WeCo received a grant and wants to use it to fund Social Coop - 7 ideas how to do that.
WeCo is a platform coop for discussion and link sharing similar to Reddit, with distinct tools such as polling and more sophisticated categorization. On Reddit r/geology and r/science are separate subreddits. On WeCo b/geology is a childbranch of b/science.
We'll be legally a cooperative soon, allowing equal co-ownership of the platform to all users, while keeping registering as an user free.
About WeCo:
How the democratic decision making works in WeCo and future feature proposals for more sophisticated polling tools and comment rating mechanisms.
Discord and/or Slack Group. Everyones welcome to join.
We got a 680£ grant from UnFound to to recruit users. Instead of buying ads from the neofeodalist landlords, we want to fund projects that share our goals and can help WeCo grow.
Social Coop is most ideal such project. WeCo has a branch for Social Coop, which has two childbranches: one for the Reading Group, and another for coop ideas, where I have collected links to toots about ideas for new cooperative. I also linked a 50+ toots long thread about the Platform Cooperative Consortium Toolkit from June, and hope to make the b/socialcoop into an archive members can use to find old, coop related toots from our instance.
Mini-tasks
WeCo will donate 1$ to Social Coop each time you (a social coop member) do one of the following:
Post your first comment on b/co-ops, a branch in WeCo for sharing and discussing links about cooperatives.
Follow a WeCo Mastodon account that would toot all links shared in b/co-ops (account doesn't exist yet).
Add a link to WeCo and Resonate in your Mastodon profile bio chart (example).
Post at least one comment on b/co-ops a week (1$/every 2 weeks).
Working Groups activities
These are activities Working Groups can organize where membership participation will result in funding from WeCo.
Community Working Group
Have a poll on best idea for a new platform cooperative tooted(example of such a poll).
Reading Group
Set up a Q&A session on WeCo with an author of a Reading Group book or an article posted on b/co-ops.
WeCo will donate 1$ per SC member who makes at least one comment in the Q&A thread.Have a webcam interview with an author and choose questions and comments from WeCo.
WeCo will donate 1$ per SC member posting questions or comments in WeCo for the interview.
If you wanna start doing this right away, remember to mention in the comment that you are a SC member :).
I'm open to adjustment or new ideas. These are concrete but also potentially narrow ideas. Would be also happy to just give 50 $/month donation to social coop if there's a dozen of social coop people sharing links and comments about cooperatives in WeCo regularly.
Let me know your thoughts, especially if something I explain is unclear. I tried to keep it as brief as possible.
Leo Sammallahti · Thu 25 Oct 2018 9:59AM
If 20 members of Social Coop (10% of membership fee paying members) would do all these activities, and there would be an author Q&A and a platform cooperative idea poll every month, the group of 20 actives would earn Social Coop 140$ in their first month, and 80$ every month after that. This would mean 1020$ a year. The overall maintenance expenses Social Coop has had throughout it's existence add up to 884$, so this might turn out to be a rather nice way for non-tech users to fundraise to compensate for the Tech Team.
If Reading Group would want to do fundraising to donate for authors who give out their books for free, it could start a Loomio check poll to nudge members to participate in a WeCo Q&A.
Other ways that Social Coop could support WeCo that wouldn't involve compensation:
* CoopNews mastodon account could retoot WeCo account when CoopNews articles are linked to WeCo and the account toots them.
* Internet Of Ownership mastodon account (@internetowners could toot every time a new project is added to the directory of platform coops (I can write the toots and include a link to their Platform6, CoopExchange, etc. profiles if they have one). WeCo has a monthly poll about the most brilliant project added to the IoO directory, which [@nadiab1] posted on Social Coop. InternetOfOwners account in Social Coop could toot or retoot link to those WeCo polls.
* Link to WeCo branch for cooperatives, platform cooperatives or social coop could be included in the about page of social coop.
* Social Coop wiki could add a link to crowdsourced software recommendation sites for people to upvote platform cooperative alternatives (recommending Resonate in the list of alternatives to Spotify, WeCo as an alternative to Reddit, etc.).
I want to declare openly and from early on that I wish later to come up with ideas on how Social Coop could use the funding it receives from WeCo in a way that would mutually help both cooperatives. However, I do not wish to have any more control over the funding WeCo provides to Social Coop than any other member.