Loomio

Expense Submissions

Matthew Cropp PublicSeen by 22

A thread for expenses to be submitted and voted on by the Finance working group.

Nathan Schneider

Re: @mayel's concern, could we change the word to "ongoing" or "indefinite," to make clear the option for stopping it?

Make our $5/month Loomio Gold subscription permanent

proposal by Matthew Cropp Closed Tue 28 Nov 2017 9:37PM

Original: We previously approved a 4 month trial period for Loomio gold, and I just received the invoice for the 4th month's payment, so I figured I'd put forward a proposal to make our subscription a permanent recurring cost of $5/mo.

Amendment the word "permanent" changed to "ongoing" per Nathan's suggestion.

Amended: We previously approved a 4 month trial period for Loomio gold, and I just received the invoice for the 4th month's payment, so I figured I'd put forward a proposal to make our subscription an ongoing recurring cost of $5/mo.

Results

Matthew Cropp

Just signed us up; we should be getting a socialcoop subdomain soon, too... :)

Vote removed

Thomas Beckett
Agree

I will contribute personally as soon as I can get my work/life back under control.

Use the allocated $20 for 4 mo of Loomio Gold

proposal by Matthew Cropp Closed Wed 19 Jul 2017 11:09PM

Outcome
by Matthew Cropp

I will move forward with signing us up for Loomio Gold

In the time since we approved the $20 donation to Loomio, they changed around their model a bit, and I could no longer find a spot on the website to donate. As part of the change, they mentioned that they are offering the paid version for $5/mo to grassroots groups, so I'd like to propose that we sign up for Loomio Gold for 4 months, at the end of which we can evaluate whether we want to maintain paid membership.

Results

Michele Kipiel

This makes perfect sense to me. Looking forward to the vote.

Mayel de Borniol

I'd say take the $20 we already allocated to pay for the $5 subscription, and plan to make another proposal before the 4 months are up about whether we should continue it.

Matthew Cropp

Alright, funny story. I broke out my card tonight to make the Loomio donation and submit for reimbursement, but I cannot for the life of me find the Loomio donation page since the update that corresponded to the email I imagined most of us received. Basically, they've locked down things like the creation of subgroups, which was always listed as a paid feature, but free users could do it anyways.

In any case, in the email announcement, they mentioned that grass-roots projects can sign up for the paid version for $5/month if we do so with the provided coupon code by August 15. I'm thinking that's well within our budget and we we should do that, with the $20 already allocated used to pay for the first 4 months. I will turn this into a proposal soon, barring any strong immediate objections...

Sam Toland
Abstain

I'm happy to go with the consensus on this - I think it's a pretty small amount. It's a nice gesture, but I would be equally comfortable with waiting until we have enough cashflow to justify a subscription.

Nathan Schneider
Agree

This strikes me as an excellent example of modeling cooperation among co-ops, within our means. And Loomio, I think, can be a major ally as this project develops. I also hope, too, that the workflows we're creating together will demonstrate to others how powerful Loomio + OpenCollective + Sandstorm can be for building little platform co-ops.

$20 Donation to Loomio

proposal by Matthew Cropp Closed Thu 6 Jul 2017 5:00PM

While we're using the free version of Loomio, and might not be ready to upgrade to the paid subscription, it would be good to make a modest contribution to the platform's operations, so I'm proposing that we start by giving $20, and revisit the question of a subscription or another donation in a few months...

Results

Matthew Cropp

@mayel valid points; I'll withdraw my proposal and resubmit as a $20 initial donation, and we can revisit subscribing at a later date.

As to compensating back-end labor, have you given thought to how that might be structured? A per version upgrade stipend? A certain number of hours of labor per month? something else?

Mayel de Borniol

np! just created a dot poll as well :) let me know if I missed anything and will add it

Matthew Cropp

TY, sorry to be a bureaucratic pain... :P

Nathan Schneider

I'm happy to approve the expense as soon as we have a decision in that thread. Thanks, @mayel.

Mayel de Borniol

That sounds reasonable. I've already made the submission to OC, but IIRC only @ntnsndr can currently approve it on there for it to go through. So I'll make a proposal in the main group now.

Matthew Cropp

As we've not officially adopted to bylaws as a group yet, my thinking is that it would be good to post individual expenses to the whole group for ratification until we do, simply so that everyone involved has a chance to weigh in until the division of labor is formalized. Hopefully the bylaws review meetings will move the ball forward sufficiently so the task can be explicitly delegated, but it would probably be best to err towards whole group engagement until we have passed that milestone.

Mayel de Borniol

In reply to your earlier question, we have $159 currently available, and an estimated annual budget of $732 (based on current contributing members only)

Mayel de Borniol

@matthewcropp

According to the draft bylaws, this should be it. Any member wanting to oversee expenses can join this group to do so. Of course, the larger group needs to be aware of that, and I'd assume budgeting decisions would be taken in the main group, but don't know if everyone wants to have to deal with each individual expense...

I'm about to submit the expense on OpenCollective now.

Matthew Cropp

So, process-wise, do we move this to the main group for ratification, or is this subgroup empowered to authorize reimbursements?

Matthew Cropp
Agree

Glad to have more beefy tech capacity, and that we have enough $ flow to cover it!

New Server Expense

proposal by Mayel de Borniol Closed Sun 11 Jun 2017 11:02AM

All agreed for me to add a server expense on OpenCollective? for $13 x 6 months = $78 (so from June to November, inclusive)

If we need to upgrade again at any point during this period, I can then simply submit an expense for the difference.

Results

Matthew Cropp

That sounds good to me, Mayel - I think we should commit to new recurring expenses sequentially as we have the capacity. We're over $13/mo in pledges, so I think we should do that right off the bat, and commence the Loomio subscription ($19/mo) when we break $40/mo.

One other thing that would probably be good, perhaps as the next milestone post-Loomio subscription, would be to contribute something to the Mastodon development/er Patreon.

@ntnsndr, what is our current total monthly take from OpenCollective?

Mayel de Borniol

Thank you @matthewcropp, appreciate it.

We're going to need to upgrade the server soon anyway, as we're now using about half of both RAM and storage space available (including 6 GB of images already!). We can double the resources so we have 4GB RAM, 100GB SSD storage, and 4 CPU cores, for $13 a month.

Price wise, you can compare this with DigitalOcean, the provider most instances are using: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/#droplet

If it's agreed, I suggest doing one expense per quarter, for less bureaucracy.

Matthew Cropp

I'm kicking off this thread because, as people and contributions start flowing in, we should get a handle on what expenses we should budget for in the short term. My thinking is:

  1. A subscription, or at least a donation, to Loomio, given that we're leaning heavily on the service for our governance.
  2. @mayel's monthly hosting costs - he's being incredibly generous with his time right now, so we should be at least making it so social.coop is not an out of pocket cost for him.