Participatory budgeting process

Thanks for moving this forwad, @Darren.

I agree with the comments from others about having our strategy discussion first, and on moving towards a more holistic approach towards use of our funds, but I think those things can be addressed in parallel with a first experiment in allocating funds via co-budgeting.

Agree with "participatory," but flexible on the amounts and purpose.

This feels like a reasonably scaled pilot project to me. I definitely feel like we should be both contributing resources to the software we rely on, along with using our little bit of clout to incentivize development that serves the unique needs of co-op/democratic software. I'll be interested to see how the first process goes!

Yup, seems a good thing to try out! Thanks for proposing it :)

It makes sense to me that we would help support development of software we use as an instance. The participatory budgeting aspect allows for member input on specifics.

Sounds like a great idea! As a new member, I'm not yet clear on the current budgeting process, but I like the idea of using a dot vote to proportionally distribute discretionary funds.

While 5% of cash-on-hand seems like a large chunk, and it's also only roughly ~15 members annual dues. I think it's safe-to-try and I would enjoy seeing the participatory budgeting play out.

That said, I could see a smaller amount still being significant enough for us to learn real lessons from; and a ~200 would bring it to < 1.5% of our cash-on-hand.

This is a worthwhile experiment, and could be a great ongoing process. Open source maintainership can often be thankless, and efforts like this could enable a move towards professional maintainership outside of corporate contract sponsorship.

Around 5% seems fair for kicking up to projects that we depend on, though agree that revisiting in 6 months is a good plan. I like the idea of collaboratively deciding upon projects to support first, and then disbursing based on dot votes. I think participatory budgeting is exactly the kind of democratic process that social.coop should be experimenting with and look forward to it happening!