Weco Update | June 2018
It’s been a while since the last big update in January but things have continued to move forward at a good pace behind the scenes. Many of the ideas we’ve been exploring during this period have begun to crystallise into a new plan for the next stage of the platforms growth so the time now seems ripe to offer our followers an update.
In the intervening months we’ve faced some financial setbacks that have forced us to re-evaluate our funding strategy in difficult but ultimately positive ways, we’ve gathered data on advertising techniques and how users are interacting with the platform, joined a new platform coop incubator programme in the UK, worked out more of the logistics of transitioning to a coop (including how we will define membership and organise governance), and come up with a new approach to coordinating and incentivising the projects open source development.
In this update I’ll go over each of these developments in more detail and then finish with a brief outline of our plans for the future.
Finance
Having used up most of the seed funding we received from Namaste building out the core features of the platform in 2017, we were running low on funds at the start of the year and in need of new investment to keep the project moving in 2018. To make things more challenging around the same time a prior member of our team and a longtime friend of ours left the country with a significant amount of our money, given to him in the form of an emergency loan to help support his family, and then cut off communication with us leaving our team struggling to cover even the platforms hosting costs let alone pay for further development work.
Facing these difficulties it was clear that we needed to find a broader network of support for the project that could help us spread the idea further afield and open up new doors to funding. We also began to think more seriously about how we could better incentivise and coordinate the open source development of our codebase so the platform could continue evolving without being so reliant on external investment.
Unfound Accelerator Program
We were fortunate enough to then stumble upon a new coop accelerator programme starting up in the UK called Unfound. It’s the first accelerator programme in the world set up specifically to help early stage platform coops and was looking for qualifying teams in our country so we jumped on the opportunity to get in contact. We only had a few weeks to apply before the application deadline but managed to get shortlisted for an interview in London in April and to our excitement were accepted onto the programme shortly after.
Several articles have recently been published about the Unfound program in news sources including The Independent and Wired.
We’ve now been to seven out of the eight masterclasses and have another one to go before a final crowdfunding session at this years Co-ops UK Congress event on the 23rd of June. Each masterclass has been a daylong session in London or Manchester listening to experienced individuals in the coop/tech start-up space, doing group work around the logistics of our projects, getting feedback from the mentors, and connecting with the other teams on the programme.
Our hope has been that these sessions would help us to move the project forward in a number of important ways; from refining our business model and investor pitch, to mapping out the details of our coop structure, ironing out kinks in the platforms UX design, building useful connections in the coop space, and potentially even raising further funding. So far it’s been incredibly useful — we’ve learned a huge amount from the information and mentoring that has been made available to us and it’s been a privilege to meet so many other people who share an excitement for the potential coops have to bring about positive economic change in the world. There seems to be a real interest in building relationships of mutual support between the teams in ways that you wouldn’t expect to find in the for-profit, private sector.
Below is an overview of the plans we have been developing recently around transitioning our company into a coop as we’ve taken part in the programme; including how we will define membership, manage the platforms governance, and incentivize future open-source development work.
Membership
We believe it’s important that our users can access all the features on the platform without cost and will only require them to become paying members if they wish to participate in the platforms governance. Membership will cost approximately $3 per month or $30 per year and will be organised, at least initially, through our Open Collective page. We will also provide free membership to every developer working on the code base and create opportunities for other users to gain free membership in exchange for various types of contributions to the project; such as sharing links to the site on their social media channels or offering skilled services.
The requirement to pay a nominal fee or offer something of value to the project in exchange for membership creates a basic layer of verification that will help to protect us against manipulation from fake accounts or users who have no vested interest in the betterment of the project, while at the same time incentivising a flow of contributions to supporting the platforms ongoing activities.
Members will gain the right to vote on all governance decisions (which will be hosted on Loomio until we have added more features to the polling tools on Weco), access to member’s discussion threads, inclusion in the members email list, and inclusion in the members section of our contributor’s page. All governance decisions will be made using ‘one member, one vote’ polls such that power is distributed equally amongst the members.
