Toward an annual budget

Thank you for pushing forward a budget. The co-op adheres to the International Cooperative Alliance "Cooperative identity, values & principles." Should we be budgeting in a paid membership to the Alliance (or do we already)? It would be nice to reciprocate more formally to groups from which we pull our foundational character.

@Eric Leland That's a great idea. We can discuss specific contributions and memberships once this basic framework is in place. But another dimension is that we might have an ICA membership through our fiscal host.

Looks like a good starting point.

Can someone clarify why there is an itemized list of software under the OpenCollective item? I don't understand what that item is saying.

@Dynamic Those are just examples of potential projects. But we'll sort out the specifics once the basic budget framework is in place.

@Nathan Schneider

Are we only giving money to OpenCollective in order to fund specific projects, or are we giving money to them as general infrastructure which might help support specific projects?

I have trouble keeping track of our various affiliations, and I don't know what specific work OpenCollective does or how their funding model works.

Let me echo the excellent point of Johannes Ernst · @J12t · 13 hours ago

“I would like to see the people who do ongoing work (whether that's tech or moderation or whatever is a non-one-time-activity) to get paid in a way…”

I’m delighted to see we have a healthy buffer in resources and stewardship of that for long term sustainability is important but also conscious of how huge the amount of work of some of our key members are doing and suspect they have been somewhat over modest in their request for compensation. I would thus also like us to consider rewarding their time and contributions more (but have no strong feelings on specific amounts).

Apologies for arriving late into this discussion. With my fiscal host hat on, and as has been previously discussed we'd like to begin to be compensated for the time involved in dealing with the book-keeping and managing expense claims, etc.

I'm aware that others here have suggested that there needs to be a distinct proposal on this - perhaps around agreeing the principle of making a contribution to the service provided by the fiscal host (which we've up to now provided at zero cost to social.coop), and I'm fine with that (but not had time to kick that off due to other pressures recently, including being unwell for several weeks over the Christmas period), but at the same time I'm keen to get something into this discussion on this issue.

It's hard to pin down what might make sense for all concerned, but from our side, looking at the time it takes each month, and the nature of the work involved, I think that a monthly fee of around £50 would be a reasonable start.

@Graham Thank you for this reminder. I think that is very reasonable. Typically fiscal sponsor fees are arranged as a percentage of turnover. You can actually set a percentage for transaction fees in Open Collective. Would it make sense to just do that?

At the current rate, a 5% fee would be just over 50 GBP/month. How does that sound?

@Nathan Schneider @Graham There is required time and expenses that perhaps scale with our contributions and there is also a fixed set of time each month, so perhaps we stick with 2% of fees (the current agreement) and add an additional £50 each month? We may also need to account for additional transfers to P6 to cover chargebacks and disputes (Stripe)?

@Nathan Schneider I'm torn on this. On one side, setting a 5% fee sort of automates the process and scales up or down in line with the amounts of money being handled. On the downside, with our current system of book-keeping, it radically ramps up the number of transactions that we are dealing with, and the consequent book-keeping workload, so is somewhat counter productive. I think what I'd like to do is - for the time being - agree a flat fee and simply put in a claim for that just like any other expense claim, whilst at the same time I can work with colleagues at this end to see what we could do to change how we handle book-keeping for Open Collective stuff that might address this issue. We've learned a lot and are continuing to do, so this would act as a useful spark to encourage some fresh thinking about how we might approach this.