Regular contributions to upstream software

Hi all, I'm new here and still getting to know the community here; it's been great to see the thoughtful discussion! I'm supportive of distributing funds to strategic/values aligned initiatives, especially ones that are focused on diversity/inclusion and online safety, which seem to be two areas of significant need.

We may find the direction of Mastodon itself troubling yet support it because we use it while also supporting a wholly co-operative collective that is developing an alternative that we can see ourselves transitioning to using in future.

The conversation this last week on how best to do moderation has been very instructive. There are clearly strong needs in our quickly growing Fediverse. Moderation is the issue of the day but other issues will crop up as well. It really boils down to a clear articulation of "Our Values". This clearly needs to be debated, but I'd vote for a core value statement that we want a long term, sustainable ecosystem based on federated hosting, effective moderation, member safety, and fair compensation for both projects and people doing key tasks like moderation. Once we agree on this higher level statement, teams can be tasked with finding and supporting projects and people that do this in an effective (e.g. not wasteful) and ethical way.

@Isabel Thanks for your comment here—I really like your proposal.

Just for context, though, the purpose of that poll is NOT to rush into making a decision; it was to provide a structured venue for surfacing possible ideas that we could craft into a more sophisticated proposal. I started the poll precisely because I wasn't sure how to proceed and wanted to encourage constructive proposals like the one you offered!

cc: @Shauna Gordon-McKeon

Hi all. OK. Here is my blogpost length answer.

TLDR. Let’s get this out of the way with a 6-month donation as a form of prepayment. And while Eugen may say he wants to democratize social media, he does not want to democratize the workplace.

I believe we have 2 concerns here. One is the desire to support projects that we rely on, and IMO (perhaps in our aggregate opinion too), it's good form to do so - assuming one has the means. The other concern is how to be mindful to support the projects that align with our values, and as @Matt Noyes pointed out, align with our strategy. I believe we can do both by untethering our contributions to the platform we depend on from our budget proportions and by changing the period in which we make this payment.

For the amount that we should pay, I think rather than looking at our monthly disposable income, we should ask instead what is a reasonable amount for using the software for a server, and perhaps as well, consider that there are apparently thousands of servers. I see this more as contractual or as an unwritten few perks leasing plan than support. Given that this is free software, we would not be, for instance, receiving technical support in turn for these proposed monthly payments. When we require that support, it’s up to the volunteers of the TWG to resolve our technical issues, as well as via any help they can get from other volunteers. Most notably, there is https://social.coop/tags/mastoadmin, and I don’t know if there is any pay arrangement for that, or if the Mastodon org provides any resources to the initiative.

My fear is that it’s mostly volunteers. If that’s the case, then the org should see to it that people are compensated for the work they do volunteering to help others. And we too may want to see how we might be able to help on that solution. If there is generally little help that does get provided there, then that’s even more of a reason that we should be a part of that solution of compensation - to ensure that more help is provided.

Those who write the code get to play with it and use it for themselves, as well as sharing it with others.Those, however, who volunteer to help at https://social.coop/tags/mastoadmin, are giving time to helping on others' server issues, which the helpers themselves do not necessarily directly benefit from. Further, those IMO, who help others with their server issues play more significant roles for the community than those who just share their code.

Back to making payment to the organization itself though. If we do not know what is reasonable, then perhaps we can see if there is any place where there is a suggested donation, and then pay say 150% or 200%. But I think the payment should be made more by what we think is reasonable for a very limited unwritten contract rather than how much we believe should come out of our budget, as if it were a monthly tithe to assuage our conscience.

On this second part, I do not believe we should be on the hook monthly. We could perhaps make lump payments prepaid every 6 months and then review them at the end of each period - or pick a different period, or not review them but just repeat them. But, it should be for as long as we intend to keep using the software, as this project is not one that we - AFAICT - see as one that we should prioritize building, independently of our use of it.

I do not like the idea of our payments being conceptually based on our income. I’m not betting on this, but let’s say our income significantly increases. We would gladly have more financial resources for the projects and services and compensation to those who we do believe in and with whom we would like to build based on a shared vision, but this would also be cut into by a growing amount of money going to an org that at least presently, does not share our vision. This model works against our being able to provide yet more resources to those we wish to build with, and which continues to use the model that we’re trying to build an alternative to. Both expenditures should not grow, as our budget increases. 

The reason that I say that the Mastodon org has a model that we’re trying to provide an alternative to is not because, to my understanding, Eugen is neutral on these questions, but that because - and this is just as much as I’ve been able to pick up - that though the org is technically a nonprofit LLC in Germany, I cannot find any information about its board of directors or how it is governed in practice. It appears only, that when it comes to how the project is governed, that it uses the BDFL (benevolent dictator for life) model.

