Sustainable Appsterdam

[matteom]

Some months ago we had a meeting to discuss the future of Appsterdam and its sustainability. The concern was raised by me, but was a shared by others. Somebody in that meeting expressed the concern that, having had our second birthday recently, we were not sure if we could make it to a third one. (I won't name names, but everybody is free to claim their own words).

Out of that meting came out the decision to use Github to coordinate our efforts. Now that we are here, let’s get back to those issues that need to be addressed even more than before. As a reminder, and for those who were not in that meeting, I’ll write a summary. Feel free to fill in the spots I'm missing.

Appsterdam is solely based on volunteer effort. As much as that’s what made it possible for it to exist in the first place, that is not a sustainable way to go on, now that it has grown into a full organization, albeit still made by volunteers.

We are seeing this problem already. As people in the organization need to take care about other more pressing issues in their life, we lose key people that are not replaceable. The list is long and we all know it, so there is no need to report it here.

Many of us do what we do for Appsterdam because we are the founders of the movement and we were there since the beginning. Nobody else will ever share this and it must kept in mind since, as we drop our tasks, nobody is usually there to pick them up.

The reason is simple: although Appsterdam is a non profit organization, it cannot be run completely on volunteer effort and it has to somehow provide for it’s members too, either economically or in other tangible benefits. Even the more committed volunteers after a while leave, because their will to help the community is not enough to keep things going.

This is not an uncommon idea and it can be seen in many non profit organizations, like the Red Cross, to name one. Some time ago there was some (unjustified) public outrage as the salaries of the CEOs of the top non profit organizations in the Netherlands were published. What the public failed to realize is that to retain a person capable to lead such a big and complex organization, you have to motivate them not to look for a more remunerative job elsewhere.

Appsterdam is not different. Unfortunately at the moment Appsterdam has no money to afford to even pay a small salary to any of its members. Added to that we are not capable (yet) to raise the amount of money that flows into the organization to make its existence sustainable.

Another problem in the organization is that a lot of the effort of our volunteers disperses in many activities with little attendane that are not attended by us, as it was rightly brought to attention during our meeting.

The outlook is not so dire though. As we have grown as an organization we have many untapped opportunities to provide more value to the community, our partners and sponsors and to our members, to make it possible to provide value back to those who invest in the organization. I personally have some ideas as others had, some of which can be implemented straight away with little to no effort.

I think it’s best to keep this Github issue as the parent and a reference to all the single ideas we can implement to bring Appsterdam forward and a place where we can have a meta discussion about how to organize this. I think the best approach is to start proposing and discussing the ideas that can be implemented immediately not to waste too much time and effort on different things that might be done or not done in the future. As we already realized, we are already spreading our efforts on too many things, so lets focus on a few of these issues at a time.