Objective:
To leverage our spare capacity to generate funds for marketing, and to position Meet.coop as a truly commons based initiative which is leading the transition towards a regenerative economy. If you’re not familiar with mutual credit and the concept of ‘spare capacity’, which makes this so perfect for Meet.coop, please check out this post.
Strategy:
Start small, via The Open Credit Network, test if it works, review and iterate. The Open Credit Network (of which I am a co-founder) only offers credit to registered UK business atm, so this offer would not be open to individuals to start with.
How would it work:
I propose to start very small, by offering Meet.coop membership to the existing members of The Open Credit Network, to see if one or two business would like to join Meet.coop and pay in mutual credit via The Open Credit Network. I suggest we take the whole payment in mutual credit to avoid any complications with part payments. We would be able to track our mutual credit balance via The Open Credit Network, and spend any credits we earn with businesses in The Open Credit Network, for example, with Orgs offering social media support, design, blogging and other marketing tasks, or anything else we need.
We could also possibly pay part of our server costs to Web Architects in mutual credit, although Chris would want help to make sure he could spend any credit he earns.
When a new Member signs up and pays in mutual credit we would simply log that they are paying that way in the Members spreadsheet - and I would take responsibility for invoicing them and collecting payment each month via The Open Credit Network.
If this works we could look to roll out the concept in other countries via different mutual credit networks - or, ideally via an international mutual credit network, ala the Credit Commons, Seeds etc…
I’d welcome any thoughts, or feedback - and will aim to present this proposal at the next All Hands (if there is time), or the one in 2 weeks.
I propose to start very small, by offering Meet.coop membership to the existing members of The Open Credit Network, to see if one or two business would like to join Meet.coop and pay in mutual credit via The Open Credit Network.
How many people are we talking about? How much load?
I suggest we take the whole payment in mutual credit to avoid any complications with part payments.
I agree.
spend any credits we earn with businesses in The Open Credit Network, for example, with Orgs offering social media support, design, blogging and other marketing tasks
Do we have candidates? Do we have good orgs for these tasks that accept mutual credit as payment?
We could also possibly pay part of our server costs to Web Architects in mutual credit, although Chris would want help to make sure he could spend any credit he earns.
I think we need to first confirm this and not leave it as a maybe, because there will be real server bills we have to pay in dollars as a result of adding new members.
I would take responsibility for invoicing them and collecting payment each month via The Open Credit Network.
What happens when you cannot do this anymore? How much work is this for another person to take over?
Thanks for thinking about this and the Qs, replies below:
one or 2 to start with - on small accounts i.e. not multi-user
There are plenty within the network - see here for example - I would not plan to go ahead and accept mutual credit payments unless we knew we could spend them.
If for some reason I can not do this anymore we can ask the Orgs that are paying in credits to convert to paying in fiat, and if they don’t want to we can cancel the memberships. We will not have lost anything.
I feel mutual credit / community currency is exactly the type of initiatives Meet.coop can support that many mainstream SaaS platforms cannot. My only concern of internal capacity seems to be addressed with @osb taking lead and having a plan to wrap this up if things don’t work out or we lack capacity to manage in the future. Starting with < 5 accounts seem low risk, and we can use the credit for services, so I am +1 on this!
Great, thanks. @wouter@melissamcnab@elon@3wc@Yurko@dvdjaco@anyone-else!
Do you have any views? Maybe, if you can add your comments here we can decide on this asynchronously without needing to meet!?
PS @3wc I am conscious we did not follow the sociocracy format and have check ins at the beginning of All hands yesterday - and was sorry to see you leave because of this. I think, if we really want these things to happen, we need some training in sociocratic practices and to formally agree a meeting format. Persoanly I don’t feel comfortable trying to run a meeting using sociocracy as I don’t know enough about it, which is why I offered for The Open Co-op to pay for training for Meet.coop members - but there was not a lot of interest so that that never happened… I’m afraid we can’t offer to support this any more as we allocated the funds elsewhere. But please do join us again - and hopefully we can agree to follow better meeting practices!?
Feeling cautious about adding a comment, when I wasn’t present! My experience with Meet.coop so far is that all meetings have been very well held. It is more a matter of the skills of the facilitator and the growing culture of the community. I don’t think the issue is Sociocracy or training in it. For example, having check-ins at the beginning of a meeting is really important to me, to build a sense of personal connection with the others at a meeting. Similarly, having some kind of connection and closure at the end of a meeting. Also, the importance of acknowledging people for their contributions throughout. I could go on indefinitely…
I think I agree with @benhylau and think he’s voiced any concerns that I might have about this.
I think it’s great, that we should definitely start with a small amount and aslong as we have a system in place to agree on when and where this would seem most appropriate, would be fine.
great to seek this kind of connections with mutual credit or complementary currency networks. It seems smart to start small, in the UK where Oli is actively involved in both parts. If it works we could repeat this pattern, of small engagements with similar networks in other localities, and in all cases, evaluate after a certain period. How long of an evaluation period to see how it goes? 6 months?
Regarding the side convo of All Hands format, @3wc@garyalex both expressed importance for check-ins and check-outs, I think we know what to do and just need to stick to it. I am partly guilty to pushing thru agenda items at the expense of procedures, and I’d like to apologize for this.
Having looked into this a bit more, there are definitely some people that would be able to help with various aspects of our marketing, and possibly also business planning and co-op formation etc, who are already Trading Members on The Open Credit Network.
However, in order to generate sufficient credits to be able to engage them any time soon I now realise we would need to sell more than 1 or 2 accounts at Level 1… e.g. we would need to sell 10 @ £9/month to generate £90/month in credits, which will probably only buy us about 2 or 3 hours marketing support / month… which is not a lot, and probably not enough to make much of a difference…
If we could generate ~ £500 worth of credits / month we would be able to afford ~ 16 hours of marketing support a month, which should be just enough to make a difference. But that would require we sell ~ 55 accounts (at Level 1 - or fewer at higher levels), which is a lot more than I was originally proposing. I still think this could be OK, as long as we have enough spare capacity on our servers and these new members don’t mean we hit any limits…
The other option is we start small, as I was originally suggesting and offer 5 or maybe 10 accounts via mutual credit, but we have to wait a while before we can afford any marketing support - i.e. 11 months with 5 accounts or 6 months with 10 accounts…
We could always try to find cheaper marketeers (although that’s not often a great plan!) or spend our first few credits on other things like, a bit of social media support etc
I still think the main decision is whether we are OK with the principle of accepting mutual credit.
But I realize the change in scope makes this a slightly different proposal, so I’ll leave it a few days to allow for more feedback - and then re-clarify the proposal - before kicking off a vote.
I agree with your analysis that ideally we could pay something like 500 GBP in credits per month, but we are not there yet, we also cannot ourselves these sums. Not yet.
So we do need to increase our userbase, and this proposal is in that direction. I’d say let’s take it step by step, don’t aim yet for 55 members on mutual credits, as that would be doubling our current userbase
Is there a way that we can accept such credits from people who we also would like to help us? So it becomes a more reciprocal exchange? And they would possibly value our effort to get into the mc and do something reasonable in exchange? If we get a few dozen credits a month from a few, that we can channel back to one communication/marketing person of that group? I’m all for trying and see where we can get with this.
yeah - we can try that. It’s actually what I have been thinking too… there’s no harm in trying this, starting small as I originally suggested and just seeing where it goes. Let’s vote, on that basis - i.e we start by offering just 5 Level 1 accounts and review if we get that far!
OK - this is looking positive - so I went ahead and made a Meet.coop profile on OCN.
I will start to message other OCN members and see if anyone is interested in signing up
