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prospectacle writes:
"An important choice remains for this site. What kind of organisation will we be, practically, legally and financially?
A for-profit, shareholder corporation seems out of the question, by general consensus (correct me if I'm wrong), but other questions remain. The basic choice is this:
Will we be like a charity, a co-op, or a recreational club?
- (Like a) Charity:
Being like a charity means operating for the public benefit. What we produce is news and englightened commentary for the benefit of the world. All our finances and operations would be geared towards this aim. All excess revenue is reinvested into the site. - Co-op:
A co-op is for the mutual financial benefit of individual (possibly paid) members. Three main sub-options for this exist that might be appropriate for this site:
2a) A retailer's co-op. Members use a common organisation in order to make individual profits. For example if members used this site to display their stunning intelligence, and then put their resume or website links on their profile page so people could hire them. Maybe there are services built into the site to find someone to hire who fits your requirements.
2b) A worker's co-operative: Employees share any excess revenue. Some revenue would go to expenses, some would be reinvested, whatever remains is shared among employees.
2c) A buyer's co-op. We exist to get discounts, or to buy together what we can't afford separately. Maybe we're buying well-written news and analysis from professional authors. Or maybe we're bulk-buying electronics, etc, so the price-per individual can be lower. - A Recreational Club:
This takes membership fees to provide access to equipment, organize competitions, etc. Maybe paid members would get to use extra services, like an email account, or storage space, or their own discussion thread area, or software project hosting, or chat-rooms, etc. Non-members could still be permitted, with fewer privileges, and would have to pay-per-use for the extra services (or pay to become a member).
This is a gross simplification, but gives some idea of the options involved. Feel free to offer alternatives. So what should we be, what is our purpose, really? And what kind of a structure is required to make sure we serve that purpose, and that money doesn't end up in the wrong pockets?
Bonus question: which jurisdiction should we set ourselves up in to fulfil our mission most effectively?"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by robp on Wednesday March 12 2014, @09:22AM
(My unorganized, sleepless two cents.)
I agree with this call for a non-profit without mandatory paid for services. Ideally, there would be reasonable projections of continued cost over time available, and most of the funds would go into paying for servers and operational support. I think some sort of compensation for editors would be nice, but realistically, how many editors do you need for the volume of stories posted in a day? Is that really a full-time job for anyone? I can see having a couple supervising editors on staff, but I don't see that supporting tons of paid people at this scale. I don't know what the current structure is now, but I'm sure you could find a number of people willing to volunteer a subset of their time.
Personally, I've been using the other site since about 1999, mostly as a consumer, would use mod points if I got em, and rarely commented. From time to time I saw an ad that was relevant to me (in the days before adblockers were common) and would click on it. However, I would *never* consider paying a dime to the other site because as much as I liked it, it's not the kind of thing I would value paying a monthly fee for. They make more than their fair share off of advertisements and slashvertisemnts for what is essentially all user-generated content. I really do appreciate the community of commenters, but do I appreciate it at say $5/mo, when there are tons of alternatives? Not really.
If Soylent were run as a non-profit, I would be willing to donate from time to time, but if I had to pay for any significant functionality, I would simply go elsewhere. To put it bluntly, I'm not going to pay for a nostalgic HTML layout. I would *donate* to see a cool thing happen, as long as there is reasonable transparency on how the funds are used as well.
All that being said, I am cautiously optimistic about the future of the site, and would love to be part of this community. Just remember that you're competing against the other site and pretty much the rest of the internet, so don't try and go too big with things.