hypothetically yes - but I think we saw pretty clearly that the money doesn’t go there @sauloperez and so perhaps in the interim we need something less ‘perfect’, like overheads?!
a bit of thinking out loud below as trying to wrap my head around implications of this finding quite challenging. Change is hard
My points / questions are:
Theoretical perfection, practical administration, realistic and manageable transition - generally
Where/how will global budget and costs actually be managed, and by who? Will it be legally reportable somewhere? Can we please make this not excessively administratively onerous as it will likely be done by someone unpaid.
we in Aus have quite a few global costs still. @serenity and I are going to try and work out a way to separate and report this in the next week. Until we can bill them to someone else we need to pay them . . and feel nervous about not being able to use overheads on development to do so
In the perfect world everyone gets paid fairly etc. But we are not in that world. Some of our overheads are actually part of creating a working environment that attracts and keeps amazing people (think @danielle@sstead etc), who then continue to be willing to do a lot of unpaid work. How do we account for these costs e.g. space?
Serenity and I’s budget task will also help us reveal actual Aus overheads that we need to try and cover. We will also be continuing conversation with aus team about space for example
Overheads and ‘donations’ - @sauloperez@enricostn I am interested in your thoughts on this, because it is my understanding that you need/want to have some overhead to Coopdev because you need to be investing in that too. Would you see this as going ‘on top of’ or ‘coming out of’ your dev rate? and does that affect how you feel about acceptability of rates in the above table? I am curious as to how much you might do what we in Aus have done of sometimes charging a certain agreed rate for things, but then not actually ‘taking that out’ personally as pay but rather ‘leaving it in’ as contribution to other costs and other things you’re trying to do? How do we feel about ‘instances / places’ doing this? or is there a way to make it more transparent or unnecessary?
Fair, consistent and attractive working conditions for people - including in some cases job security. Using the @maikel as guinea pig example
The rate ‘set’ for this was negotiated based on life circumstances and particular situation (including big contribution from another project) that make me unsure about using it as the ‘peg’ for OFN-Ri devs everywhere
Was developed based on our model of having overheads elsewhere in the system and other non-OFN income to cover related costs etc, including risk . .
There is a risk and commitment in that that we (at this stage OFN Aus) are taking in trying to set up a full-time employee. We need to make sure we can back this up and are going to have income to cover it for the time period in question. If not through overheads then how, and if not possible then OFN Global dev resources are significantly diminished!
Open to talking about how OFN Global can make this commitment to people, but as it’s not a legal entity meeting legal ‘fair work’ requirements anywhere, I’m not sure how that can happen?
******* below this line is just more detail / me thinking aloud - can be ignored
I think that we in Aus are also in a funny position of still having significant inherited process entwining between Aus and Global/commons, and considering how to manage a major transition of how we have managed to ‘keep the lights on’ here. The theoretical perfect separation is quite (a lot) challenging in practice for us. We have costs that are global e.g. Buildkite? Domain names? what about our accounting package - which has pretty intertwined aus and global / commons income and costs? Some more obviously should be eventually separated (like accounting package) . . but given that management of all these systems tends to fall in the volunteer work category, it makes me feel a little overwhelmed. And who are we going to bill ‘global’ costs to anyway? is there a core commons budget and spending? does it now include everything? and who is managing it? does it have a set of accounts? and where / who are they reported to? If every dev invoices different places for different money, keeping track of this in terms of global budget / spending is going to be a nightmare - @lin_d_hop can attest to the pain of trying to reconcile spending across two teams, let alone if everyone is invoicing all over the place.
