year of spending.

Broken into 3 groups: 1,000 pounds for the Finance Working Group to spend. 10,000 pounds for the Tech Working Group to Spend. 4,000 pounds for the Community Working Group to spend. Then, also: 5,000 pounds in Reserves.

... Math: 1+10+4=15 spent and 5 unspent

Within each group of spending, the total fund amount is not fully allocated yet. The ideas for how to spend that money will come from all members who contribute ideas. The decision-making processes are mostly up to those 3 working groups. Changes will come as we form a new Organizing Circle in 2024. We want to start a discussion now.

@Caitlin Waddick, CaitlinWaddickSocial.Coop

Then a: please edit Nathan's post and your own to show £15k instead of £15.

b: Can you explain in Nathan's post how £21k over 5 years is compatable with £15k/year

c: Can you explain the total of Expenses=£2 (or £2k) with the numbers beneath it. and so on.

Sorry, but we aren't all mind readers, and not making the units clear, not even to the point where we can guess them - given the discrepancies above - doesn't exactly lead to a lot of confidence in a Finance Working Group !

Oh - and make the time unit clear as well e.g. if you mean £15k/year then please say it, otherwise we don't know if its per month or £5/week or whatever.