Social.Coop is joining Meet.Coop

Jami might be OK as an on-the-fly voice/ video chat room for the server team, but it needs a UX makeover before I'd try it with non-geeks. Also, there's gotchas, like whoever starts the room is hosting it (ProTip; whoever has the best PC and bandwidth needs to start it), which limit how many users it can support in one room.

So here's a question: what about tools like Jitsi or the distributed Jami (still glitchy but deserving support)? Should we put resources into them? Should we host a Jitsi instance? Or go in on hosting with others? Or pay/donate for Jitsi hosting by an existing project like Disroot, Framasoft, MayFirst? I like the Meet.Coop idea, but we should be aware of alternatives.

I do like the idea of offering more perks to the social.coop membership. This is similar to how scribd.com has perks like giving members access to curiosity stream and pandora radio, which I am listening to right now included in my $9 / month membership. This really does help keep me as a paying member. Scribd offers e-book and audiobook streaming services, along with magazine streaming as well as a library of user-submitted materials. These services are enough but the added perks really keep me coming back.

Offering access to our mastodon services is probably enough for most people but the added perks like video conferencing and the opportunity to support other cooperative solutions, will be a more persuasive deal for our members.

I think we can structure a deal that is fair for everyone, like I see a deal where we pay and get credits like they are used on resonate.is and we can give hours per person and per hour sort of credits. Included in your social.coop membership is 20 free credits, which gives you 20 hours per month of conferencing for meetings of 12 or fewer people and bigger meetings use more credits.

This is also similar to how library multi-media streaming hoopla.com services work, where the commons or the local government pays hoopla per item borrowed for its patrons, and each patron gets a limited amount of borrows each month. But the patrons get the books, music, movies, and comics for free.

I would think we would need to do some surveys to determine how many people would appreciate the conferencing services and how much the demand to use them would be. It would also be good to have some market research showing how persuasive this deal is for future social.coop members to choose to join us.

I see S.C (Social.Coop) offering a suite of services for its members that all aim to connect people to each other. Our unique proposition would be that we connect people to each other and to the communities they care about as opposed to something like Facebook that is designed to keep you hooked and viewing advertisements.

I think to be more successful, S.C must expand its service offerings to the point that it is the obvious choice for social networking and social cooperation. We really also need to work on our branding and clarify our identity to attract more members. Offering video conferencing is a must, and if you haven't noticed yet, Facebook is now offering a new feature of virtual meeting rooms for video chatting with friends. So we really do need to offer something that makes Facebook obsolete and irrelevant because our services offer a much more social and enjoyable experience.

I vote in favor of offering more and better services to help member users connect and to collaborate more with other cooperatives.

I votes YES, absolutely. What the folks at meet.coop are doing is EXACTLY what we should be doing more of i.e. pooling skills and sharing server costs so we can actually own our own tools! The cost is not high at all - it's what you need to pay to host and use your own OS tools... and, as a co-op, they need support from the co-op community... and any surpluses will be re-invested in the co-op or shared among members... so what's not to like!?!?!

oh, and one more point:

d) it's something we can actually do more-or-less now. when people are talking about social.coop offering more services, it feels like as users they want access to more services, but I rarely here anything about how they quite expect that to happen (and as the main tech person right now that would be important! ... I don't want to have that discussion right here, right now but just flagging it because other services were mentioned in this thread ... I do want to have that discussion, and was thinking to suggest a shared general call to get to know each other a bit more and start to progress these topics).

Right? Principle 6: Intercooperation. One role SC can play is to help cohere and strengthen the existing network of online cooperatives.

I like it on the basis that:

a) social.coop has money available, and/or skills to contribute (I could/might consider getting involved on the tech level too, as I imagine webarch is involved there and I know the people)

b) if, in general, the co-op movement is to work, we need to support the wider network, not just think about our own specific interest, so even if it's "too expensive" (if it were considered as a simple transactional service) what is good for the co-op network will be good for us in one way or another

c) we have a bunch of social.coop uses, and I'm sure there will be some way to also use it for other purposes by the members (even if as lower priority, or when it's not being used for something, or whatever)

I tend to think we should go in together or not at all, rather than creating pay-to-play features of Social.coop membership. To me the big question is what benefit we receive from an organizational membership—the extent to which meet.coop would allow social.coop members to use the service for their own purposes.

Interesting -- so whoever wanted could pitch in to pay for an organizational membership that would then be available for all members to use?

I would love for us to join!! What if those who were interested in using it for personal purposes could pitch in for an account through social.coop? If there were 10 of us, that would amount to less than 5 eu/month

By what standard? We currently have 6k GBP on hand. If Social.coop members would find this membership valuable, we could in principle afford it.

Too expensive for our purposes.

I think our average of meetings is closer to 3/month (tech working group, community working group, reading group, DisCo game group). But maybe that is still not enough to justify the expense?
If members could use it for their own purposes -- maybe limited to non-commercial uses -- would it be worth doing?

I love the idea of meet.coop but think the price during the first year is bit too high for Social Coop. Social Coop does not use online meetings that much (I presume maybe once a month), so the price would be around 40$ per meeting. Would wait until the next year when the subscription price comes down and then join.

It is there in the "Recurring Contributions" section: https://opencollective.com/socialcoop

Any idea yet how we're doing on covering 90GBP per month?

https://wiki.social.coop/meet.coop-registration-form.html

Would you share the signup link, please?

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Seems like I failed to respond to @Bob Haugen -- Social.Coop pays about 90GBP a month for a multi-user account, so it would be about 1000GBP/yr. An easy burden for us to bear collectively. Not sure why it does not show up as an expense in Open Collective? @Nathan Schneider ?

Can it show up as an expense in open collective?

I signed up using the form from the link in yesterday's meeting and did my first meeting this morning.
Very smooth. The question came up, though, how much is social.coop paying for meet.coop (said $500-$1000 somewhere if I read and remembered correctly). The signup form suggest upping your existing contribution, which I did, but I have no idea if the member contributions are covering the cost, or even what the cost actually is. 500-1000 is a big range. And I'm happy to bump my contribution again.

As it is, there's no paywall to use the tool, but it looks like membership is facilitated through the starter orgs?

Great question. I'd assume the former. That would be the only way, I think, this would be worth the money.

Question: if we joined as a member organization, does that mean that any of our members could use the software at no additional expense? For their own purposes? Or just for Social.Coop meetings, events, etc.?

Following the practice of our DisCO friends, I volunteer to facilitate this thread. ;-)