We are currently wrestling with what to do about space here in Aus because we can’t afford to keep that office on our own, haven’t been successful in finding someone to share it with BUT feel that having a good space to work together has been and IS critical to attracting and retaining the awesome voluntary contributions that we have. I think this relates directly to your point @pau@MyriamBoure about structure costs It is really hard for someone to stay motivated in a long-term voluntary capacity if they are not getting to actually hang out with people they like as they do it - I am assuming this but interested in your thoughts @danielle@sstead@oeoeaio@maikel etc. Given that we (global team) can’t pay at full rate for Danni, Sally, me, Serenity etc - is it reasonable that ‘global team’ would pay for conditions that make them want to stick around? We have always seen this as an aus responsibility, but something we have covered from overheads when work is being done ‘for other instances’. If a big proportion of what people in aus do is ‘for global’ then does infrastructure like space get covered from ‘global’? but then do we need to cover it in multiple places? which gets really expensive? I get that there is no longer a theoretical reason why australia should have this infrastructure when no one else does (although maybe coopdev do?), but . . sally, danni, rob you get my point!!
IMO we haven’t yet nutted out the money situation and how we will logistically run as a single team. We didn’t have enough time, so what @MyriamBoure has (wonderfully and eloquently) written above is a download of where we got to…sort of…but nothing was truly resolved or decided.
And I’m not sure that this thread is the right place to do that work. This is going to take a few heads bumping together and considering all the constraints/realities/desires and doing further work coming up with an implementable (is that word) approach that will work right now.
Would suggest that those heads should be people who look after the money for each instance where people are currently getting their hands dirty in global platform development. So that means AU (@Kirsten / @serenity), UK (@lin_d_hop) , FR (@MyriamBoure ), and Katuma (@sauloperez / @enricostn). Because it is you all that will be required to implement whatever is decided and manage it financially. But would also suggest that you keep this working group as lean as possible, maybe one rep from each instance, to try and get it done quickly.
yep agreed @danielle . . as I now go back to my task of summarising strategy, I think we do this in six month chunks in which we want to ‘guarantee pipe diameter’ agree how much this is for who and put money in the right places. Perhaps it will be different for ocassional vs core devs . . will have more thoughts later no doubt
I think we should set up a time to discuss that through a hangout. Maybe next global hangout? If not too late?
I understand your point @Kirsten but I think all are in the same case as Aus. When I pay a coworking I spend maybe 50% on doing GH thing and working on pipeline and testing and … (which is global) and also doing some local support, contacts, etc. For all of us both are very entangled. BUT I understand the value of the OFN Aus office for the global product dev project so maybe we can decide to include a % as a fixed global cost. So you would cover the rent through 2 sources: the global fixed contribution + some % on top of what the devs who work in it are paid (see below). We need to have a discussion about "what are the fixed cost of the global product dev? And just agree to allocate the money needed from the global bucket.
Being a distributed team also expend our overhead costs obviously, like if we rent offices in all those, etc.
So the rate we agree on should include some % on top of the pure dev rate as suggest above to cover those office/insurance things (10% for instance?). So each time Rob and Maikel work, you charge 67 (or whatever we agree on) and pay them 61 so the difference is your overhead and contribute to pay your office as well. But in France for instance we all live in different cities and don’t have offices. So it’s fair for me that Hugo for instance who pays himself for his coworking invoices the same.
I think the money flow will not be a problem if we had the good tools to follow them, it only has to be done monthly basically. Maybe all certified developpers should have a Toogl account (the toogl fees should be paid globally) so we can really easily track all time spent on global pipeline every month, and the more adapted instance pays for it on his global budget. I’m not sure cobudget is the best use for that in this new setup. Maybe just a spreadsheet would be better : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EjDgQOGMAePgyvWv8gyIPgLPnvieWoWXO0bUzkz4pPA/edit?usp=sharing
Cobudget was an idea when we were crowdfunding features and projects, but now that we put all our money in a same virtual wallet and use it collectivelly in agreed upon product dev spendings, I’m not sure this is the tool we need. Realistically we don’t really use it so I guess it’s not really what we need, at least for now…
About your point 4. we also had discussions about that and disagreed with @sauloperez and @enricostn so yes would be good to talk about that and agree on something. I don’t feel comfortable actually with paying someone and this person don’t taking that money for himself but paying some other local instance costs with it. I don’t think it would be fair for instance if Danni is not paid and if Enrico is paid, and then Enrico gives that money to local Katuma instance contributor, and Enrico has to work on other projects to earn his own money (this is kind of fake example we discussed ;-)). Then it is something else for me if Enrico is paid and he chooses not to take the money and let it in the global wallet (like basically all non-devs are doing so far in theory ;-)). Global money should be used for global product only IMHO. Else instances would be reluctant to put money in the global bucket I’m afraid. Unless we all decide to use global money to support local instances. I know that everyone is free to use his money to do whatever he wants, I also understand that, but if we can’t pay all contributors on the global product dev I think it would be unfair.
