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?

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

Needs a named individual to go set it all up (not me), cannot migrate existing subscriptions from PayPal, at the moment PayPal has about £300 in it and so doesn't have an excess beyond March.

The group deciding on whether they want to form a collective should make that decision first, ideally by end of January with named people in place... and then, then the Open Collective should be set up by end of February (with all the KYC checks done, etc, and a named secretary / treasurer or two), and then fund raise prior to the switchover date so that you can collectively pay the bills the month later.

It makes no sense for me to try and do this for you all, because I don't know that you're actually going to go forward with running the forum, I don't know that you'll agree on who takes the risk and the form of how you're doing it, and I don't know who the treasurer / secretary is who should be on the account... and as I say, I do not want my name on it after the 16th March. It is also making a false promise, to start new fundraising when there's no clear path beyond the 17th March today.

But finally, the simple reason I never set up an open collective: I already subsidise costs most months (except for the months that a big donation or two close the gap), changing things will temporarily result in an even lower total amount of donations, meaning the amount I would subsidise in Feb and March would be even higher... why would I volunteer for that?

The cleanest way forward:

• The lawyers on here do their reading of the OSA guidance and the risks we face, and share that with this group (though, in more secret / hidden forum).
  
• The group here decides if they're actually going to form a CIC or company to run it, and who is doing which roles.
  
• Then... and only then, when you have a clear path forward... create the Open Collective and use the community-wide euphoric feeling of having dodged a bullet to do a donation drive to firmly get the forum to a healthy bank balance of 6-12 months money in the bank, rather than limping month to month like we do.
  
  

It's easy to do... but do it when you know that you're going to go forward, otherwise it's a lot of false promises, and you may be in the messy position of having to return money and not knowing how to (if we still shut down).

Bear in mind that the good will of a few people saying "I'll put my name to being a Director" isn't enough.

If the legal folk here conclude the same as I did, that we'd be in the zone of having to implement age verification, scanning of file attachments, scanning of DMs, new reporting tools, etc... then you need to also identify engineers who can give time to building these things, as well as additional costs to pay for third party services to do these things... hence the decision to set things up and move forward is linked to how realistic it is that we could comply with whatever recommendations arise from the Ofcom risk assessment, or to have a reasonable story why we don't have to.

• Actually setting up an Open Collective = not hard.
  
• Doing a donation drive = not hard.
  
• Paying bills, you need someone to pay the bills, someone willing to have a £1k slush fund in a Wise account... and that person would be reimbursed when they file receipts = moderately hard as it's a PITA chore and someone needs enough spare cash to cover the bills and be willing for their name to be public.
  
  

Open Collective is not a bank account, and is best used as a fund raising and transparency platform, that collects the money (the hard part) and then reimburses the money.

None of this is hard... the hardest bit is identifying who is going to handle paying the bills and filing the invoices and being reimbursed.

But you can't reasonably do this stuff before you know you're going to run the site after 16th March.

good will of a few people saying "I'll put my name to being a Director" isn't enough.

to me, this is the essence of the issue.

having a number of people with a moderate degree of motivation to help out is not the same as having one or two people with a really big degree of motivation to actually make the whole thing happen.

whilst the collective efforts of people here are heartening, it's hard to see where the person with the big enough motivation to take on the wherewithal of the whole gig is going to come from.

not wanting to be pessimistic and far less to minimise everyone's efforts and intentions, it's just how i see it.

I absolutely agree with this.

LFGSS needs a few leaders who are tirelessly motivated in addition to accepting the risks identified and working through it.

I know I cannot, I have no time or energy to beyond the little I was doing... but this is what is needed.

A group of 10 Directors isn't really functional... ultimately 1 or 2 will run everything... but Directors alone can't actually run anything, you need someone to do sysadmin things, and I believe (hope to be proven wrong) that you also need programmers to get the systems compliant with whatever is identified.

Then of course fundraising... and everything spoken about adds to the amount you have to fundraise. Want a CIC? Fees, post office box, annual accounts via accountant... all which cost. Want transparent fundraising? Platform fees, payment provider fees... you receive about 10-20% less of the donation, you need to raise more. Want insurance against some of the risks? No idea what that will cost.

The costs we had were incredibly low, given that this site is massive and every page is a dynamically generated page for the signed-in users (cached for the guests). LFGSS makes up 80% of the usage of the Microcosm platform, then comes PignoleFixe with less than 15% usage, Espruino with 3%, Islington with < 2%... and all of the other sites, on the instances I run, account for less than 1% of usage. Costs follow "active users", a site where no-one is active costs nothing at all (just a row in the database)... so LFGSS carries everyone, and either it works for LFGSS, or it works for no-one.

This all sounds negative, it's not... just reality. It can be done, but needs a strong leadership to do it.