Reportedly, while many people may spend endless hours volunteering with code fixes and new features, none of them get a vote. It is ultimately Eugen who has the final word about what is allowed into the code base. Any money that we provide should be done while being cognizant that there are many people who may give ideas and labor, all contributing to the project that we all use, but which do not have their proposals voted on, and whose inclusion into the project is at the whims of one authority figure who can just say “no.”

I think we should reach out to the other cooperative instances and even non-cooperatives and get a sense about how people feel about this and at least let our sentiments be known. The man may run his project however he feels (and find end runs around NGO law in Germany. It would at least be an issue in the US), and that’s meh, OK.

I’m not asking that we try to force him to change, but I don’t think we should be encouraging that behavior every month through our limited resources. Instead, we should be looking towards building alternatives and supporting others who do so. We can send some lump sum to the org every 6 months or whenever. Mathematically, we may wind up spending the same amount every period, but conceptually, the rest of the months, we should not have our budget constrained by this obligation.

For those too who are fans of Sociocracy, we can go ahead on some lump amount provisionally for the period and then revisit this again in the future, without having this task be unresolved as we go through the work of attempting to explore and determine what we instead would like to contribute our resources to building and supporting.

I'm new to Mastodon but one thing I noticed is that its license is AGPL 3.0, which if I understand correctly is the most copyleft of the well-known license types; I like that. But that isn't to say one way or another about the governance of Mastodon development outside of the terms on which they are providing its source code.

Support we offer should be for cooperatively-governed projects. For the future of the fediverse, cooperative software development and cooperative instances are both absolutely crucial. By having money set aside for this purpose, we can help nurture those that have started down this path and perhaps encourage cooperative forms to come into being. No one else will do this— we must.

Thanks for the incredible contributions here! So much wisdom. But I have some concerns about the accumulating complexity of the proposals on the table, which I've shared on Social.coop for discussion:

https://social.coop/@ntnsndr/109444870370800595

I would love ideas about how to synthesize the beauty of what is here on display with something that does not significantly add to our organizational load!

I think it would be good to get consensus on the envelope of funding per month that we want to redistribute, as you suggested, but without delegating it to the TWG. If that's, say, 100 USD/month, then we can decide on a participatory budgeting process by which that could be allocated to upstream and mission-aligned initiatives.

In other words, separate the "Do we want to set aside money for this (and if so, how much)" question from the "How do we want to spend the money we set aside" question.

As to the "How do we want to spend the money", I'm in favor of allowing for lightweight proposals to be floated while the process matures. So once the envelope is set, it should IMO be OK for a proposal like "Let's at least give a small amount of money to the primary software project that we rely on," to be floated.

Thanks for this. I like the idea of identifying a minimalistic starting point and developing from there. A concern is: Will the community be willing to write a blank check? And who would steward this, according to what criteria? I suspect asking for community-level approval for every contribution will soon become a large burden. I think we'll need to answer those basic questions before promising funding.

@Erik Moeller how do you suggest those proposals are put forward? In text form in the thread, or as a new discussion?

It might be good to start drafting the broad proposal language in something like an Etherpad or a Hedgedoc before a vote, just so we don't all suffer from proposal fatigue. But the gist of it for proposal 1 for me would be: Do we want to set aside some of our funds for investment in mission-aligned technical or non-technical initiatives.

We could enumerate examples that have been cited in this thread. The options would include "No, I think we need to focus on our core operations for now", and a range of funding scales similar to the initial vote here (perhaps with a slightly higher ceiling).

To me, there has already been strong support for funding upstream work that we rely on. (See top of the thread.) The question is more one of how.

@Leo Sammallahti:

an easy option could be to allow projects to apply for funding for us, instead of us looking for projects to fund?

People could apply for $100, $200 or $500 grants from Social Coop. They write an application, its discussed on Loomio and then put on a vote.

That would seem like something that would require relatively little effort from Social Coops behalf?

https://social.coop/@LeoSammallahti/109444987076475110

I should say I do not necessarily think that running a grants program is "easy," and it raises the question of who would be the decision-makers. At minimum, I recommend entrusting that to a willing working group, rather than the community at large.

When you have the time, would be interested to hear why you think entrusting handling the grant applications to a working group rather than the Social Coop community at large would be better? Notification spam?

Making good allocation decisions requires time and energy. Say there are 10 applications/month for 5 grants, and it takes 5 minutes to review each app fairly. So that's 50 minutes/month per person. Multiplying that by 300 members is a much much larger demand on our collective energy than multiplying that by 5 WG members.

And thatdiesnt include the time for deliberation if there is any disagreement at all, which also becomes more complex (potentially exponentially) with the number of people involved.

