Hola everyone!

To follow up on the presentation I gave at the summit about Cobudget and a survey I did with you a few weeks ago (you can see the results here), I’d like to share with you my proposal for a new Cobudget model in written and get your ok1. for moving forward with it.

As I explained in Hvar, over the past months, @jefb , Katalina and I spent a lot of time trying to work out a new Cobudget process, that could enable us to tackle the following problems:

1. Until now, there has been no one clear way how to get funds in your Cobudget account. We have had multiple different ways to get funds, depending on the country, which has lead to some administrative chaos because we were mixing different processes in one group.
2. To do the administration accurately, each country would have to have their own Cobudget group, which would be quite ashame because that would create an articifical silos between countries
3. Many people are doing work through / thanks to / related to Ouishare, but not invoicing through one of our legal entities, and have therefore not had an easy way to give back to the community. I think we have been losing a lot of potential give back because the process was not clear.

Therefore, I would like to propose a new Cobudget process that is identifical for everyone in Ouishare, no matter which country they are in and how they invoice their work.

Though this will of course also have some tradeoffs (because there is no perfect solution), I hope that this will simply the process significantly, enable us to tap into synergies across locations, enable people in more established communities to support the emerging ones, and help us collaborate more on projects.

In the long term, my hope is that this could even be a way for us to spend all our surplus in a very dynamic, organic way, instead of having heavy processes every few months to have to make these decisions.

The proposal

Here are a few slides that explain the new process in detail .

The very quick summary is:

• From now on, all Cobudget funds sit in a separate bank account, for Cobudget only, run by the French Ouishare Foundation
• funds can be paid in very easily as donations, with a credit card through the platform Helloasso here.
• Helloasso will automatically generate tax-deductable donation receipts and send them to the donors

The trade-offs

To make sure you are aware of them, are the trade-offs of this model are:

• tax deductions will probably only be possible for EU countries, and for some EU countries there will be some admin to get Ouishare added to the non-profit registry
• for non-Euro countries, there will be transfer and exchange fees
• since these are donations, we cannot give invoices
• since the funds are being donated to a charitable organization, the projects we fund must be justifiable as serving the common good (they cannot be purely commercial). In many cases it will just come down to how we formulate our projects, and to make this more clear, I’ve made an overview of examples here.

Next steps

Please vote on whether you are ok with us trying this model for 6 months to see how it works.

If there is consent, we will clean up the current Cobudget funds and buckets with Spain and Germany, and share this model out to the broader community.

I’m also keen to discuss trying out the rounds model to create more engagement, since this would help us have a deadline for proposing and funding buckets.

I look forward to hopefull funding lots of buckets soon :)