So, is this thing still alive?

Yes. I think the quality of toots after the storm has been better than before it.

Our Tech ops team is working and our Community Working Group Ops Team is getting formed now, so the Loomio side of Social.Coop should start picking up. The Reading Group now includes a "Social.Coop Happy Hour" -- a Zoom chat that is recorded and posted on Geo.coop. The next one is Dec. 19th, with George Cheney, author of Values at Work (about the Mondragon cooperatives). When we get the CWG ops team running we can re-open sign-ups. Leo has been proposing interesting ways to collaborate with WeCo and there may be other such opportunities.

@mattnoyes do you see the Happy Hours as the space for the community to connect with each othe beyond social.coop and loomio? @all I still see there is a need to come together as community in a call and share deeper what moves us to really connect. I am willing to host a space like this, but I am unsure if I am the only one who senses this need.

Thanks for the summary. I have been impressed with the tech group picking up the ball and running with it. And good to see the co-op side picking up now too.

I was wondering what had happened, as my Loomio mail had faded to a trickle.

I think we've all noticed how quiet it is, both on Mastodon, but especially on Loomio. My impression is that everyone's a bit relieved not to have so many decisions to participate in! But also a lot of people have dropped out entirely, which maybe isn't so good.

Thanks for the tech group praise! We did make an extra effort to keep things from going off the rails. There is however still a lot of work to be done and we would appreciate it if more people could help out. Otherwise I feel it's definitely not going to be sustainable in the medium to long term with the people we have.

Each person taking responsibility for just one regular task, perhaps just a few hours a month, would mean one less task for the core group to manage. (We in the core also need to make inroads on documenting these tasks and making them self-contained enough that they can be done without encyclopedic knowledge and root access everywhere.)

Anyone who can help with a few hours here and there doing tech, please ping me off-list. There's also wish list here for those who have git.coop access. (Likewise the other working groups need help - moderating etc., perhaps we can make a wish-list for those too?)

If we can't muster enough volunteer work we will probably end up in a situation like before, where we get behind with maintenance and a perfect storm brews when some other crisis emerges.

Probably what we need to aim for is enough income from users to pay for dedicated non-volunteers, but we're some way from that...

@wulee

tech group . . definitely not going to be sustainable in the medium to long term with the people we have . . get behind with maintenance and a perfect storm brews when some other crisis emerges?

Thanks for this alert Nick. I'm not able to contribute tech work but here's wishing success in growing the tech team.

we need to aim for . . enough income from users to pay for dedicated non-volunteers

@mattnoyes tooted yesterday: 1,218 people on social.coop, 223 paying members. We're SMALL! Must be realistic!

Well, yes, I am trying to be realistic. Isn't the aim of Social.coop to be a self-supporting coop, rather than a volunteer run club? If so and we're not on track for that, we need to recalibrate.

Currently, ~200 contributors -> ~$4.8k/year, which is about $2/month each.

I estimate we'd need 2-4 times that to actually make it approach a viable livelihood for someone to spend the time it takes to keep things maintained, yet alone moderated.

And we have a lot fewer active users (~100, being generous) than paying members. This is a bit worrying, as it suggests the contributions may drop.

What do other people think, does that estimate seem fair?

And what was the vision at the start for how to achieve coop sustainability, can @matthewcropp, @ntnsndr or anyone else around then comment?

@wulee You raise the key points:
what is our aim (coop or club)?
need to recalibrate
need to increase our income
need to build user engagement
It seems to me right now we are rebuilding our capacity to organize that discussion. First, the tech ops, then the Community ops. Then work on member engagement so we can build a collective discussion on aims, roles, and resources.

Think we should try to actively recruit new members and do fundraising by helping out platform cooperatives (example how).

I hugely appreciate the work of Membership Working Group and personally like everyone involved, but I have to say that the plans to stop accepting new members and using substantial share of our funds to fund Community Working Groups Ops team are something I'm bit skeptical about.

I think we should try to actively recruit new members and prioritize use of funds to compensate the Tech Team instead.

Hope I'm not getting off topic and really hope the people working in Community Working Group don't take this as devaluation of their effort.

I think we should open to new members as soon as we have the Community Ops team functioning -- since it is their job to handle moderation and new memberships. I love the fundraising approach you have offered -- another thing we can better deal with once we have a functioning CWG again. For now, why not move ahead with the (minimal) compensation for CWG ops work? We will revisit it in 6mos.