Loomio
Mon 5 Oct 2020 2:32AM

Initial Proposal on Social.Coop and Meet.Coop

MN Matt Noyes Public Seen by 95

Based on our discussion with @Oli SB and @Graham of Meet.Coop and the two strategy summits last month. I propose that Social.Coop join Meet.Coop as a multi-user member, for a trial period of 3 months, at a cost of 90GBP per month.

Social.Coop members who contribute the equivalent of 3GBP/mo. or more to Social.Coop will be able to use Meet.Coop's Big Blue Button video meeting service (subject to reasonable bandwidth/resource controls).

Social.Coop empowers the Community Working Group Operations Team to create a circle of members to implement this new service in collaboration with Meet.Coop.

At the end of the three months, the circle will facilitate a retrospective and make a proposal to continue (or discontinue) the service.

Note: we also discussed other roles that Social.Coop might offer to play in Meet.Coop, but I would like to focus on this issue first.

As proposer, I would like to follow the integrative consent process we have used before. So this first round of discussion is for questions and answers about the proposal. I will then integrate the comments and make a formal proposal. - Matt Noyes

Notes from the SC and MC meeting are here: https://cloud.owncube.com/s/GBPZYYDssykKJtn

DC

Derek Caelin Thu 15 Oct 2020 4:30PM

Full support for this motion.

MN

Matt Noyes Fri 16 Oct 2020 3:56PM

@Nathan Schneider So the proposal is that we join Meet.Coop and offer BBB to all Social.Coop members (people who contribute 12GBP or more/year)?

NS

Nathan Schneider Sun 18 Oct 2020 4:01AM

How many people are not contributing financially at all? Would it be such a danger to just include all members?

MN

Matt Noyes Sun 18 Oct 2020 4:07PM

That's not easy to know. We have 1,280 users on the Mastodon instance (average 140ish active users per week). 327 people and 9 organizations have contributed (ever). Many people (like me) make a recurring donation instead of using the member fee. And, we have 252 members on Loomio, some of whom may not be on Mastodon. It seems safe to assume that many users of a Social.Coop-Meet.Coop BBB service would not be active on the instance or in Loomio or contributing on Open Collective.

NS

Nathan Schneider Mon 19 Oct 2020 4:06PM

Wow, that's a big issue.

I know early on I registered the @internetowners and @platformcoop accounts without paying for them, just because I figured they were mission-aligned. But I wonder how much those users are duplicates of paying members as opposed to non-paying members.

I see three options in order of preference:

  • Seriously cull the membership rolls (which seems to be underway already) to make sure anyone who is not paying is doing it for need-based reasons

  • Simply require that even a small payment is required for all members, perhaps after a brief trial period

  • Implement your proposal of only granting access to dues-paying members

We just need to be aware that if we opt for the third option, we are establishing a tiered status structure in the co-op that can be a precedent for further entrenching a difference between paying and non-paying members. In that case, paying and non-paying members could begin drifting away from each other in terms of their experience as members, which could have troubling consequences down the road.

MN

Matt Noyes Mon 19 Oct 2020 6:11PM

Right, I think this goes back to the original conception of Social.Coop as more of a common pool resource than a cooperative, to borrow an idea from @mike_hales, with paying and non-paying users. We have come to operate more as a cooperative and may want to do more than run a Mastodon instance so maybe we need to adopt a clearer membership model that is more clearly sustainable.