Cécile is right ! The following is added because a post has to be at least 20 characters long 
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A list of roles would be helpful for finding people who want to contribute.
Do we need moderators for different time zones?
Possibly. If we envisioned a split between Asia/Pacific, Africa/Europe, and the Americas. I could cover the the Asia/Pacific.
Malcolm
I’m a bit all over the place in terms of awaken hours, although trying to go back to what would be “normal for my timezone”. If needed I can cover Americas.
If someone were willing to invest the time to install Discounrse/MFSC onto a VPS - Virtual Private Server - the cost would be a fraction of Discourse’s hosting fees. Ionos, for instance, has VPS setups starting at $2 a month. GoDaddy is ~$30, and others all over the map.
That is the plan Kirk, Malcolm has offered to be responsible for the tech aspects. We will move the site onto Digital Cloud for 10$/monthly. It is just the initial set up (250$) that we will leave to an expert who does only that.
We are paying only one month on Discourse so that we have time to set everything properly.
I’ve been looking at the setup documentation - there is nothing too complicated. It looks like I could do that myself.
There is the issue of mail. It’s recommended to use a dedicated mail server. Discourse generates a lot of mail so that’s a good recommendation.
Top of the list is Mailgun. They will give us 10,000 email per month for free. Double that for $5 per month.
Malcolm
It could work at first but we sent 5.1k emails between the 42 of us, for the 30 days of June.
Well that is where the cost of hosting on discourse should be evaluated. That figure of 5100 from 40 people = 127 unique messages, or four messages per day or roughly 10% engagement.
After looking at the figures below for a while and thinking about what happens at FMCommunity I think that the engagement rates that I have assumed in the table below are too high. However, even when I reduce them by half, it is still much cheaper to use Discourse hosting on the standard plan.
I’ve asked the sales team of my own hosting provider to send through an estimate for hosting with an email volume of 600,000 email per month.
The spreadsheet below makes assumptions about engagement rate for an increasing number of users. If we assume a much smaller engagement rate we still have over 1.5M email/month at a cost of $915/month from a provider like mailgun.
In comparison, the discourse hosting for standard is $100/month (100,000 page views) and business is $300/month (300,000 page views). Discourse hosting is much cheaper than going-it-alone.
At the outset it would be a projected cost of $1,200/pa. It’s possible that the site could attract advertising revenue to defray costs but that would require some management.
I could cover Europe - but if Torsten would love to do that, I be happy to not (-:
the numbers are somewhat hard to read since the sheet is splitted into one row
What if we reduce the mailflood, ‘Agenda’ sends an overview once a week… on filemaker community, mails are important - but with discourse, I could be without a mail per posting…
Edit: Shows fine now - Thank You!
Wasn’t promoting myself when suggesting time zone moderators.
I’d be happy with Markus doing the job.
What I am more concerned about is that on Discourse, we are capped at 100k pages views per month. We did 10k last month. For 500k its the business plan @300$; For 3M+ it is the Enterprise plans which start at 500$/month.
If everybody agrees to use the mobile app, then we can disable instant email notification (which I would not mind because it is just packing my inbox (yeah i know i should make a filter). Leave email to daily reviews and weekly digest, announcements, and such.
That way we only have to focus on finding the biggest page views bundle we can find.
Is this the pricing for businesses or for associations?
Not for profit would be half of those prices
Can we put securing of funding on the AGM topic list?
We should find a way to secure 12 months of operations.
CTRL K+D. I can’t forget it even if I try… 
Agreed.
We should build a list of the matters that have to be discussed
- Securing funding
- Position regarding display of publicity
Anybody knows of a simple effective sample Association Statutes/Bylaws that we could tweak for our needs (if not l’ll ask Google)?
Incorporation as a nfp is same day/one day in Canada. So we could take the time to send a general email invite to all the members and hold the AGM around the 20th and have enough time to do all the administrative and technical operations required before the end of the month.
I’m talking incorporation because registration as an Association requires a mandatory 60 days publication period and it is not clear how the taxation treats it.
So if you become a NPO or NFP, then SLACK will give you a free version of their full SLACK site, with the only constraint at 250 users. The biggest issue with SLACK FREE for regular people, is the truncation of historical message access at 10,000 messages, which sounds like a lot, but in an FM Slack group I am on, 200 participants consume that message count every 4-6 weeks, valuable shared info drops off the map quickly. A NPO or NFP resolves that limitation, and is, in many ways, superior to a forum orientation. And did I remember to say “FREE”?
If there is already a fmslack, what would be the point? Also I have no idea what slack looks like but hadn’t we agreed that the only point of keeping mfsc alive is because we like how the platform supports a certain form of interaction?
Let’s find solutions to the costs component rather then running after free that ends up not free when all things considered.
El barato sale caro
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