Toward an annual budget

This seems like a reasonable 2024 budget; and I like that we are setting aside some amount of cash for the members of the circles to compensate them.

It would be nice if the Community Contributions were split between the Tech WG and Community WG. Right now it looks like they come out of the Finance WG's budget, but are directed by the Tech WG; which may mean that fediverse projects that aren't "Tech" oriented will not get funded.

It feels a bit off that contributions back to the community are confined to Open Collective. Especially because most of the non-tech-oriented projects rely heavily on GoFundMe, tip-jars, paypal and other high-accessibility fundraising means.

TL/DR: I'm glad we have a budget. This looks reasonable from a cashflow perspective. It would be great if the budget proactively signaled an interest in funding labor outside of tech.

@Zee Spencer Thanks for this—and you caught me with an error. We initially had planned to have the contributions going through the TWG budget, but at our meeting today we decided to propose running it through FWG instead. This is because (according to my read of the TWG's last minutes) the TWG has a lot more on its plate and is in danger of burnout. The FWG has capacity to take this on. And of course that process would involve consultation with the broader community, including TWG members. I've just corrected the proposal above to just have that managed by the FWG.

The restriction to OC is primarily logistical right now. We cannot currently make payments otherwise, unless somebody submits an invoice. So I think this is a good way to start, but especially after we move to our more durable fiscal host (that's another discussion) we can open it up beyond this. So in our pilot phase I think it would be best to stick to projects on OC (which is most well-aligned open source projects).

Hi Nathan,

Great work! This email is a perfect example of why we are building VisionsUnite. Please take a look - short overview of the sortition voting app here - https://visionsunite.gigalixirapp.com/

@freescholar Wow, nice! So y'all didn't end up going with Decidim?

Hey @Nathan Schneider, while I understand using OpenCollective for record-keeping; and for ease of logistics, I still think restricting payments to only existing OpenCollectives is a policy that will prevent us from funding the work of the moderators and communiyt organizers who actually make the Fediverse work.

Open Collective makes it straightforward to reimburse someone for "fronting" a payment to an outside entity. Payments from Social Coop to significantly important vendors, such as infrastructure providers, already use the "submit an invoice and get reimbursed" flow.

I am not dismissing the added logistical burden of needing to submit an invoice, rather than paying directly from Open Collective to Open Collective; but it feels inequitable that we are comfortable paying for some things with an invoice/receipt, but not others.

To be blunt, it feels a little like a reflection of entrenched patriarchal white supremacy, in that we are unwilling to value the labor and energy of the Black and Indigenous people of color who do the vast majority of community-organizing and trust and safety work sufficiently because they don't want to use "our preferred vendor" for payment processing and we don't want to do the work of submitting a receipt for reimbursement.

@Zee Spencer Thanks for raising this concern. I agree it is a real constraint. We could certainly do a reimbursement process for the donations, if people are willing (in the US, doing so does mean some care with respect to taxes). In any case, we were suggesting the OC restriction as totally temporary, until we settle down with our fiscal host (which is in flux) and possibly get access to a debit card. My view is that getting this contributions started has been a long process that has been repeatedly flummoxed by perceived complexity. So I think there is value in trying to reduce the complexity. But I'm open to adjusting, and I suspect others would be too.

On the question of justice, I think it is worth pointing out that, as vendors go, OC is a pretty decent one. The organization is women-led, with a CEO from the Global South. It has made an explicit commitment to supporting mutual aid organizations.

But I agree keeping to one network (even just initially) could introduce unwelcome constraints and get us started on a bad foot. I'll remove that from the current proposal and defer the question to the post-budget process.

To be clear, I love OpenCollective and use them for Zinc's projects gathering income from community and to publicly account for spending. My concern isn't that OC isn't a just vendor, but rather that we are adding a constraint whose consequences will primarily be felt by the non-white, non-programmer members who steward the federated web.

Thank you for removing the constraint that recipients of Social Coop's discretionary funding to support the federated web must use a particular vendor to get paid for their contributions!

I would like to see the people who do ongoing work (whether that's tech or moderation or whatever is a non-one-time-activity) to get paid in a way that they (and their spouses :-)) are happy. I can't tell from this budget whether this might be true or not.

@Johannes Ernst The goal is certainly to provide stipends for people doing some volunteer work. It's not living wages. But it is based on what the WGs have been asking for (or more). I think if we wanted to make living wages a goal (rather than stipends for volunteers), we would have to rethink the budget and labor allocations. I would support that, but I haven't heard WGs asking for it.

@Nathan Schneider Thanks for circulating this. I am not involved enough to understand how social.coop operates in terms of its budget. However, I believe that cooperatives all over the world should be reimbursing its working members for the work that they do at market rate (or at least some semblance of market rate), even if this involves increasing subscription rates. I know that we don't succeed in our worker co-op (ChiCommons LWCA), but we are working toward it. Even if we are willing, as cooperative proponents, to 'volunteer' some of our time, anything operational (central to the ongoing sustainability of the cooperative) should be reimbursed at wages commensurate to the type of required work. This is a longer term proposal than a comment on this specific budget.