Open Collective
Open Collective
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July 2020 Update
Published on August 13, 2020 by Zee Spencer

Hello Again!

Another of Zinc’s core values is people who contribute time, attention, connections, and expertise deserve a share of the wealth captured by the systems they participate in. 

Nine months after incorporation, we put our money where our mouth is and performed our first ever patronage payout. This payout serves as an opt-in participatory basic income for contributors and maintainers at Zinc.

I’m going to nerd out a bit on the details. Feel free to let your eyes glaze over and skip down to the project-by-project updates..

Every contributor and maintainer at Zinc has a patronage account. Patronage accounts accrue points based upon economic participation in Zinc. Maintainers earn 40 points for every hour they spend working on projects, and Contributors earn patronage in return for contributions to the cooperative.

Over the past nine months, Contributors and Maintainers have accrued 56,093 points. The Zinc Stewards agreed that it was safe to perform a $100 patronage payout in our June member meeting. To get the per-point redemption value, we take that $100 and divide it by the 56,093 outstanding points for a value of $0.001782754 per point.

Maintainers and Contributors may opt-in to redeeming from 0 to 100% of their points. Redeeming the points removes them from the outstanding points total, and we send an ACH payment for the cash-value of the points redeemed.

It isn’t a lot of money, and we’re only 9 months in. believe that by developing a portfolio of products and services with reasonable affordances for capturing the wealth generated by these products and services, distributing that wealth based upon time and attention investment we create a more equitable digital economy

For those with an entrepreneurial bent, follow along with our unaudited quarterly financial overviews.

Project by Project Updates

Convene 

Convene is a Space for People to gather. Create Rooms in your Space, and meet face-to-face. Add in some power-ups, like a radio station where you’re the DJ, a scheduling tool that knows how to find a convenient time to talk, or a shared write-board.

Columbene, Max, Melissa and Vivek have been hard at work exploring how we can position Convene’s core value proposition in a way that resonates. We’ve also resumed offering demos, so if you want to explore how Convene would fit you and your crew, set up a demo!

We also:

From an infrastructure and operations perspective, we made it easier for Tom and I to manage the Videobridge virtual machines, migrated our Zinc Videobridge from Amazon to Vultr (far more consistent cost structures!) and improved connection reliability through nightly restarts of our Videobridges

Compensated

Create value, get paid. Compensated gives technical small owners powerful tools for collecting cash from their customers.

In July, we created a command line program for Compensated that allows developers to create products and prices in Stripe. You can see an example of how to use it in the Cross-Platform Selling feature definition!

Moment Park

Take and share better photos and videos. Capture and enhance your precious memories.

Moment Park has released the source code for ShakeIt Photo under the Prosperity Public License in preparation for the 3.2.6 release! If you’d like to help us test it out, let us know and we’ll add you to the Test Flight team!