So, is this thing still alive?

Thank you :)!

I don't have a strong opinion on offering compensation to CWG, and certainly am more than happy to go with it if it passes a membership vote. Was just wondering if we should prioritize our limited funds to compensate the Tech people instead?

Don't know how much effort goes into to the Tech stuff as opposed to the Community Ops Team, which is why I don't have a strong opinion on this.

Community Ops team is a very good initiative and think it's totally reasonable to have it functioning before accepting new members.

On the other hand I don't feel comfortable telling the CWG not to receive compensation as I appreciate the effort they have put into it, especially since I have not made effort to help you out!

I think it would be a helpful and achievable goal to give community and tech working groups a monthly budget to pay for people who can commit to regular availability. Something like $160/mo would pay for a day's worth of work at $20/hr.

@mattnoyes Say more Matt, on "user engagement/member engagement"? What kinds of activity achieve this kind of thing?

I feel warmly towards the activity but am unsure how it may be conducted in this kind of context . . with an outcome that amounts to more than a scattering of toots.or Loomio-posts in lieu of "a collective discussion", and feels actionable because many people have spoken and concurred. Does it in fact end up with the insight assembled and leadership exercised by the Ctty team? I'm not saying that would be a bad thing, or that I wouldn't trust that . . just seeking a realistic sense of what is practicable.

Hi @mikeh8 Two specific things we can do to get started: @manuelabosch has offered to facilitate sharing circle conversations, with the goal of building relationships; I would like to set up a member-to-member network to organize a "listening campaign" with social.coop members. Proceeding "at the speed of trust."

Sorry to be late to this conversation; a few thoughts:
- Current Scale: I actually find our current seemingly fairly consistent baseline of active users quite encouraging. More than 150 folks seem to actively be treating social.coop as their Fediverse "home base," which feels to me to be a solid foundation to build on.
- Order of Operations: Given that our recent crisis came at a period of explosive membership growth, I'm still firmly feeling that we need to get our house in order before re-opening the gates to new members. I think we're getting close with the CWG Ops Team formation, and once that group is constituted, a priority will be getting things lined up to re-open and start building revenue. However, I think we should strategically treat this first 6 month period (the term of the initial CWG) as a chance to focus more on internal development than external growth, laying the groundwork for a more resource-intensive scaling at the conclusion of that period.

In all, I feel like some key things are coming together, we're rebuilding momentum, and finally formalizing some key role, so I'm cautiously optimistic right now... :)

"Given that our recent crisis came at a period of explosive membership growth, I'm still firmly feeling that we need to get our house in order before re-opening the gates to new members."

Very good point.

Glad to have this assessment @matthewcropp - you're closer to the operational reality. It's SO hard to know what in fact happens (and what in fact can be 'solidly' done?) in a virtual space like SC?

While I like social.coop, I don't think it provides enuf value to support a full-time devops person. Alternatives:
* figure out how much of a part-time worker could be supported and what would be the effects on the instance;
* move to a hosting service that can be supported by the current level of contributions;
* provide more value to cooperatives, possibly by adding more features. In other words, offer more than social networking.

Bob, do you think we need a full time dev-ops person? Upgrades and migrations are time intensive but rare. If we have several tech people on call who all have the necessary documentation and credentials, we should be able to handle outages and routine maintenance issues as they arise. It probably makes sense to have at least one (extremely) part-time paid coordinator to wrangle the volunteers, but that seems like a sustainable model to me.

@edwardlplatt @bobhaugen This is important. Please keep this exchange going until it's wrangled to a standstill :-) @wulee too. Don't feel able to judge, myself.

@leosammallahti

Don't know how much effort goes into to the Tech stuff as opposed to the Community Ops Team

I would say, if each team is equally capable in their own kind of activity, each team is worth the same as the other (called 'Walking on two legs'), and an equal split of funds is equitable, at least until it's clearer what a 'normal' workload is like. However, I do not know how to judge the capabilities of the two kinds of team. Does anyone feel that they do ? Is this evaluation (taciltly) part of the work of the Community Ops team (which in the nature of things, conducts more public discussion than the tech team?)? For sure, this judgement needs to live somewhere, and is a hard one to make. @wulee volunteering to be 'at large' in ctty subgroup is relevant to this oversight and evaluation?