LFGSS Collective

I’m a front-end dev happy to help if I can

Happy to increase my donation to keep the site going and could mod, zero tech skills unfortunately.

I've no relevant web/IT or business skills to offer unfortunately. Despite mainly lurking for the duration, this virtual community has been a big part of my life for the last 15 years. I'm really grateful to Velocio and everyone who has made it the place it is - something humane (warts and all), supportive, intensely informed and informative, sometimes banal but so often hilarious. I think its important to try to enable it to continue to thrive in as near it's current form as possible. I'm also more than happy to increase my donation if that will help though am aware that this is not what the central challenge is likely to be.

I'm also willing to increase my monthly donation, I don't have skills to help unfortunately.

I have some minimal tech skills, but primarily i could commit to increase my monthly donation/ be regular financial contribution/ subscriber and help moderate etc.

This was what I always aimed at, but as people's payment methods expired, etc... well, I just made up the difference and didn't both to do a focused fundraise in recent years.

This part makes me consider the value of adding Patreon as an option. Because (a) they'll do the chasing bit for you if someone's card expires, and (b) it's an easy option to include for people that already subscribe to support various other ventures.

It might not be the most efficient option financially, but its popularity is a strength which could reduce the barrier to entry enough to offset that.

Patreon

I researched a lot of the providers, and Patreon would've worked for us... but, it really only works for a single person.

Open Collective is by far the better option here, it allows multiple people to be on the account and to let different people pay different bills and still be reimbursed and have it done transparently.

There is only a single reason I didn't do Open Collective sooner... you can't migrate subscriptions from PayPal.

But I will cancel all subscriptions, so if this group has their stuff together and are committed to continuing to run LFGSS (and a few of the other sites like Espruino or PignoleFixe)... then start over afresh on OpenCollective whilst you have the goodwill and enthusiasm of people to get the place into a good state, and whilst it has the extreme transparency of showing how it all adds up.

Is there any particular reason why we have to use one payment method exclusively?

Also, happy to chip in with dev work.

It's really messy to mix and match, from a transparency perspective, from an idea of what your balance is... But mostly because when people did this it inevitably mixed with my personal funds which opens it to being income taxable... I.e. the two people who were insistent on not using PayPal, one of which could only donate in dollars.

It's all just a mess, open collective solves all of that. I wish I had moved to them years ago , I hope that I'd this survives that the future organisers / owners do move to open collective

How hard is it to move to the collective now, anyway?

While there's a motivation to save this place, it would be a good time to shift the donation platform perhaps.

How would becoming a paid service rather than a free one with voluntary donations affect the legal situation? I don't just mean for OSA.

Legal issues aside, what about a two-tier approach where it's free but paid subscription gets you things which are currently available after a length of time?