Just got back from a meeting between Social.coop (an instance on Mastodon) and Meet.coop, in which we discussed Social.coop joining Meet.coop or paying to use its videoconferencing tools.
As Resonate scales up from using Jitsi and having larger meetings in the future (especially for events like General Meetings, presentations, etc), we’ll need some sort of solution in this area. Currently, the price for Resonate to join Meet.coop directly would be too expensive, but I shared some thoughts about Social.coop users playing perhaps sort of ambassadorial roles with the respective co-ops they often work with. This way, a co-op like Resonate could occasionally use Meet.coop’s videoconferencing services through an already existing personal account of a Social.coop member.
I’m also encouraging the idea that Resonate (and other co-operatives) could potentially join Social.coop/Mastodon with a user account, and then use Meet.coop services through that membership. Social.coop could end up playing a sort of intermediary role between various co-ops, and use of Mastodon would be incentivized due to granting access to Meet.coop and its tools into the future.
Sure it would be cool in its own right for us to have a Mastodon social media account the same way that we have social media accounts on Twitter and Facebook, but how much better would it be if that account meant that we also got to use Meet.coop for board meetings, general meetings etc.
The vision here is still very amorphous, but the ideas I shared above seemed to have a bit of enthusiasm among the meeting’s participants. Everyone there really wants to find ways for co-ops to support each other, especially when it comes to essential online collaboration tools and communications software. For platform co-ops this seems fundamental, but platform co-ops still in the “start-up” phase need more affordable options.
Fascinating to ponder how a social network like Mastodon/Social.coop could potentially create a more accessible “mid-tier” price point for co-ops to use other co-ops’ services until they can afford full membership in the services themselves. Social.coop is very much at the beginning of talking about this stuff, and the members in the meeting were only a very small percentage number of membership, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens on Social.coop’s Loomio page and what decisions are reached. Outcome could end up quite different, but I’m at interested to push the discussion in this direction.
