Loomio

Who's in charge of software upgrades again?

Neville Park PublicSeen by 20

So, people are #discourseing about the latest Mastodon RC, which got me realizing—I don't know who is in charge of updating the software right now, or when the instance is upgrading. Who is doing it at the moment? When a new update is released, could they announce when social.coop will upgrade to it in advance?

Mayel de Borniol

Hi Neville, I've been doing upgrades until now whenever I can, since I set up the initial server, but we now have @victormatekole helping by setting up new servers so we can scale better and have more stability, and we have a few more technical members as well, so it's a good question to bring up, thanks! It's great to start sharing the work load, and in any case I think at some point people who spend a lot of time should be compensated.

Nathan Schneider

I completely agree about compensating labor. What do you think would be an appropriate policy? A standard hourly rate?

Michele Kipiel

Totally agree with compensation for tech work. Count on me!

Matthew Cropp

Once people are being compensated for specific labor, we'll definitely need to figure out who is allowed take said tasks, and how multiple people desiring to take a task are prioritized, and the rate of compensation. Does anyone have a proposed framework that can cover those bases?

Nathan Schneider

The bylaws say "Social.coop is run through a system of open contributions." With that in mind, can imagine developing a system that is as open as possible for contributors to come and go, with appropriate accountability, rather than specifying ahead of time who is allowed to take on certain tasks. Of course, there should be high trust built into the oversight of those tasks. In this we can continue the experiments of open companies like Gratipay and Sensorica.

Neville Park

Perhaps on sign-up (or at any point afterwards, by asking the tech working group) members can be put on a list of people who can be called on for various tech tasks, and if no one is available, we can put out a call to the general membership?

I'm not sure what would be a fair way of prioritizing people, though, and I am not in the industry so I don't really know what average rates are.

Thomas Beckett

Perhaps we could establish a standard hourly rate for labor, and then find a tool for recording all labor contributions. Deciding whether and how to pay individuals for their labor is a related but different question. I think it is a good idea to book all labor contributions regardless.