We started out trying to do a bit of pretty much everything described above. 6, 7, 8 is what has organically taken off, while the other attempts have faded away. That also indicative of what really is in demand amongst the community.
I don’t think as an org with limited bandwidth and capacity, it’s feasible to do all of those things, given that each item can be a large org on its own! We should let them naturally emerge from within the community based on demand and let the community take up the mantle of running them, like how events are running currently.
Would it make sense to explore a micro payments model for bottoms up democratic funding, unrelated to membership ? A meetup happens every month. Let’s say we put up a UPI barcode somewhere during the event. Inform the audience that we’re looking for participatory funding - no strings attached. Run this as an experiment for 6 months.
No artificial bands/limits need to be placed on a fund transfer - we may get as less as less 10 Rs (“darshini chai”) to whatever - and we need to accept each equally. The hard part here would be not doing gamification or anything that would look remotely like “dark patterns” of fundraising (sorry - can’t the get right word here - but I guess you understand what I am saying here).
There will be management overhead of tracking these micro payments, and I’m sure we have folks who know better how to take care of these things via automation - I can think of Nemo in this context already. It would be a fun project to make a box saying “FOSS United” with our own own audio - but that’s a side activity.
Thanks everyone for your inputs. There is an overwhelming consensus that FOSSUnited should be become a member driven organisation and if we move in that direction, we can find ways of getting the right kind of resources in place.
As concrete steps, here is what I am recommending:
Create a membership program with flexible tiers (500, 1000, 5000)
Once we reach, say 100 members, members to elect an annual steering committee 7 members to oversee activities of FOSSUnited including secretary, chair and treasurer.
Operations of steering committee to be 100% transparent and reported to the community via this forum.
Staff to report to the steering committee for events and programs
I have nothing for or against the membership thing, but at this point, we definitely don’t have the capacity to do it. If we need to do it, firstly we have to hire full time employees to manage this, define the structure, member management programs etc.
Secondly, I am not in favour of having this whole open voting system. This will bring in a lot more complexity, the annual election in itself will be a massive months long planned program to organize. How does everyone who are members know who are the people standing for election? I dont find this practical. This will become like any other regional election. Is there any volunteer org running successfully in this model? I’d like to know more.
Voting for the sake of voting is not the right way of doing it. Also, just because someone pay to become a member shouldn’t entitle them with a vote / candidature, either. People can choose to pay for membership for the cause as well.
My views are informed by personal experiences as well as observations gained by witnessing the growth of many associations.
At a personal level, in the last 10-15 years, some of us tried to set up FOSS organizations but found that (A) we did not have enough capital to do so and (B) we were too busy with our professional lives to anchor this org. Therefore, what we have going at FOSS United is rare and precious.
Secondly, what attracted me to FOSS United was the die-hard FOSS credentials of @knadh & @rushabh which gave me the confidence that this organization will do the right thing for the FOSS community and not flip around and do something that is not in keeping with FOSS values.
When it comes to building a FOSS organization, our big concern used to be around building an organization that has solid FOSS credentials and could not be captured/corrupted by the enormous financial power of Microsoft. Over the last few years, Microsoft has also embraced open source. Therefore that threat has receded but many challenges remain.
The biggest challenge in institution building is to grow the institution while maintaining its sense of purpose. As long as the institution is small, this is very easy. As it grows big and successful, this becomes much harder because you will have a number of special interest groups trying to capture it. For example, 40 years ago, my family members started a school that teaches 5000 students every year. As the school grew, many factions emerged and my family members became disillusioned with the direction of the school. I have seen some of the most successful industry associations losing their sense of purpose and becoming the very opposite of what their founders intended.
My view is that having an extremely open architecture leaves us vulnerable to mission capture. We need to carefully think through the design choices we make right now and create an org that (A) Takes the FOSS mission forward and (B) Creates the next generation of FOSS leaders. I don’t have ready answers and solutions, but perhaps a via media between what @rushabh suggests and our current model is to have working groups, identify individuals who contribute to these WGs over a sustained period of time and have values that are aligned to FOSS United and leadership qualities, and gradually promote them to the next level of leadership. We could also take the advice of people like Avinash Raghava of SAASBoomi, Harish Mehta of NASSCOM and others who have vast experience in building organizations.
As I said earlier, what we have in FOSS United is rare and precious. We should grow it with preserving its core values.
Voting is just a mechanism to give voice to diverse opinions in the community and bring out the best ideas. Do you have an alternate model in mind?
This argument has been made against “openness” all the time. You open your doors, you get fresh air and pollution. You open the internet, you open yourself to all kinds of influence. I think you have to assume people are smart and they can decide for themselves what is good or not. And if you don’t “open”, you will never let new leaders self-select themselves.
All I am saying is that we should take calibrated steps when taking an irreversible decision. Right now we have good momentum and a highly motivated team. This is something that any organization would give an arm and a leg for. It is never a good idea to mess with something that is working well. We have revitalized the FOSS community and brought a fresh energy and vitality to the community. Let’s build on it and keep improving upon it.
Why would you think I am aiming for anything else?
So far we have just kick-started some movement, my aim is to make this 10X bigger. The only way we can do this (according to me) is by taking more risks and empowering more people!
