Updating the Expense Submission documents

I love the rewrite of it. Thank you for taking this next step, @Nathan Schneider

I propose an edit that justifies the stipend. We can explain what a stipend is and why it is relevant to Social.Coop. Some people do not understand this idea. Some people feel that they are exceptional and that they deserve more or less than other people due to their effort or skills or their perceived time-value. Some people think it is stupid to have a stipend at all because, as an individual, they may already earn $850/hour in consulting fees outside their regular $500,000 annual salary with benefits; thus, from their point of view, the stipend is nothing to them; it is nothing to others; it is not worth the time to discuss it. In fact, someone in such a position said something like these words out loud to me recently. Conversely, to mention Matt Noyes (because he is so good natured and has already spoken about money over public Loomio threads)... a stipend would be meaningful to him, he said, because he is on a limited income, even though his stipend amount would pale in comparison to either his annual contribution to Social.Coop or to his labor value if he were salaried, given that he volunteers so much time here. And, still other people have objected to the stipend because of their extra effort to figure out how to report it for tax purposes. A tax-free stipend might be accomplished through the purchase of gift cards, for example, as a gift to volunteers, or skill-sharing services among ourselves, and I wonder how we would operationalize some alternative stipend. ... I've written a lot here, and I am going to look at the document text and see what additional text could be added concisely. Or: maybe some multi-sentence statement could be linked there or, better, perhaps, included in another page on Working Group stipends.

If we want to have stipends for Working Groups, then we have to overcome many people's aversion to talking about money and getting paid, at least for the Americans (who learn this aversion to avoid discussing their economic inequalities). We have to set up Working Group volunteers with the primary understanding that everyone in the group will send an invoice for an equal share of the amount allocated for their official members, and that the Working Group can decide how to allocate their stipend funds, provided that they update the FWG about their decisions. ... and we return to the problem of defining group membership: Each Working Group must have official members for stipends to be paid out.

So, the OC discussed their stipend allocation today, which I posted to Expenses thread. I might say more later about how I set up discussion and how discussion went down. (It is in the meeting notes). It was not straight forward to make the decision. More than one person became upset. People still raised all sorts of problems. Taxes: I don't want to have to report it. The logistics: this won't work for different countries. The inequity: some people really need this money (vs. us privileged white people). The absurdity: this money is nothing compared to .... the salary of my day job, or the amount of time I "spent" on X project, or the heart and soul I put into X project, or the special skills I have, or the grand importance of X project that I completed. In the end, decisions were made. 6 people attended this meeting; everyone spoke 4 times at least, in rounds. Several people seemed unhappy with the results.

I wonder if we need to have a public discussion in the main Loomio forum on stipends for working groups, just so everyone can feel heard.

Also, there are other ways of configuring "payments." Someone may want to advocate for labor time tracking. I want to advocate for gift cards, which are non-taxable.

How I set up discussion today was based on my anticipation that everyone would want to opine, which they did: [This procedure took 20 minutes, at least)

Stipends: Each Working Group has an amount budgeted for stipends, and they decide how to spend it among its own members.  (See Toward an Annual Budget 

https://www.loomio.com/d/xqw7FtUT/comment/3054707 ) 

* 1,000 GBP allocated for stipends per working group 

Proposed: This total amount shared equally among members regardless of time

* 3 Options for a person: ACCEPT, DONATE TO GROUP, DONATE TO SOCIAL.COOP 

* ACCEPT:: An OC member commits to invoice (or not) the amount via Open Collective 

* An OC member decides not to take it, then either offer it for everyone else or donate it back… 

@caitlinwaddick Thank you so much for sharing all this. I'm not surprised to see this controversy, as I have seen it before in Social.coop and elsewhere. I think we need to find a simple solution that covers as many challenges as possible. For instance, my proposal would be:

WG members are entitled to a stipend, which they are expected to claim during the annual Stipend Window, which is between January 1 and November 30. In order to claim a stipend, WG members must post an expense to Social.coop on Open Collective.

Stipend amounts can be calculated by dividing the total WG stipend with the number of active members, according to the minutes of that WG.

Any stipends not claimed will be donated to the co-op's Community Contributions fund.

Regarding the "Submitting Expenses" document specifically, what do you think would be useful to add? I think of this document as actually separate; maybe we should draft a separate wiki page with more explanations on a stipend policy?

@Nathan Schneider That's fine, if we first finish discussing ... 🤓🤪😂

** whether the amount budgeted for stipends is the right amount

** ways to value our contributions with the creative use of money or non-monetary tools.

** ways to use money and other tools to encourage and promote the participation of diverse people (race, class, sex, national origin, etc)

** whether stipends are a good idea, such as the effects of stipends in how people choose to contribute (i.e. Do volunteers who receive a monetary recognition work harder? Does paid work discourage member participation?)

** other ways that we might name the stipend, such as “an honorarium” or “salary” or “gift” etc.

** whether we need to have a pizza party to show recognition for all volunteers, even if they don’t serve working groups

** whether to hire a consultant to help us navigate the issues.

I already made a specific change the submitting expenses document a few days ago; I'm sorry I didn't mention it here. I don't love my additions either.... they are in the first paragraph.

Yes: we do need a separate FAQ on Stipends. ...We already know what people will ask and object to and propose, for the most part. We could also start a thread in the main Loomio and let people ask away to generate the content. ... I am tempted to write it right now, but I recognize that I am procrastinating another task.

@caitlinwaddick Thank you! Since you've had more context of these discussions in the OC, I'm happy to follow your lead. But feel free to work from (or scrap) my draft above!

@Nathan Schneider have we lost the edits made to the draft? Can we begin using something more permanent?

@andrewe Shoot. Yes, Riseup resets under-used docs. Here's the latest draft:
https://pad.riseup.net/p/socialcoop-fwg

But I'm going to just add this to our wiki, marked as a draft:
https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Submitting_an_expense

Want to just edit away there?

Should all expenses be posted as links to opencollective‍.com, if they are all available publicly (without signing in) on opencollective‍.com? Is this helpful or duplicative?