Can see where you are coming from, and you might turn out to be totally correct. My guess would be that the process would be mostly a rubber-stamp with rare occasions where a grant application is rejected. Especially if the grant sums are small ($100 grants with little opportunity costs, etc.) I do not think occasionally giving a grant to a "bad group" would be a big deal.

Another option could be to set up simple minimum requirements and use a lottery to decide between the projects. That could minimise effort required, although it lacks a democratic element; think participatory budgeting similar to what @Josh Levy proposed would fit a coop well.

That being said, I do not have strong feelings for or against any of the options. They all seem good.

Having been involved in a number of community groups and social enterprises that applied for grants, I want to point out a few of the downsides of this micro-grant proposal.

• Writing grant applications takes time and energy that could be going directly into the activity the grant would be funding. As does correspondence with the grant org (and reporting on how the grant was spent, if required).

• Reading grant applications, corresponding with applications, and deciding who gets the money takes time and energy.

• Realistically, 100 funds no more than one hour of a skilled technologist's labour at market rates

Keeping all this in mind, a donation of 100 is much more helpful to a software project than a grant for 100. A 100 grant wouldn't even fund the time spend on the application and associated admin. If you want to set up a grant scheme, handing out grants of 1000 a year gives you and grant receivers much better bang for buck in terms of admin overhead, than giving out 100 a month does.

Even better, just donate the money you want to hand out in grants to an existing org with a grant program. For example, if you want to help fund development of fediverse software, and decentralized and user-respecting software in general, you could contribute to the funds that feed the NlNet grants.

FWIW Another way anyone could help with funding for software projects is to write a grant application for them, and handle the correspondence and reporting. Obviously you'd need to start by getting active agreement from the project that they want grant money and have the capacity to deliver on the strings attached, which isn't a given.

I would be pretty wary of a grants program; having run them in the past, they take up a lot of resources and would require a lot of buy-in from this community.

One thought is to invite the community to vote, on a monthly basis, for who to distribute funds to. The working group could come up with ~5-10 groups (some tech/infrastructure, some more community oriented), facilitate a vote, then distribute funds to the top 2 or 3 (an even split). I think this is similar to how CREDO distributes funds.

@Josh Levy I do not think the grants program would require lot of resources or buy-in from the community; it could work like your idea for a monthly participatory budgeting but without requiring a Working Group(s) to find projects to fund.

To expand on the ideas for participatory budgeting (some of these points could also be relevant to the proposal for us handing out grants)

As has been alluded to a number of times in this thread spending deliberation processes may well benefit from bring run every few (3?, 6?, 12?) months rather than monthly.

As we iron out the process, if we chose, participatory budgeting could be expanded to provide members with direct democratic control over how we spend the majority of our funds.

Members dont need to participate but a periodic budget preference [dot vote](https://help.loomio.com/en/user_manual/polls/proposal_types/index.html#dot-vote) provides a relatively quick and easy way for a member to meaningfully participate. The open deliberations leading to these budget dot votes gives the opportunity for deeper participation

To avoid notification fatigue we could create a new Loomio subgroup/working group which is open for any member to join. Ongoing deliberation related to how we organise the budgeting (or other spending) process & what projects to fund could happen there.

I think this is a worthy experiment, especially it is opt-in. I still worry about the drag on people's attention, but I would be open to seeing the approach tried. Would you (or anyone here) be interested in anchoring/facilitating this idea?

Yes, Id be very happy to begin organising this.

Im not totally clear, but get the impression it may be best to avoid using the Finance Working Group Loomio as it now has all the metagov stuff set up on it

Thinking it would likely be good to create a separate Budgeting Working Group on Loomio to contain the conversations

Who has suitable privileges in Loomio to do that?

You can use the Finance Working Group area. Only one thread is affected by the Metagov Gateway, the Expense Submissions.

I have the Loomio permissions, but I recommend not starting a new working group without first passing a an at-large proposal. Ideally, you would first pass a proposal here to authorize a budget and a provisional plan.

Please don't use the name "budgeting," as that creates confusion with finance (which is perhaps poorly named). Perhaps something like "mutual aid" or "upstream support." And perhaps it shouldn't be a working group per se but a "participatory budgeting space" open to anyone.

Adding another piece of software to support may be more of a hindrance than a help, but there is a software tool called CoBudget for managing decisions on disbursing surplus funds. The linked page has a collection of case studies on how various orgs currently use it, including Enspiral (of which Loomio is a member) and Outlandish, a member of CoTech (the collective of UK tech co-ops). The current stewards of the software are GreaterThan, who are also an Enspiral member company.

+1 to Strypey's points. Our co-op has pretty much given up applying for grants, not because they haven't been successful, but because they're soul-destroying. Even more so for small amounts that could be donations.