[HCoop-Discuss] Reduced rate qualifications

Fri Jul 21 14:53:14 EDT 2006

After reading these comments against a tiered pricing structure, I would like to rescind my previous comment and say that I also think that we should avoid tiered pricing as much as possible.  It does seem to go against the "cooperative" nature of the organization and encourages unnecessary hierarchy.

It seems that there are still two issues here, however, that haven't been resolved.  First, we certainly have to figure out exactly how to cover costs on a temporary basis for the new infrastructure.  With this change, costs will certainly jump up for a while until membership rises a bit more.  I know that there have been some preliminary ideas on the "FinancingIssues" wiki page but I haven't seen a resolution to how this will be handled.  

Adam suggested earlier that we could have a schema where some members pay extra "shares" to help members who can't afford the temporary increase in dues that our improvements will require.  I personally think that this is on the right track, but I would rather avoid the concept of "shares" because it would seem to be difficult to reconcile with the one member, one vote philosophy that holds that each member is of equal value to the organization.  Instead, I would think that we could stay close to the idea that Adam had where members who could afford it would contribute what they could to subsidize others' dues during the transitional period.  

Second, there is the issue of long-term pricing changes.  Just brainstorming for a minute, would it be possible to split our pricing not into tiers, but into "public" and "private" services?  In this schema, we could give all users equal access to services in terms of functionality.  We would also try to support users' publicly available material (this seems to be the most likely to benefit the internet community and society as a whole the most, and perhaps closer to cooperative ideology because of this) as much as possible by giving space and bandwidth for these purposes, especially on sites deemed by the members to be in the public interest.

However, if a user needed lots of space for personal imap or other personal file storage that is not for public access, we could have options for extra disk space, etc, and we would develop pricing options according to how much the user wanted/needed.  I would assume that this could be extended to personal applications requiring bandwidth or monitoring as well.

Of course, if we have lots of space and resources available (which we will in the beginning of the new infrastructure), perhaps we could stave off the tiered private plans for an indefinite amount of time, and just accept that some people will use resources more heavily than others.

Justin

On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 02:01:21PM -0400, Terrence Brannon wrote:
>    My feelings:
>    1 - I dont understand tiered pricing. Why not just have everyone pay
>    proportionately instead of blindly shelving people into tiers?
>    2 - I can understand the need for having more money than just the
>    proportionate amount I asked about in point #1. To that end, simply have
>    people pay 30% more than their proportionate amount at all times so that
>    hcoop has a buffer.
> 
>    I am a heavy disk space user but actually was wondering why I can't buy a
>    disk or something instead of paying monthly for one.
> 
>    On 7/21/06, Justin S. Leitgeb <[1]leitgebj at hcoop.net> wrote:
> 
>      Sounds like a great plan.
> 
>      On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 11:42:10AM -0400, Nathan Kennedy wrote:
>      > Dues for the other members could either be done the same way by
>      > deducting flat dues from monthly expenses and splitting them evenly,
>      or
>      > moving to a flat rate where monthly dues are set somewhat above
>      > projected expenses in order retain cash for future expansions.
> 
>      Of these, I would strongly prefer the latter option.  I think that
>      structuring our dues so that they include funds for expansion and
>      repairs would be a good thing for the sustainability of the coop.
> 
>      Thanks for suggesting this, Nathan!
> 
>      Justin
> 
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