having a play with spreadsheet now as I agree putting some real numbers in place will help make sense of this
While trying to get OFN Aus accounts in order I am starting to feel extreme excitement about simplifying all the tracking of who’s money is paying for what as it’s a nightmare at this end!!
re. 4. I suspect it might be the other way around - if people are NOT able to do this then they will hold money back from the global pot? Why can’t people decide if they want to make their ‘donation’ to global or local? So (hypthetically) danni is making her donation globally and enrico is choosing to make his locally. They are both working out for themselves how much money they need to live and how much they earn from OFN or elsewhere. It is my understanding that France has kept money from grants for supporting france instance, which is cool, but we also need a way to work out how to make things work when different groups ‘have the grants’ at different times. Aus and UK have subsidised others for a long time when we were the ones ‘with the money’ supposedly (har har) and I suspect the reality is that the ‘global community’ is now going to have to allow / support that. Don’t want to get too caught up on this as may turn out to be a minor or irrelevant point once everything else is sorted!
No objection about point 4. I’m fine if we all agree on that. I was just not feeling super at ease if we decide to pay only the devs, so make an effort to collectively prioritize the money on devs to make sure they can work for the project and then this money not being use for themselves. I mean if they don’t need that money to work on the global pipeline, then maybe we can spread it more evenly to pay all contributors working on the global pipeline. But if Danni and Sally are ok and don’t feel any tension with that, that’s fine with me. Let’s discuss that in next hangout.
nb. very minor point and I fully acknowledge my ‘language privilege’ in having all ofn comms in my first language ;), but I just went through and changed a bunch of ‘he/him’ to ‘they/them’ so as not to assume male developers. I know from discussions in Aus that this handled differently in other languages and so is tricky to remember, but was just about to send this link to a possible female developer so it stuck out like a sore thumb in this case I’m sure you people don’t mind me pointing out / fixing
I keep getting used as an example throughout this thread but not well understanding the content of the conversation and what the different opinions/viewpoints/options are that we’re talking about.
I’m thinking that I don’t need to understand so long as the rest of you know what you’re talking about and can solve all the problems raised on here. But given the quote above that I might feel tension and not be ok about something…then maybe I do need to understand?
@MyriamBoure@Kirsten, can I ignore this and leave you both to it or should I be asking for clarification?
Sorry @danielle if I wasn’t clear enough, I think it’s good that you understand the point were we mentionned you, just to make sure we are on the same page and avoid future “unfair” feelings. So to keep it simple, accepting to work as a volunteer on global product roadmap, would you feel ok / or not so well, if another global roadmap contributor is paid for his work on the roadmap (a dev most likely) and he doesn’t take that money for himself but finance some other stuff that are needed at instance level (like pay local community builder with it) ? Just to check
I think it would depend. If you got paid, or Kirsten, or the lead devs like Rob or Enrico or Pau, then sure, it would be fine. But maybe I’d feel a little uncomfortable if anyone else was paid. I don’t know. It’s all semantics, right? I donate my time to the OFN gladly, and I give what I can. But if you want to pay for someone to do this work more frequently/constantly then isn’t there an option where you’d want me to do that in a paid capacity? Or for that matter also you, or Kirsten? But then, what do you mean by “Global roadmap contributor?” What is this role? Is it developing? Is it all the different roles we talked about that aren’t just dev? I’m still confused
Couldn’t you say that this is the model that myself, you, Kirsten, even Sally, are using right now? The work we do could/should be paid, however we choose to work for free and allow for the money that would pay for our time to be redirected back into building great things.
I’m sure you people don’t mind me pointing out / fixing 
