Please Suggest Projects for SC to contribute to... (from FWG)
Josh Davis PublicSeen by 211This thread is an Invitation to Community Contribution Budgeting. The first annual budget for Social.coop passed on March 18, 2024. https://www.loomio.com/d/xqw7FtUT/toward-an-annual-budget. We agreed to distribute funds as part of a "Community Contribution." The Finance Working Group (FWG) invites your suggestions to advise us on the possible organizations that we might support. For this year, the amount budgeted is £3,400. To begin with we will be distributing £1,700, which is half the total amount. We would like your suggestions for worthy projects and organizations.
This participatory budget process will proceed in parts. First, in a Question Round Poll, you suggest organizations to receive SC donations. After this poll, we will create a "Dot Vote" proposal, so we can weigh our collective priorities. You will also be able to add options at that point. We are thinking to fund 3-5 organizations. And, finally, the FWG will review the results, make a final decision, and announce the beneficiaries in this thread.
Please name a project and provide a one or two-sentence rationale for SC to support them by April 4th, 2024. (We prefer projects that take donations through Open Collective, for ease of payment, but we will also consider projects and organizations that do not use the platform.)
@Johannes Ernst Yes, just put your suggestions here. We were planning on having a "Question Round Poll" here, but that option appears to have been removed.
@Josh Davis @Nathan Schneider. Nathan, Josh and I read through the help files for Loomio. The "Question Round" poll is described in the help files, but was not available when we went to create the poll!
For anyone following this discussion, the Question Round poll option in Loomio is there, but it was hidden at the time that Josh and I posted this thread. The option is now unhidden from view. (How is it all possible?)
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Full disclosure: I only know of them by research, not my own active use. I would love to see recommendations by users.
PixelFed: strengthens the fediverse's image-sharing capabilities and promotes a privacy-focused alternative to mainstream photo platforms.
PeerTube: open-source decentralized video hosting challenges the dominance of centralized video platforms.
Thanks for hosting this participatory process! My one suggestion is:
[IFTAS: federated trust & safety](https://about.iftas.org/). This nonprofit is networking and supporting moderators of fediverse instances, developing legal guides on trust/safety issues, and working on developing moderation tools for the fediverse on CSAM and other very sensitive issues with legal implications. I believe they [accept donations through Givebutter here](https://givebutter.com/iftas-supporter), though we would want to double-check that's their preferred channel if we decided to donate.
I'm working on a cooperative open-source music distribution platform called Mirlo that's about to launch its first fundraising campaign, it would be lovely to have some support from folks here! Contributions can be made here: Mirlo: Mirlo. Or reach out to me directly (here or on Mastodon @arod@social.coop) and we can set up an ACH transfer. There will be a Kickstarter up soon, too.
Sociocracy for All is a worthy nonprofit doing important work in this space, seems relevant given that we're trying on some of the tools from their toolbox with this iteration of our governance.
I nominate the tools we use but don't currently pay for:
Mastodon
Matrix
As well as some co-op tech projects that could support future infrastructure:
And some aligned fediverse projects we might someday adopt:
Bonfire
Hometown
Fediforum
IFTAS
@Nathan Schneider For what it's worth, I would strongly support contributing to any open source project we currently use but do not contribute to. Or increasing those contributions if they are low.
@Kathe TB I would suspect we use several thousand open source projects; the couple of "brand name" projects Nathan namechecked in turn depend on many, many others.
My day job has higher-dollar solutions to this; at SC's scale it might be interesting to take a whack at https://opencollective.com/backyourstack and see what is recommended.
I'd like to mention a project that I have some involvement in. The goal is to provide a high quality modern professional cooperative hosting service where customer-members can spin up a server on demand on a cloud hosting platform akin to the likes of AWS, Azure, etc. The plan is to use an open software platform - the current candidate is Open Nebula (https://opennebula.io) - and run this on hardware that is cooperatively owned and controlled, sitting in cooperatively owned and controlled racks in a cooperative data centre.
It's a significant piece of work and will require significant amounts of funding, but we have an active group of skilled cooperators pushing it forward, we have the data centre and rackspace (in Greater Manchester in the UK), and we have identified what's needed in terms of hardware to get a pilot up and running, and I hope that during the course of 2024 we'll be in a position to put a first 5-figure chunk of funding in to acquire at least some of the necessary hardware. and we have a relationship with at least one major cooperative organisation that could become an anchor tenant. What we need is more investment, commitments in principle to use the service once launched, discussions with potential partners to develop other server clusters in different locations to help the project scale out and bring resilience. Currently looking at launching in 2026/7.
The cooperative movement as a whole will currently be pouring millions of dollars annually into hosting services provided by large tech corporates, essentially draining funds from the cooperative sector. This doesn't need to be the case.
Great to see this process in action.
May I suggest an increase to your Loomio contribution? It's currently at $5/month and has been since 2017.
For context we're revising our plans, a 300 member plan would be $499/year for a nonprofit org.
Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder and employee at Loomio.
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I would definitely support this. Maybe it would help with patching the above typing bug on Android Firefox:)
Yes, mobile experience could be improved with support :)
@Robert Guthrie Thank you for raising this. To keep this within our “Community Contributions” could social.coop make a contribution to the worker-owned Loomio Coop now and then revisit annual pricing for 2025?
Yall, the Finance Working Group agreed to close this thread on April 4th, but we haven't. So, if you have another contribution to this thread, please post your ideas soon-ish. I probably won't get around to making the next step -- the Dot Vote Proposal for distributing funds to these suggested organizations/projects -- until Sunday-ish.
suggestions for recipients of funding are still open here, for Phase #2? I propose extending from fediverse to pluriverse. We are social dot COOP after all. I propose Global Tapestry of Alternativese, a network of networks, federation of grassroots economic alternatives across the global south, originating in South Asia, embracing Rojava, Chiapas, Colombia, China). Who remain stuck in the GAFAM world - we should fraternally invite them to join us? And join them??
Where do you want those suggestions? Right here in the comments?
If so, I suggest Mastodon GmbH. We are using their software, and benefit from it, and they operate on a shoe string, so they should get some money. Donation link: https://joinmastodon.org/sponsors#donate