[HCoop-Discuss] Financial situation

[Adam Chlipala]

Nathan Kennedy wrote:
> rob at hcoop.net wrote:
>   
>> I will not pay any portion of this debt.  Please make note of that during
>> my monthly contribution.  Many months ago I expressed my concerns with
>> hcoop's financial situation in regards from switching away from Abu and
>> Fyodor.  There needs to be some accountability here.
>>   
>>     
> It is not an option for individual members to pick and choose which 
> co-op costs they are willing to pay for.
>   

I stand by both my guarantee that no one who objects will need to pay a 
penny and by the appropriateness of that guarantee.  We should not 
direct any negative vibes toward Rob or anyone else for taking me up on 
it, and here's why:

I'll split my reasoning into two pieces.


First, there's the issue of how deeply "co-op-ness" extends into our 
identity.  We have a vocal minority of members strongly committed to 
"cooperative values" and the like, and (not surprisingly) they are 
over-represented among volunteers for specific jobs.  However, I'm 
confident that they make up an insignificant fraction of the overall 
membership.  Speaking only for myself, my goal is to offer the best 
quality Internet hosting to as many responsible people as possible.  The 
co-op social/legal form comes into the picture as the most effective 
tool for doing that.  I expect most members not to attach any special 
significance to the co-op form, and I don't fault them for that.

The attitudes associated with the "customer-business relationship" are 
too deeply-ingrained in most of our members' social environments.  It 
does not make sense to scream at members who make statements based on 
those attitudes.  Instead of saying "you have broken the Code of the 
Co-Op," try to explain why a particular way of doing things makes sense 
from first principles.  We are incorporated as a co-op, and that brings 
with it certain legal requirements on our structure, but I don't plan to 
accept as axioms any less formal consequences of our co-op nature that 
some others seem to be implying.  We will only alienate potential 
valuable members by expecting them to sign right up for a fringe 
philosophy and never question it, instead of gradually explaining its 
benefits over time.


The next line of argument is related to the first, but I think it's 
different enough to deserve its own section.  The issue here is 
expectations of "accountability" when a few people are made responsible 
for doing work on behalf of many others.  Again, the basic assumptions 
here tend to be shaped by the "business-customer" model.  An important 
aspect of that model is that "customers" are paying for labor by members 
of the "business."  Though most people don't realize it, they have all 
kinds of expectations about timeliness and organization that are based 
on the fact that money enables workers to dedicate set hours of each day 
to projects.  We don't have that advantage, and so basic things like 
coordination between workers become serious problems that require 
non-trivial brainstorming to solve.  In other words, people who think 
that it's outlandish that we're taking so long to prepare for migration 
just have no understanding of the constraints that our medium of 
volunteer-only, Internet-coordination-only work imposes.  They assume we 
work more like nearly every other aggregate organization they've dealt with.

HOWEVER, I also believe that it's not cost-effective to try to convince 
members of this.  We don't have documentation to "support" every 
decision by a volunteer to work on his "day job" instead of HCoop, or 
accounting of the delays that caused for other volunteers while they 
waited for the original person to respond to an e-mail or perform some 
task on his list.  I do believe that our overall velocity is probably 
_better_ than the average staffing solution that could have been 
implemented with our constraints.  But the sheer volume of data and 
analysis needed to justify this is beyond my ability or motivation to 
provide.

Therefore, in the interests of keeping the co-op moving, in the 
interests of not having to write more long-winded e-mails like this one, 
I'm willing to use my personal funds to cover the shares of people who 
have doubts about our processes.  Once we are going in steady-state, I 
imagine that everything will work smoothly enough that no one will 
question the underlying processes enough to find our very low fees 
unfair.  For now, however, we need to deal with folks used to being able 
to complain to the Better Business Bureau when an item ordered from a 
company takes too long to arrive.  They expect to see documentation of 
"good reasons" for the delay if they aren't to jump ship, and we can't 
provide that documentation.  I'm willing to pay for the privilege to do 
"real work" instead of spending time educating them about why their 
assumptions don't apply well to our situation.


I'd like to close by making it clear that I still believe my decision to 
hold back charges was obviously the right choice.  Just look at the 
controversy we are dealing with now, and imagine renewing that each 
month with new Peer 1 charges, with new members coming in and starting 
it anew, etc..  It's so much easier to convince people that it's in 
their interest to pay something when it's clear what they will get for 
it and when, and we just couldn't predict the "when" when we first 
signed up at Peer 1.  Whether or not you agree with my stance, the first 
section above should have conveyed that I find "cooperative ideals of 
sharing costs" irrelevant to this decision, especially since the amounts 
of money involved are so trivial.