Our main hurdle right now is to get more organizations into our field of membership and members into those organizations – there is no cost for an organization to join the field of membership except an hour or two of its leadership’s time sending documents to the NCUA. The NCUA is requiring that we increase the number of primary members in our field of membership. The organization we started this process with with has about 300 members and the NCUA said they want much closer to 3000 primary members in the field of membership at the start of Phase 1. Only members and employees of the common bonds in our field of membership count for the NCUA, they aren’t considering secondary members such as immediate family toward the 3000. So we are looking for organizations to join us to proceed in the chartering process and getting to the main purpose of this project which is writing free and open source software. Please refer any organizations that might be interested to our page about it https://communitychest.io/join-our-field-of-membership/. You could also help us by joining one of the common bonds that we are adding to field of membership – hopefully we will have one soon that is easy to get into like a charity that only requires a onetime donation to become a member – reach out to info@communitychest.io if you know any organizations that might be interested.
We paused most of the development on the code base years ago, when we realized that it was going to take so much longer than we had anticipated to charter a credit union. We felt like we were wasting developers time when most of the programming languages and security software were going to be different by the time we actually chartered. We aren’t going to restart the work back up again until we submit Phase 2. If you are an experienced programmer that is interested in volunteering there are some upstream and downstream projects that could use help in the meantime:
- Halcyon, a Kotlin XMPP library – we would like to speed up its adoption of iOS XMPP support
- FOSS Phone operating systems like CalyxOS, iodeOS or a linux phone distro that plans to support RISC-V – Helping with security patch support for a budget phone or small tablet.
- Kotlin Wrapper for FOSS ACH software like Moov.io or OpenACH
If you are not an experienced programmer or are an experienced programmer interested in learning some new skills that can help us when we resume development on CommunityChest.io please reach out to developers@communitychest.io and we will connect you to free learning resources.
It would help the project immensely if you could sign a commitment letter promising that you will donate funds to the credit union once it is chartered. Here is a sample letter provided by the NCUA https://ncua.gov/support-services/credit-union-resources-expansion/chartering/sample-commitment-letter. The proposed credit union has 160k in funds pledged but that is being shrunken in real dollars by inflation while we are in the chartering process.