Simon seems to be a good person to know @MyriamBoure!!
On a related matter I have been broadly following discussion around formation of the Collaborative Technology Alliance on Hylo and there is much here I think we could learn from.
So this is an “alliance” of distributed orgs and individuals across the world committed to work together and achieve common goals. See in particular the
CTA seal document and this great document by Greg Cassel re agreement based organisations
I would like to work with you on task: “structure and process for accepting new members”. I think something akin to the seal document would work well - with individuals and orgs publicly signing up to the document. It would list out the values and responsibilities of “members/partners/signatories” in different categories. I think we should have a process where existing members formally accept a proposal by new orgs wanting to become member/partners by signing the document…
Re your point 1) - I think this sort of approach would work in principle for the global network. “They say that the General Assembly is permanent and that any question can be raised by anyone and be decided upon following the rules”. I think using discourse for general discussion and agreeing on proposals is a good idea THEN using loomio for formal decision making based on the solid/well thought out proposals developed in discourse. So in this discourse discussion thread we might be working towards something that ends up as a proposal that we formally take to the community using loomio? Maybe we could talk about this at next HO and see how people feel about trialling Loomio to make some of these big constituting decisions?
Re your point 2) I like the idea of an “expected contribution” but that this isn’t compulsory. This is how enspiral works. I think we should be clear when we are talking about fundraising of specific members (eg regional orgs) and fundraising specifically for global core (i.e separate). It would be good to maybe do a trial using Patreon - I went and had a look at it the other day and seems worth a try. I was reading about someone using this WITH Co-budget software (co-budget doesn’t yet directly handle payments/contributions; once payments were collected by Patreon, they used co-budget to decide among contributors how it would be spent).
I am excited about co-budget - the problem is it doesn’t seem to be very developed (only in closed beta and lots of dev before its ready for open beta trial). I have emailed Alanna Krause at Enspiral to see where its up to and whether its worth our while trialling the closed beta version. The thing I like about co-budget is that the group agrees on the core/admin amount to come out, then anyone from network can propose “buckets” (projects) that all contributors can allocate the remainder of their voluntary contribution to. I think it sounds like a good potential tool to manage process to “crowdfund” features, among other things.
Re your point 3: Re “commercial actors”: I think we want to encourage values aligned individuals making a living off OFN commons. Maybe we can deal with them similarly to “OFN partners”. It might be a separate category on the agreement document that they publically sign up to. So we have a category for “partner orgs” (for regions) and then for “other service providers” or something like that as another category. This could also be for developers providing services (ie like our team). There might be a process where the community agrees to “endorse” / “agree” that they can become official OFN service providers and publicly sign the pledge document. Part of the agreement/pledge is that they adhere to values / decision-making process/rules and that they make a voluntary contribution of some proportion of revenue to the core. We are already modelling this in aussie dev team.
As discussed here it was Michel Bauwens suggestion that we then also change the licence so that we restrict commercial use of code to people who are members/part of community (other commercial users would need to pay a fee). I’m not sure this is necessary - it might be something to work towards in later phase.
This is a very long post!!! Maybe we should raise these issues broadly at the next HO and then maybe set up a sub-group / separate HO to discuss in more detail and come up with some draft options for the broader group?
I don’t have that much time, but coming to a resolution re both decision making rules and process for $ contributions / crowdfunding projects within the community is a priority!
Thanks again Myriam!!