Governance
The governance process will be structured as a pipeline of stages in which ideas pass from user submitted suggestions, to proposal polls, to pending tasks, and finally to completed tasks. At each stage the ideas in question will be up for discussion amongst all interested users and have to pass a given threshold of votes in order to make it to the next stage.
Although members will have the final power to accept or reject governance proposals, we will encourage everyone on the site to participate in the larger decision making process and have plans to co-author a constitution for the platform that will oblige members to vote with the majority opinion of the total user base if at all possible, provided it wouldn’t jeopardise the core values of the platform. The constitution will also lay out foundational rights of individuals and communities on the site to protect them from potential mob dynamics. Any proposed amendments to the constitution would have to pass through the same decision pipeline before being accepted.
At the start of the pipeline the Weco branch and it’s contained child branches have been set up to make it easy for users to submit new ideas, ask questions, and debate existing suggestions relating to the platforms governance with other users. The account u/weco and other global moderators will regularly monitor all the new ideas posted by users in the Suggestions branch and then submit official polls to the Proposal branch for all the ideas that receive more than the required threshold of up votes. For now we will set that threshold at 1% of the total user base, although that number may be adjusted in the future, so a post would currently need at least 7 up-votes to be submitted as an official proposal. Every poll submitted to the proposal branch would take the same format; including a clear description of the stated proposal, links to any relevant posts and comment threads on the platform, links to other relevant resources online, and the option for users to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the proposal.
When enough users have participated in a proposal poll (another threshold we will debate as we experiment further with the process) and more than 50% of those users have voted in its favour, the proposal will then be passed on for a members vote on Loomio. If the members don’t block the proposal there, a new card will be created for it on our public Trello board in the ‘Backlog’ list and a post linking to that card will be submitted to the Pending Tasks branch.
The number of up votes each task receives relative to others in the Pending Tasks branch will be used to determine its position of priority on the Trello board. Depending on what type of work is required to enact the proposal, developers or other members of the coop will then be free to pitch in to work on any of the available tasks that take their fancy. When someone has pitched in to complete a task and the rest of the members are happy with that individuals ability to work on it (mediated by another poll if there are any disputes), the card will then be updated to include their name, their estimated time of completion for the task, and be moved to the ‘In Progress’ list on Trello.
Once someone has completed a task, relevant users and members will be invited to evaluate their work before it goes live. If everyone evaluating the task is happy with their work the Trello card will be moved to the ‘Signed Off’ list on a Trello, the old post in the Pending Tasks branch will be removed, and a new post will be submitted summarising the task and including all relevant links in the Completed Tasks branch. The posts in the Completed Tasks branch will then serve as a permanent archive of all tasks completed throughout the history of the coop and a space for users to comment with further reflections. The users who complete a task will also have their name and profile picture added to our ‘hall of fame’ on the contributor’s page with a description of the task they completed and a link to its post in the Completed Tasks branch.
Open Source Development
We plan to coordinate the platforms open source development much like other tasks using the decision pipeline explained above. To help incentivise development work and encourage more donations to the project, we have also decided to allow users to donate money to the specific tasks they would most like to see completed via our Open Collective page, creating a kind of bounty reward system that encourages the completion of work desired by the user base. The Trello cards will be updated every time a new donation has been submitted so developers can freely browse all the available tasks to see how much they could earn for each task before making a decision.
When a new development task is first moved to the Pending Tasks branch in the pipeline we will allow other developers involved in the project to submit a rough cost/time estimate for the task, which will later be averaged out and added as a guideline to that tasks Trello card. If we come into further funding in the future, we plan to use a portion of it to bump up the available bounty on tasks significantly lacking in donations to meet those guidelines where possible.
