Toward an annual budget

Having a year's operating budget in the bank would not be a bad fiscal choice in my mind to ensure year over year stability. My priority would be 1) keeping the lights on (paying our server fees), 2) supporting our open source dev ecosystem, and 3) paying our 'staff' (I put this as 3 only because it's such a nominal payment that I expect most folks are doing this as effectively volunteer work). I agree with Mitra that the numbers look a little wonky but I think I got the gist of the question.

Hi friends, it is important to add in the new Organizing Circle, whose members will receive stipends of some yet to be determined quantity.

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

I quite like the work Framasoft is doing (https://framasoft.org/en/), which includes free Nextcloud hosting for organisations (Framaspace - https://www.frama.space/abc/en/). In the context of social.coop, some kind of similar hosting (Nextcloud or other) would be interesting. Obviously there'd be server costs associated with this and would need to be budgeted.

Online training would also be an interesting service. Cyber security, sanitary online practices, VPN use, programming etc. Could be anything really, I was just trying to think of "technology" related ideas. Disaster Ready (https://www.disasterready.org/) does a brilliant job of this in the humanitarian space. Whether this was Social.Coop run training, or partnering with a training organisation to provide these courses, I don't know.

Offering a stipend for specifically social focused open source development projects. Members submit proposals for development projects, which are voted on by the membership and the successful projects receive some level of funding from social.coop. Could even just be maintenance of an existing OS projects, or perhaps direct funding for development of Fediverse tools.

That's all about expenses, but are there ways to increase the social.coop revenues as well? For example, I'm sure many members have excellent technology skills. Could social.coop source contract work, which members undertake for payment obviously, but social.coop retains a margin of the contract rate, which is then used to further fund and expand social.coop services.

@Black Flag Medical

I quite like the work Framasoft is doing (https://framasoft.org/en/), which includes free Nextcloud hosting for organisations (Framaspace - https://www.frama.space/abc/en/). In the context of social.coop, some kind of similar hosting (Nextcloud or other) would be interesting. Obviously there'd be server costs associated with this and would need to be budgeted.

👍 Framasoft has a great strategy, developed over a decade and more 💚 Also, May First Movement Technology provides NextCloud for members (as well as free-to-use jitsi) and is very solid on membership participation and democratic leadership. Maybe social.coop can take a membership of MayFirst like with meet.coop, to provide NextCloud accounts for members?

This principle of federated provisioning of digital infrastructure and paying for services is an important one? But not sure that MayFirst does multi-user membership in the way that meet.coop does (enabling social.coop to create individual accounts). @Matt Noyes d'you know? What's the status of discussions w MayFirst?

@mike_hales Social.coop is already a member of May First! I recently had the pleasure of paying our membership fee: https://opencollective.com/socialcoop/expenses/171880

See more about the membership on the wiki: https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/May_First_Movement_Technology

@Nathan Schneider This is great to hear thanks 🙂 It’s not 100% clear to me from the wiki, or in the thread a year ago, that cloud storage is available to individual members, or how to get it. Or email accounts. Calendars seems to be what the thread focuses on. Might it be made clear, just what each member can get in MayFirst service? Is there a cloud quota for example? Onward!

@mike_hales I just clarified on the wiki page:

Our membership is designed to support Social.coop's collective business, not individual members' needs. In addition to our collective membership, Social.coop invites its members to consider becoming individual members of May First as well.

@Black Flag Medical

Online training would also be an interesting service. Cyber security, sanitary online practices, VPN use, programming etc. Could be anything really, I was just trying to think of "technology" related ideas. Disaster Ready (https://www.disasterready.org/) does a brilliant job of this in the humanitarian space. Whether this was Social.Coop run training, or partnering with a training organisation to provide these courses, I don't know.

Yep another nice possibility 💚 An organisation that provides this kind of training is https://www.digitalrights.community/the-team Speak with them maybe? Also (more at the level of configuring digital tech rather than just using) there is https://simplysecure.org/who-we-are/ (rebranding, apparently, as 'Superbloom'). And MayFirst (see above https://www.loomio.com/d/liwtX0qd/toward-an-annual-budget/15) is hot on digital security, and campaigns on this with its movement members. Perhaps hold a webinar with all of the above, to figure a strategy for social.coop?

I think this looks like a plausible budget for expenditure (modulo needing to add the "k" onto the £15 which is confusing). What it needs to gain is an income budget: how much do we currently get in each year in donations (or other income sources). With healthy reserves we could plan to spend slightly more than we currently get in (perhaps other members like me would happily contribute more if they thought the money would be used well).

@Daniel Thomas Thanks @Caitlin Waddick, @[email protected] for taking care of this!

I like these ideas, but perhaps instead of starting from "we have money, how are we going to spend it" we need to start from "we have goals, and potential projects, do any of them need money?" Budgeting is a strategic planning conversation. What is the implicit strategy here? It seems like keeping Social.Coop sustainable and building some kind of solidarity network of platforms. Is that right? Much of that does not require $, but in some cases it might. So, I wonder what is it that we want Social.Coop to be?

@Matt Noyes Thanks for this.

For context, please remember that we have had ongoing discussions about this, going back about a year: https://www.loomio.com/d/jSvw79qE/we-have-room-in-our-budget-to-do-more-what-should-we-do-

The results of that initial poll were that the things the membership was eager to do more were 1) pay working groups more, toward sustainable compensation, 2) invest in new services, and 3) donate to FOSS and fediverse ecosystems. So this proposal really does not come out of nowhere, or out of a random desire to spend money. This is an attempt to actually follow through on stated wishes of the membership.

Loomio developer note:

Just popping in to say that in future, Loomio will not show a link preview if that link already has a preview earlier in the thread. Thanks for showing me what needed to happen :)

@Robert Guthrie In general, two things:

• I'm really not into link previews. They're really big, distracting, and steer focus away from the discussion.

• I usually try to delete them, but recently that has become impossible for me in current Firefox. Here's what it looks like (notice the button in the top-left):

@Nathan Schneider thanks again (and sorry to the people expecting this thread to be on topic). I've fixed the buttons now.

In summary the link previews will be now be fewer, smaller and the buttons will work :)

@Robert Guthrie Thanks. While I can see the value of link previews on a social network, I don't think they're appropriate in a governance-focused context—they take up screen real estate that should focus on what people are actually saying, not what they are linking to.