I’m investigating the possibility of turning lib.reviews into a platform co-op. The underlying idea is simple: users own the platform and vote democratically on all decisions. I’m a member of social.coop, which uses this model for a social network that is part of the larger Mastodon network (a good intro if you’re unfamiliar), and my experience with it has been very positive.
What would this mean? Nothing for the day-to-day use of the site. Folks who want to participate in decision-making could sign-up and contribute to costs for hosting and development, but also vote on decisions, e.g., which features to prioritize. There would probably be a free tier for co-op membership as well, just to make sure that active contributors can join up even if they can’t contribute financially.
If this is something you’d like to see, here’s a simple thing you can do: star lib.reviews on GitHub. I’d like to use OpenCollective to manage finances for the platform, and they require a threshold of 100 GitHub stars. That seems fair—there should be active user interest before it makes sense to set up a funding/governance model.