Different business models for social coop blog/blog platform cooperative. 4 simple examples.

Thank you, Leo. Not sure how the podcast might fit in or if any money would be needed. I'd welcome your and anyone else's thoughts about topics, approaches and potential other hosts. And US credit union questions are unlimited and free! :)

I'm leaning more towards Model 1. Model 2 (voluntary pay walls) don't work well unless there is a large amount of branded content behind them. I agree with Michele that this could start as an initiative under Social Coop if there was enough support and bodies willing to manage it as there is a benefit to put out general musing and learnings about the platform-coop journey especially that highlights Social Coop.

That being said it seems like financial support for this or any other initiative should spring out of a deep conversation around having a working budget in order with projections of costs. I don't see the $4000 in OC account as an accurate reflection of available reserves as there hasn't really been an accounting of what the "true" costs of running and scaling the cooperative is including some pretty major hidden costs like admin.

Leo - thank you for moving the conversation forward. I do have a question that may inform how I vote: what is the purpose of the blog? Is it to grow the social.coop membership and gain new members? Or something else/in addition to this? As a fairly new member I'd like to make sure my vote reflects the goals and objectives of the folks who envisioned this resource. Thanks!

I see two main purposes.

Enhance discussion inside social coop
* Enable categorization of existing toots. Member visiting once a month might want to hear all the ideas for future platform cooperatives that have been tooted. Having some basic categories of toots that would be archived might allow people to find the toots they find most interesting without going through the whole feed.
* Enable posts that are longer than 500 letters, but that are not within the scope of the Loomio group.
* Have a host user that everyone follows as a default option when they register, and have that user toot every blog article written to the blog. This way new and less active members who follow and are followed by less other members has to the general discussion easier.
* Include book reviews from the Reading Group?

** Outreach to wider discussion **

• Perhaps we could have a Twitter account for social coop that only follows members, and only if the members want to, that would tweet all our blog articles. I would be happy to maintain that account by tweeting and following manually, don't know if making it into a bot would be easy.
• Perhaps a blog post about how to turn your Mastodon instant to a cooperative that is then shared to other Instants?

Would like to hear your thoughts about the podcast idea you had. Some questions regarding it:

• How much focus would there be locally and globally?
• Would it be more to people involved in cooperatives and credit unions to get professional knowledge, or for people who don't know much but are interested to be drawn in?

These questions present choices that are not mutually exclusive ofc :).

I read a thread which touched on some ideas around a vision for what social.coop should achieve. I don't know if we've had other discussions which have explored these ideas further, or if we've decided on and written down a vision statement, but I think effort we expend should be in service of such a vision, and it might be useful to frame the purpose of the blog in terms of how it contributes to that vision.

Hey Leo - in answer to your questions ... when it comes to the specific podcast segment I envision here in the two Carolinas:

1. The overall goal is to educate folks in North & South Carolina about cooperatives they may want to do business with. Thus, it would probably be all-inclusive: local, US and global.

2. It could be both but the primary goal is for raising awareness and personal knowledge of co-ops among credit union/cooperative people.

The format is planned to be 5-8 minutes and may or may not include interviews and field visits.

As all this (possibly) relates to social.coop:

1. Some of the content above may be relevant to our community, and I'd be happy to make it available if it might be.
2. We have a community of people here with a wide variety of cooperative engagement, interests and skills. Is there an opportunity for us to do something larger at some point? There does not seem to be much compelling cooperative content out there in the podcast space.

In general, I am for integrating and connecting existing resources and platforms -- rather than (or maybe in addition to) starting another vehicle. Instead of creating a new coop blog, why not find ways to aggregate and contribute to existing blogs (coop water cooler, GEO, others I don't yet know)?

Good point, although I like the idea of having an account all members follow when they register, that toots articles written to a blog.

Perhaps Social Coop Wiki could play that role, by allowing people who have written a Wiki article can have their article tooted by the account?

I should have added that as an option to poll, perhaps we can later have another poll about these two point of views.

Here's also what I tooted about engaging in other platforms:

"Have a group of tech, business, legal and academic people interested in platform coops start a blog in Quora and answer questions about start-up models, solutions to the problems of big tech, etc.

No idea how Quora blogs work, seem to allow combining different users answers together. We could combine all our answers about coops in a systematic and categorized Q&A.

Happy to donate 50 $ to this.

I alone know 5 members who've written to Quora, I'm sure there's lot more."

Also, ioo.coop/blog.

Advertising is a horrible model for funding creative content—it's almost always the case that the interests of the advertisers and the interests of the creators are at odds with each other. Donations are a much more humane way to pay creators, either Patreon-style monthly contributions ore by distributing donations received collectively.