We moved the #ZincCoop Monthly Member Meeting to 2nd Wed @ 6PM PT

- Appreciations for AF, @anaulin, CJ, DP, KH, and RC!
- We are operating at a $950 loss so far for 2023;
- We have decided to purchase Moment Park from ZTI for $600.
- We have willingness / interest in supporting a local Marijuana Cooperative; but are not sufficiently resourced re: Compliance & Legal to instigate.
- July P&L, YTD P&L, and Balance Sheet in the Notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xEWfbQrJC-1gEQSM4_ATcK2JYn5HgNWPvaW7GArLyrQ/edit?folder=1inkhC_apSgg5Scdp_7i8lgtesFnTQ2ek#bookmark=id.yb356qbzjhvk

Lovely lakeside meeting between #Piikup and some of the #ZincCoop crew!

We also learned that they are fund-raising to add #eBike delivery to their offerings!

If you want to support hyper-local, Black Women owned, worker-first, bring zero-emission logistics and distribution to #Oakland, #Berkeley, and the #SFBA; consider sending them some cash via their non-profit partner, Haven of Hope: https://www.thehavenofhope.org/donate

Just enter "Piikup, eBike Fund" in the memo!

@elight @eqe #ZincCoop is a "big tent" software coop incubator.

Our current product lines are:

- A Coop-Source, federated eCommerce project for main-street businesses
- A set of photography apps (https://momentpark.com)

Anyone who consistently shows up to support existing projects may suggest new ones.

@22 @elight Well, if you're doing it as a grind it's not going to work. You need to find a way to sustainably pace yourself for the long haul.

There are a number of coops that would benefit from engaged, committed engineering support (#BlackSocialists/#DualPowerApp, #ArtisansCoop and #ZincCoop are top of mind for me)

@nonlinear Next step for #ZincCoop is to actually put together the revenue to hire Trust & Safety / Community Engagement teams

Damn, I guess I'm just proud that #ZincCoop only loses like, $500~$1k/yr..

Sure,#Convene doesn't have nearly as much features as Cohost...

But moving at the speed of community definitely seems like the right call.

@scottjenson @ben oh hey that’s what we’ve been doing at #ZincCoop !

We host regular colearning sessions where we work towards the goals our friends in #NoBAWC tell us they’re struggling to solve.

We don’t have much of a HCI practice yet but it would be lovely!

Maybe one day #CohereCoop and #ZincCoop will have a union!

Kinda wanna rebrand #ZincCoop to #SolarpunkSoftware

@atomicpoet This is why #ZincCoop is building #Convene: a software platform that people can build fediverse applications on top of; with an operating model that is socioeconomically sustainable.

Oh and it was also the #ZincCoop Member Meeting!

We (ok, I lol):
- Did our monthly book-keeping and prepared our unaudited financial reports: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XLD35uljankxtrP259F5tbgTAFYF__96
- Recorded our expenses in our #OpenCollective: https://opencollective.com/zinc-community
- Renewed our zinc.coop domain name

Now I get to take the rest of the day off!

@mekkaokereke @jalcine You both know you are more than welcome to join #ZincCoop in whatever role would feel good to you. Advisors, etc. Happy to even increase your equity-earn rate over mine (would need full member approval first tho).

@thomasreggi #ZincCoop is a big tent project incubator for solidarity economy projects. Always happy to have collaborators!

@lispi314 @wowitskaylie @the_Effekt I 100% agree; and those options are better for the user but hamstring the organization that is offering it.

Which, again, is why we license all our software freely for personal or cooperative use. If my #ZincCoop hits the fan, I want to make sure all of our users can continue to use the software we've built.

But that means #ZincCoop is in a kind of weird spot. I don't want to charge the lovely folks at #NOBAWC or #USFWC to subsidize my time; since I don't have more availability anyway; but I would *love* for networks such as these to have their internal IT Directors acting a liaison for the national/multi-national collection of #CoOpSource co-conspirators, contributors, and maintainers

But part of the work of #ZincCoop is to support the development of these regional cooperatives staffed by worker-owners from the local community. In my imaginary happy land, ~2024 is when we launch our first "bud" co-op; with our broader community of maintainers and contributors focusing on product development while the bud co-op focuses on development of the regional community ownership

Is this income level sufficient for *you*, dear reader, to consider starting a worker-and-community owned software cooperative?

No? Well, they don't work for me either! Which is why #ZincCoop is a part-time thing, where I contribute 4~8 hours a week and I make up the rest of my income in niche market product development and engineering and executive consulting.

@digifox Yes, for example; #ArtisansCoop is a producer's cooperative of handmade goods. They're stewarding their budget by leveraging off-the-shelf services. #ZincCoop is soliciting guidance and feedback from them on how to design #Convene's Marketplace feature; in the hope they'll be able to transition off proprietary/venture-backed eCommerce and onto a Cooperatively stewarded one.

Re: #MeetCoop shutdown - #ZincCoop had also explored providing #Jitsi hosting, but the labor and infrastructure costs for highly available video-conferencing would have required us to charge 2~3x #Zoom's pricing; and the quality was... not great.

We recently disabled the VideoBridge Furniture and shut-down our internal Jitsi server as well for similar reasons :(.

Gross Sales was ~$59k; Costs of Goods Sold (Revenue Shares to #ZincCoop, Sub-Contractor payments to #Cohere) were ~$47k.

Of that $12k, I spent about ~$5k on professional services (like tax prep, book-keeping, legal). ~$2k was to rent-seeking SaaS (like Google Apps, Intuit Quickbooks,e tc), and about $1,800 was for utilities (like my tablet, phone and internet).

I also received ~$400 in income from my investments, but with the $1k loss the 'fund' part of ZTN is down -$600 in 2022.