We have room in our budget to do more—what should we do?

As one of the few instances with a healthy budget (from what I gather, at least), we really should feel an obligation to give significant support to Mastodon development.

I would really like to explore adding other services (my proposal would be to focus on social and add other fedi apps like peertube, for example), but I know that's not remotely feasible from the tech side until we build capacity, so I've rated paying working groups above that.

Why not do a participatory budgeting-type thing? People can propose a specific use of funds that they will be responsible for spending (via Open Collective, so transparency) and we vote for what we'd like to support? I would like to see more services or partnering with existing services, e.g. MayFirst.coop.

I think the continued sustainability of social.coop is a top priority, and that means (1) making sure that there are folks to keep things running (aka the working groups) and they are treated fairly, and (2) the barriers for new users joining social.coop are as low as possible.

Working groups are the core of the co-op without whom nothing is possible. They deserve rewards and aknowledgement, and relying on volunteering is precarious. So I'm for raising their payment.

Hosting a Nextcloud instance would be nice too so we, as a coop, could provide integrated services to all members. Write Freely could maybe also be on the table according to a recent discussion here on Loomio.

I'm less into the other suggestions (helping other projects development is nice, but I already donate personnally to interesting projects).

A timely poll. With my Platform6.coop hat on (we provide the fiscal hosting service through Open Collective to social.coop, free of charge thus far, I've been meaning to get in touch for some time to suggest that social.coop might like to consider making a contribution. This could be by becoming a member of Platform 6, enabling social.coop to take an active role in the stuff we're doing there, and by so doing helping to boost international cooperation, or if that isn't appropriate we'd be open to a straight donation 🙂. Having said all of that, my top suggestion is to ensure that the people doing work for social.coop are fairly compensated for their labour.

I suggest more emphasis on face-to-face meetings. Geographically local outreach groups. Education about what coops are and how they help build communities and their strengths. Education on the history of how coops, labor unions, consumer boycotts, and the people's press have lost so much power in the last 50 years, and how to make them strong again. Re Mastodon: it's too much like twitter and other single-platform corporate owned social networks. It encourages bad behavior.

I think a working group for community development and marketing would be A++. Weaving the different people and cooperative endeavours together in a more intentional, supportive way would be good leverage.

Making our infrastructure more solid and resilient is important, that's why I put 1st paying a bit more to our current people in the WGs. From there, collaborate with the Commons movement follows. Adding a new service as creating a new WG -from my POV- depends on our needs, not so much on available resources and that is why I put them after.

Cost of membership is already low (again, from my POV) so I wouldn't lower it more. If someone can't pay that is another issue and can be accommodated (as we did it always in the school cooperative with some families that couldn't pay).

Last but not least, if we donate to development, Mastodon is not the 1st or more valuable project that may need some help. Hometown or Bonfire may be more interesting for reasons related to diversity of functions, higher community participation and Fediverse potentialities added... :)

Great to hear we've got some money to work with! I'm not sure how working group members are doing, but one of the most common challenges I've experienced with community tech projects is overworked, underpaid folks. So that's my top priority.

I looked at the Mastodon sponsor levels and there is one spot remaining for the Gold Tier at $200 a month. It sounds like we're not there but it might be a stretch goal we could reach if we did a bit of outreach to current members. I'd help with that if we decided it was worth pursuing. The next tier down is silver at $40 a month, which seems doable.

For my "Something not listed here" vote I was inspired by this post about community entrepreneurs. I think our community would benefit from some more attention and support for this kind of social work with the platform.

The rest of the options are much lower priority to me.

With Twitter in flux, I think Mastodon and other other open means of communication, like chat, are priorities.