We should do definitely try this, but without disrupting what we have going now, letting it organically grow (it might work, it might not work; we don’t know). As the model matures, it should naturally become the defacto model of the org.
That said, we only have two full time people who have their hands full 24x7 with existing community activities and programs. To drive the membership experiment and grow it, we should hire a full time person who can focus just on that. Disrupting them, who are already occupied with tons of stuff will be very detrimental to the org (and their mental well being).
Let us hire a person to run this as an experiment and grow it? @wisharya@mriya11 what’s your view?
Because Point #2 in what you have proposed (copied below) is an irreversible/hard to reverse decision could cut either way:
“Once we reach, say 100 members, members to elect an annual steering committee 7 members to oversee activities of FOSS United including secretary, chair and treasurer.”
We could have a steering committee that is highly motivated, experienced and competent or we could have the opposite, or we could have something in-between.
Directionally, I agree with you on opening up but disagree with you on the speed and methodology. I think a model where we let leadership emerge from working groups (or any other mechanism), and gives us time to assess the commitment, competency and capabilities of individuals is a less risky and more sustainable path to follow.
I can take responsibility of this. What we need is a platform to automatically enroll members. All proposals will be discussed in here the forum and then voting can be done in discuss directly (discuss has features to give tags to members and restrict voting).
We don’t need to actively canvas for members and I don’t anticipate we will need a steering committee for sometime - we might not get 100 members.
I am thinking we should have Rs 1000 per year for professionals and Rs 500 for students (?)
This is a great discussion because we have diversity of opinion - this is exactly how opinions should be expressed and resolved in a “FOSS” community!
If the bandwidth objection is handled, the objection of “speed” is an opinion. My experience tells me that we are ready for the next level. It will take time before members start taking ownership and responsibility of getting things done, but we should start it nonetheless. I am specially inspired by a lot of people who are already contributing in so many ways and I think we should have a mechanism for them to take deeper ownership.
How do you think we should resolve that?
[Edit: The above poll indicates that 80% want a member driven community]
This is something that I am concerned about too. From the feedback that I have gathered from some of the avid contributors of the community, it seems that a membership with payment - providing accountability, can be beneficial or have inverse effects.
I feel the membership should start with the base idea of this, as a means to contributing individually to activities and initiatives of the organisation and the community.
I agree with @knadh’s idea of this being the start of an experiment, and with @rushabh’s idea to take in individual membership contributions and enrolling them. That being said, we could also see how the members take part in the activities and gather context about the working of the organisation during a given period.
The concept of a steering committee and voting shouldn’t be inclusive elements from the beginning but should be thought about at a later phase when there are enough members who are meritorious, who can spend time, interest etc. in making decisions in the functioning of the organisation in a longer scope.
There were 100s of volunteers who contributed to the success of FOSS United over the last few years. If someone in that is not able to afford / do not wish to pay for membership, essentially doesn’t get a voice? There are quite a few people who just talks and does not really do any work on the ground, and they can easily get a vote by paying for membership? I don’t think that is fair.
I don’t have an alternative as of now, but I am just questioning the whole idea of essentially paying to get a vote for selecting governance instead of time and commitment.
There won’t be anything pay-walled ever except the major events, like IndiaFOSS.
I think, If the community members see the membership as a way to donate, they can choose to do so.
As you are leading this project, could you please give us an outline of the next steps in detail, along with a timeline? I’m assuming that we will go live in January 24, since you are thinking about integrating it with the platform,
We can learn from our previous attempt (FOSS United Memberships [Version 1]) and make a new effort in a way that doesn’t negatively impact our current processes - I feel there will be three sets of people who would like to contribute - time, money and mixed of both. We should have all of them. We can identify the members who have contributed time and give them an option to skip paying.
This is a valid point. Perhaps we should establish criteria for who can nominate themselves for the steering committee. Even if people gain the ability to vote by paying, they would still be voting for one of the eligible members. Does this approach sound good? @rushabh@vishnus
If there are no standing objections, we can go ahead. Since this is dependent on the platform - I am not sure how long this will take - the platform itself is not in any shape for a release. Trying to get some folks from Frappe to volunteer for this. My best guess would be end of Jan.
(and remind me to ask for timelines on all your pending tasks as well )
Go ahead with the conceptualisation, membership module on the platform, community calls for membership awareness, membership drives, committee formation, or all (and how)? Like @wisharya said, without a granular breakdown of steps, it’ll be impossible to understand and keep track of what is a critical mega project (tech, people, governance).
This jibe is uncalled for.
A project that defines the future and existence of the org itself should obviously have clear steps and timelines. Without that, there is going to be ambiguity for everyone involved.
The platform development project, for example, the process and trajectory is visible here.
I only want to go ahead if there is full consensus. In my head there are only 2 things:
Creating a payment tracking system
Tracking discussions on this forum.
I had given a tentative end of Jan timeline for this.
Wasn’t a jibe at all - in my 3 years working with Vishal, I did not recall a single “let’s put a timeline” discussion, so this was new for me. Maybe this is new organisation culture - so just calling out that the same kind of accountability should everywhere.
On the whole, I am feeling a strong resistance to these ideas and somehow everything I have to say is taken with bad faith. (to me, this feels unfair). At this point, I will back off from org-level discussions. I happy to help for anything anyone needs.
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