Open Collective
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Q4 2022 Update! Convene, Moment Park, Education, Call to Client Ownership and Financials!
Published on January 8, 2023 by Ana Ulin

A warm thank you for your continued support 🙇‍♂️and best wishes for the new year 2023!

Below follows a summary of what we've been up to in the last quarter of 2022. If there are specific areas you'd like to know more about, don't hesitate to reach out to us (https://discord.gg/Qnv6v4vdRg, https://social.coop/@anaulin or https://social.coop/@zee ). We love talking to y'all!

📣We’re doing a 2022 Zinc Retrospective! Add your thoughts to our shared doc, or email them to [email protected]! We’ll review them at our February Member Meeting!

Education Programs

Our asynchronous Q3 retrospective wrapped up and our Q4 one is in progress!! We continue to have 3 to 6 participants in our Wednesday and Sunday Each one/Teach One Ensembles. Regular participant Kelly H reflects on her experience:

“Working on Convene with Zinc has been a huge help in increasing my software engineering skills, best practices, tech stack knowledge, and productivity toolbox. The group coding sessions have been a safe haven to learn in, with no fear of failure, no judgment, newbie friendly culture. As a social coder who learns best from pair programming and “just diving into the code”, I have found a vital lifeline and cohort of supportive comrades at Zinc.”

If you are interested in building your fluency in full-stack application development while building tools for the Solidarity Economy, we’d love to welcome you to our co-learning programs. Message @[email protected] or email [email protected]!

Convene

We’ve been focusing on building the Marketplace feature as we work to onboard Piikup, a delivery company for the solidarity economy. We’ve also chatted with Artisans.Coop and Indie Sellers Guild as potential Client-Owners building Community and Worker-Owned Marketplace platform cooperatives.

We’ve also begun chatting with Neb from the Austin Chapter of B-Local, and discussed ways that we could support their B-Corp Ambassadors in the emotional and logistical labor of helping local businesses navigate the B-Corp certification process.

If you’re interested in helping us shape Convene – be it with feature requests and feedback, as a prospective Client-Owner, or as a developer – reach out to [email protected].

Moment Park

We’ve had two bug reports for Cross Process since our 2.8 release:

We’re working as diligently as we can to move these forward; any co-conspirators or contributors looking to build or leverage their Tutorial Production or Mobile App Development  fluency are encouraged to reach out by mentioning @[email protected] or emailing [email protected]!

Call to Client Ownership 

Client Owners sustain Zinc’s ability to nurture the solidarity economy technology by paying a small portion of their annual income every quarter. This money goes towards education, capacity building, operating costs, and maintainer and contributor payouts.

In exchange, Client Owners receive discounts on services, the right to participate in membership meetings, and refunds from profits. 

If you’re interested in becoming a Client Owner in 2023, please reach out directly to [email protected]!

Financials


In 2022, we continued our transparent accounting practices. You can find month-by-month and quarter-by-quarter income statements and balance sheets in our public 2022 Financial Reports folder. 

Our Contributors and Maintainers report 210.75 hours of labor in 2022, valued at approximately $17,000, assuming a 32 hour-work-week and a pay rate 25% greater than the MIT living wage for one adult raising one child in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Our 2022 unaudited Profit and Loss shows a $2,306 loss, with our major expenses being Software Subscriptions, Hosting and Infrastructure, and Subcontractors.

Our 2022 unaudited Balance Sheet shows that we have ~6 years of runway with this degree of loss.

Our end-of-year ownership distribution, based upon time entries recorded as of January 8th is as follows:
  • Zee Spencer, 55.71%
  • Tom Lee: 18.71%
  • Vivek Narayan: 14.01%
  • Ana Ulin: 8.34%
  • CJ Joulain 3.23%