So far we are having Operational members and User members, right? Well, and: inactive operational members. In fact the latter is a growing class, with a rather ugly name. Instead we should create a “collaborating member” class, for members who want to contribute to our mission not as User members and nor as fully committed Operational members. Our relation with Platoniq for example would in that sense perfectly fit the Collaborating member class. And if we consider the requirement for ops members to participate in at least 50% of All Hands meetings, then that makes for quite a few inactive ops members. Even though “inactive” min this sense means to not get to the level of full ops members, these members still make meaningful contributions to meet.coop. Possibly a collaborating membership might make most sense for them?
Then there are parties who have agreed to contribute to meet.coop by participating in the Board of Stewards. Many of them are User members or Ops members, but not all. We could (or: should) give them the option to get a free account - and leave it to their choice whether they also want to contribute monetarily. In some of these case we could go a step further and strike a deal to make them Collaborating members.
For example, Sophie Bloemen from Commons Network (https://www.commonsnetwork.org/) is joining the Board. At the same time they are hosting public events about the commons economy. She’s interested in using meet.coop and convince her peers of the importance of that. We could ask them to write about meet.coop and help get meet.coop more known in their circles. As part of that collaboration agreement.