Please Suggest Projects for SC to contribute to... (from FWG)
Josh Davis
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This 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.)
Graham Fri 29 Mar 2024 8:28AM
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.
Robert Guthrie Sat 30 Mar 2024 8:02AM
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.
Nathan Schneider Sat 30 Mar 2024 3:30PM
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I would definitely support this. Maybe it would help with patching the above typing bug on Android Firefox:)
Robert Guthrie Sat 30 Mar 2024 6:59PM
Yes, mobile experience could be improved with support :)
Andrew Escobar (Andres) · social.coop Finance Working Group Mon 15 Apr 2024 4:21PM
@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?
Caitlin Waddick, @[email protected] Wed 10 Apr 2024 2:11PM
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.
Luis Villa · Fri 29 Mar 2024 6:16PM
@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.