In the past we’ve found a fair amount of interest in the project from the open source community on Reddit and developers in the coop space, including several offers from individuals to help alongside our paid developers but have lacked the organisational framework to coordinate their contributions effectively. Having mapped out our governance process in much more detail and set up a way for other users to reward their contributions through donations, we now feel much more prepared to begin cultivating a healthy open source community around the project. As far as we’re aware, this kind of incentive structure for open source development integrated with a platform wide participatory governance process is a first of its kind experiment, so we are really excited to learn from the process and see how it unfolds.
Ad Testing and Website Analytics
Over the last six months we have been conducting a range of small marketing experiments testing out advertising with links to Weco on Quora, Reddit, Google Adwords, Facebook, and a few other small curated news sites that share our underlying ethos including The Peoples News. In addition to keeping track of how successful each ad has been at bringing across new users we’ve been using Google Analytics to learn about how those new users are interacting with the platform once they have arrived and signed up. To give a few examples, one insight we’ve gained has been that a large number of new users are navigating straight to the homepage after first landing on the global wall. At the moment the homepage doesn’t offer much to engage those users so improving it’s design would be a good opportunity for us to better inform new users of what the project is about and how they could get involved. Another less expected insight was that lots of users are navigating to other users profiles from their posts on various walls but, like our homepage, profiles currently offer little information about each user and don’t yet include a list of their previous post or comments. As this would be a relatively easy feature for us to implement and several users have already made suggestions about it, we will prioritise this task along with improving the design of our homepage in upcoming development work.
Closing Thoughts
While we have made significant progress over the last few years getting our projects MVP to its current stage with the limited resources available to us, there is still a large amount of work needed to get the platform and user base to the point where it’s self-sustaining and able to compete with the much better invested privately owned and governed competitors we face in the social news market. We believe that social news users will ultimately be much better off with a transparent, open-source, cooperatively owned and governed alternative to the existing platforms and can see an interest in those concepts gradually gaining momentum but simultaneously recognise that providing a service with these features comes with many unique challenges; it’s much harder to find funding, there’s far less advice and support available, most people aren’t aware of their advantages, and you have to navigate all the difficulties that come with making group decisions at scale. That said, any progress made in these areas is a useful service to the growing body of commons related projects moving in this direction as it contributes to the collective mapping out of a pathway towards positive change that others can learn from and build upon.
There are many examples of new opportunities just beginning to open up that may provide us with the support we need to help us accelerate the growth of the project in the next few years and bring our long term vision closer to reality. Social.coop, CoTech, Unfound, the PCC’s $1M grant, Nesta’s new center for collective intelligence, and many other positive initiatives demonstrate that interest and capital is accumulating around the shared desire for more effective means of collective governance and ownership. It’s only a matter of time before ethical alternatives to the existing extractive and dictatorial platform giants begin to break through into mainstream awareness and once their power is understood by the masses there will be little reason to turn back.
We are in the process of building alliances of mutual support with many other projects moving in this direction towards a more ethical economy; including all the teams taking part in the Unfound accelerator program (CabFair, Equal Care Co-op, Schumacher Commons, The Media Fund, The Physio Co-op, Land Explorer, and The Open Food Network) as well as others like Resonate, an ethical music streaming coop, and the CoTech network. Every successful platform coop will eventually have a need for tools that help its members to self-govern, share, organise, and filter information at scale so the service Weco is offering has the potential to play a significant role in this emerging ecosystem.
Some of the next tasks we’ll be focusing on in the coming months will include co-authoring the platforms constitution, prioritising development tasks, and stress-testing our decision pipeline. We will be aiming to engage as many of our existing users in this process as we can and reaching out to others who might be interested in playing a role at this formational stage.
If you are interested in the ideas we’re exploring and would like to participate in this shared experiment, we would love you to be involved! We’re keen to hear feedback from all different perspectives and engage as many people in this process as possible. Head over to the Weco branch to find out what other users are saying and offer your own perspective on how we could improve the platform.
Thanks for your time!
