We have room in our budget to do more—what should we do?
Nathan Schneider
Public
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Your friends in the Finance Working Group have been reviewing Social.coop's cash flow and have determined that we as a co-op could increase our budget. For instance, on Open Collective, our current balance is £9,253.27 GBP. Our estimated annual income is £5,845.01 GBP, while we are spending about £3k. That means, even allowing for some extra savings, we could consider increasing our budget, perhaps starting with another £1,000 per year.
That's exciting! What should we do with it? This is a thread to begin the discussion of what more we could be doing to make our little club more wonderful.
Flancian Mon 3 Oct 2022 3:31PM
| 1 - Add a new service (e.g., hosted chat, email, file-sharing, etc.) | ||
| 2 - Something not listed here (specify in the Reason comment field) | ||
| 3 - Donate to Mastodon development | ||
| 4 - Lower the suggested costs of membership | ||
| 5 - Donate to co-op development | ||
| 6 - Pay members of the working groups more | ||
| 7 - Create a new working group (e.g., newsletter, outreach, etc.) |
Hi there! Thank you so much for starting this poll!
I'm currently a member of the Tech and Community Working Groups. I chose 1. Add a new service and 2. Something not listed here as this seems to align best to a topic we discussed in the last meeting for both working groups (minutes: anagora.org/go/twg/minutes, anagora.org/go/cwg/minutes). This is: we believe it could make sense to invest a bit more monthly in a secondary/experimental server which we could then use for the following:
To test restores (from backup) in an isolated environment. This would have the side effect of letting [[twg]] new members ramp up in a relatively safe environment. Also, it is a hidden "top priority" in my opinion; we need to keep our setups reproducible by existing tech group members to do the right thing for the community.
To run possible improvements to existing services so that the community can try them in an 'alpha' environment and optionally express an opinion on whether they are worth investing on long term. For example, some people are interested in trying [[Hometown]] instead of 'core' Mastodon.
To install and run new services, like hosted chat.
To potentially set up a stable primary/secondary layout with the existing server, Runko, so that any service we provide can be failed over with high certainty in minimum amount of time should one of our servers give up the ghost :)
To further analyze and develop the plans that could be unlocked by dedicating some monthly sum to an extra server, please refer currently to https://anagora.org/mastodon-upgrade (edit link in the Hedgedoc interface: https://doc.anagora.org/mastodon-upgrade; we will likely move this plan to https://anagora.org/go/twg/wiki once it stabilizes.)
The estimated cost of an extra dedicated server should be in the ~40 EUR / month recurring range.
Thoughts? Happy to start a new thread if that helps. And thank you again for putting this to a vote!
jonny Mon 3 Oct 2022 3:31PM
| 1 - Pay members of the working groups more | ||
| 2 - Add a new service (e.g., hosted chat, email, file-sharing, etc.) | ||
| 3 - Donate to Mastodon development | ||
| 4 - Create a new working group (e.g., newsletter, outreach, etc.) | ||
| 5 - Donate to co-op development | ||
| 6 - Lower the suggested costs of membership | ||
| 7 - Something not listed here (specify in the Reason comment field) |
Hell ya, having too much money is the best problem to have. I'm always in favor of compensating ppl who do the work of maintaining the coop as much as is feasible, within the bounds of operating costs and balanced against reasonable fees. I'd also like to see us try and expand capacity to accommodate more ppl given any new influxes from the boidz0ne.
I am with flancian, having an extra dev server to try and expand operations seems like the next best use to me. chat sounds great, like running a matrix node, or running some public service like a signal proxy, tor relay. it might also be nice to have a gitea instance of we dont already have one, and another public service use there could be to use codeberg's static site hosting tools to provide a non-platform host with however large of a public sign up we can manage.
I wasn't really sure what co-op development meant, so that's why it's so low, but I'd be interested in this if it meant setting aside some startup funds to help new co-ops to get off the ground.
Re: lowering fees- I also am a big proponent of this, but it's low here because I think we should talk about a sliding scale system: I don't want fees to be a barrier to cooperation, and I know there are some of us that could pay more to offset allowing some people to not pay fees that can't. there are lots of different ways that could look, but I would prefer that to a flat reduction in fees.
Jamie Gaehring Sun 9 Oct 2022 9:36PM
| 1 - Pay members of the working groups more | ||
| 2 - Something not listed here (specify in the Reason comment field) | ||
| 3 - Donate to Mastodon development | ||
| 4 - Lower the suggested costs of membership | ||
| 5 - Donate to co-op development | ||
| 6 - Create a new working group (e.g., newsletter, outreach, etc.) | ||
| 7 - Add a new service (e.g., hosted chat, email, file-sharing, etc.) |
My instinct was to lower the membership cost, first and foremost, but many have made compelling reasons here why that's maybe not as much a priority. I'm new-ish here, so paying working groups more does seem to make sense, as a trade-off. As I become more familiar w/ Mastodon, that also seems like such a critical resource to contribute to. A new service def seems hard to justify, in my mind, since I'm a little unsure of the current service line-up as is, and feel like that could just further mystify newer users like myself, so that's why I put it last.
The "Something not listed" is Matt's (and perhaps others') idea of participatory budgeting. It's great to have the freedom, when you stumble on an idea that just needs a lil $ to make it go, to be empowered to propose it while the momentum is still moving forward.
Nic Fri 4 Nov 2022 10:30AM
Am a bit late to this one, but definitely support donating something regular to Mastodon GMbH.
Personally I'd also welcome some legal clarification around liability following this thread – https://social.coop/web/statuses/109276555296340952. Perhaps that means appointing a counsel, if there isn't already one? ie picturing the worst, if the instance was hit with a GDPR/etc fine/libel suit/DCMA claim, who would have to pay it / who would defend it?
Josh Davis Fri 4 Nov 2022 2:39PM
Or we might want to look into insurance options. And there's still the question of how our relationship with Open Collective effects all this. Definitely merits some more research. Thanks for starting that conversation.
Matt Noyes Fri 4 Nov 2022 3:29PM
In the meantime, seems wise to add a disclaimer to our code of conduct. Anyone have a good example we can adapt?
Nic Fri 4 Nov 2022 5:49PM
Not legal advice, but a pretty thorough one I was involved, written by Silvia Schmidt is here… limitation of liability, and no warranties (aka use at your own risk).
Tom Resing Tue 8 Nov 2022 8:33PM
Sorry I'm late to this thread (recently joined). I wonder if membership has increased a lot in the last week or so and we might reconsider how to apply excess funds. I've noticed that other servers have been a lot less reliable and performant. And, I saw in a working group's notes that another server instance had been considered in October. Not sure how much that costs, but if it would help ensure future stability and performance, I'd be in favor of investing in more infrastructure support for the mastodon server.
Leo Sammallahti Fri 30 Dec 2022 12:07AM
Regarding lowering membership fees, might be worth mentioning (esp. for non-UK members who might not be aware) that the British pound has lost 22% its value since 2019, the year we first started collecting membership fees in pounds. Higher inflation means our minimum membership fees are de facto reduced each year, more so now with high inflation. Also suggests that we should maybe be more bold in spending our reserves, as they are losing spending power at a record pace as well.
Matt Noyes · Tue 4 Oct 2022 2:25AM
You can see Social.Coop income and expenses here: https://opencollective.com/socialcoop#category-BUDGET