Financial WG/Minutes

The purpose of this meeting is to determine a path to financial and legal independence for neuromatch.social

Pre Meeting

Discord discussion thread
Invitation to join the discussion via our Social_WG account: https://neuromatch.social/@socialwg/111738441996637299
Announcement also posted via admin announcement so that members of the instance get a notification.

01/24/2024

Reasons for establishing a separate legal entity:

avoid legal liabilities for the instance admins and for our current fiscal host (which is a 501(c)3 non-profit)
a way to avoid jeopardizing the mission of democratizing science due to any conflicts or bad actors on the instance
sustainability and self-sufficiency - we'd like to be able to apply for grants independently and accept donations. A 501(c)3 cannot solicit donations unless they are established as a charity in all US states. Makes things complicated!
transparent finances - we'd like to setup an open collective account (or something similar) to ensure that all the money we receive will be used solely for running the instance and not for any profit
easier relationship with rest of neuromatch - by getting the legal stuff out of the way, we can actually collaborate with them better where before it was hard for them to publicize the existence and structure of neuromatch.social

Manisha

We've been functioning like a digital coop for ~ 1 year now. Makes sense for us to establish ourselves legally as a coop!
We could follow what social.coop does - get platform6.coop to be our fiscal host. Then we'd be a digital coop and instance members would be members of a virtual coop. See also: membership at platform 6.
The fiscal host takes on the legal liabilities and maintains the bank account. We'd receive funds (grant money or donations) into their account. They'd release funds to us based on invoices that we submit (like monthly server costs, domain name costs, working group honorarium, email costs, etc).
One or more members can sign up to be members of platform 6 for us to be a part of their coop. Need to discuss details with them.

Jonny

Used to live in a housing coop and has experience of setting up a physical coop.
So another option, we could setup a 501(c)7? coop. Less paperwork than 501(c)3. But maybe more paperwork than joining platform 6.

Nick

Setting up an LLC is super easy. Takes about $10 and very little paperwork.
If platform 6 requires us to have our own separate entity, we could setup an LLC.

Keeping the name neuromatch.social intact would be nice since we are working towards shared goals.
Technically, it is currently not possible to migrate all accounts with their posts to a new domain without starting all over from scratch. Calckey was able able to do this but they are a fork of misskey and not mastodon.

Nick - what kind of things would you like to do with neuromatch.social in the future?
Manisha - more outreach. Bring in a diverse set of voices to show how (neuro)science and academia work around the world - especially the parts of the world that are severely underrepresented (like the global south).
Nick - interested in experimenting with different team and governance structures (like our cooperative governance is quite different from Neuromatch, Inc. which runs based on decisions made by a Board of Directors).
Jonny - yes and interested in using the internet as a tool for experimenting with digital governance
Nick - talked about the R&D process he's establishing at Neuromatch. How to prioritize community needs and wants.
Jonny and Manisha had very similar discussions just a day ago. See thread. Would be nice to do a followup meeting to discuss this further.
See also: A grant that we applied for, got positive reviews from all 3 reviewers, wasn't funded

Nick asked the question
Jonny and Manisha enthusiastically say heck yeah! :) We were just talking about how posts like this one by Luiz Pessoa give us a warm feeling - that people are having fun here. Around the time of the meeting, there was another positive post about collegiality on mastodon. See also.
Jonny - building trust is important and we are also not really aiming to become a large community. [Manisha's post meeting thought on this - that would defeat the purpose of decentralization but would be nice to see more communities experimenting with different governance structures and we'd love to share our experiences with the experiments we undertake]

Manisha and Jonny to email platform6.coop and ask them about the process of them becoming our fiscal host. Then followup with Nick.
Once we have more clarity on the legal structure, figure out how to continue to get funded by our current fiscal host.
Nick will followup with the Board of Directors about name change and conflicts with the current donation/gift acceptance policy.