27 March 2025

Organizing circle has been struggling a little with attendance this month for various reasons and we went ahead and finalized several decisions with the three of us who were in the room that had been developing over the last several months. Specifically we decided to request an annual report from financing starting next January (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Annual_base_operations_budget_report), revised a description of socal.coop member types (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Description_of_social.coop_member_types), added a discussion on working group recruitment to our calendar, as well as added strategic conversation topics around 1) member role/responsibility, and 2) financial strategy (https://share.mayfirst.org/s/WyKxiJ8C4gLbFxf). Notable personal projects OC members are taking on includes drafting revised onboarding material and a retrospective report on finances.

Updates from Community Working Group focused on turnover in active group members. There was no representative from Tech or Finance Working Groups.

See https://www.loomio.com/d/h5IKL7Td/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-27-march-thursday-1500-utc for notes.

20 March 2025

We reviewed and revised the documentation policy for Organizing Circle here https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Documenting_a_proposal. Folks were dropping off due to timezone changes and other scheduling issues so we decided that we would move the rest of the agenda to the next call.

We had an update from Tech WG that surfaced a conflict resolution framing from Courageous Conversations from Soul Fire Farm https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14rX3Dzab8-d3jSG_wQ8zovYy6vpyo23C0or0eWoETY8/edit#slide=id.p

Just want to express my appreciation for all of the careful, thoughtful work done by so many of you for the past several years, since social.coop got going.

The recaps are helpful and constructive.

27 February 2025

We had two policy formulations around financial strategy and capacity building resulting in the proposed policies and decisions below (no policy/decisions were finalized). Financial and Tech Working Groups have not met since our last meeting. Community Working Group had some minor issues with rotating meeting coordinator and reminds us all that we can call in users on problematic behavior without a formal report. Legal Working Groups continues to be in pre-launch mode.

Financial strategy

Context and Scope: We need to define a coop financial strategy to guide operations of the Finance Working Group to guide management of our financial resources to support social.coop activities, the broader fediverse, and promote inter-cooperation among coops. We are in the unique position to have more money then we are spending. Social.coop had our first annual budget last year and has not conducted an end of year report historically. We want to steward the resources of the group in a way that supports the broader fediverse community as well as our own co-op. Success here is ongoing abilities to pay direct costs incurred in operations and providing financial support to aligned organizations. We have an immediate need to plan for operational 2025 spending and a long term need of identifying broader financial strategies with the larger social.coop community. Both needs require an assessment of our past spending to identify operational costs and our capacity to support aligned organizations. (More here: https://www.loomio.com/d/ZIEx8Dt2/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-13-february-thursday-1500-utc and https://www.loomio.com/d/NQ3BIMqf/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-27-february-thursday-1500-utc )

Operational Financial Baseline

Policy Proposal: We ask the Financial Working Group to develop a report of our annual expenditures including defining appropriate income and spending categories by the end of April 2025 and beginning of January there after. Based on this report and any anticipated changes to the budget, we ask the Financial Working Group to develop a base operations budget to support core social.coop activities for the next calendar year and identify reserve levels to support these operations (ie our current reserves will support X years of baseline operational budget).

Metrics: The current reserves/balance from past reports should match https://opencollective.com/socialcoop and budgeted categories for upcoming calendar year approximate the end of year report spending for that year.

Term: We will re-evaluate in one year (March 2026).

Big Conversation: Strategic Financial Development

Decision Proposal: We will add a "Big Conversation" (see https://share.mayfirst.org/s/WyKxiJ8C4gLbFxf) on financial strategy with the larger community of social.coop to the topics list. We ask that Financial circle define what kind of guidance they are looking for from the community. We note that the following has surfaced in our discussions on this topic:

• need clarity on criteria for consideration, how does this spending support the values, mission, and aims of social.coop

• ongoing support of an organization has a higher impact then a one-off donation

• how can the process effectively leverage and build off of past discussions and decisions

(Since this is not ment to be referred to on an ongoing basis, we do not need a recorded policy here.)

Capacity building and onboarding

Context and scope: We need to enable ongoing member participation in social.coop discussions, operations and governance. We suggest sequencing: awareness, engage, educate, and evaluate. Here we define membership as contributions to social.coop in the following ways: microblogging, financial, strategic, operational, and social (see https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy). This may include: onboarding new members, filling skills gaps, recruitment for working groups, and broader conversations about the nature of cooperatives and commons in the context of social.coop. (More here: https://www.loomio.com/d/ZIEx8Dt2/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-13-february-thursday-1500-utc and https://www.loomio.com/d/NQ3BIMqf/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-27-february-thursday-1500-utc).

Decision Proposal: We will

• develop a policy on onboarding new members. This will include communication drafts, storyboarding new member journeys, metrics of success, and evaluation terms. This will go on our 2024 OC priorities calendar.

• develop a policy on working group recruitment. This should build in greater support for a sortition process as well as sequence awareness-engage-education and include an evaluation. This will go on our 2024 OC priorities calendar.

• add a broader conversation on the nature of cooperatives and commons in the context of social.coop to "Big Conversations"

(Since this is not ment to be referred to on an ongoing basis, we do not need a recorded policy here.)

See https://www.loomio.com/d/NQ3BIMqf/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-27-february-thursday-1500-utc for full notes.

13 February 2025

We consented to the priorities calendar, scoped out what a fiscal strategy might look like, and also scoped capacity building.

Calendar of topics:

Context: We have found that we tend to leave topics dangling or not get to strategic topics in favor of tending to operational discussions (aka burning fires).

Policy: We adopt the topics and calendar (https://share.mayfirst.org/s/WyKxiJ8C4gLbFxf) proposed in the share drive and move it over to a wiki page. Term: 6 month, reviewed in June 2025. Metrics of success: development of policy associated with these topics that everyone feels good about.

Fiscal strategies

Scope: We are in the unique position to have more money then we are spending. Social.coop had our first annual budget last year and has not conducted an end of year report historically. We want to root our financial spending in the value of promoting inter-cooperation among coops. We want to steward the resources of the group in a way that supports the broader fediverse community as well as our own co-op. We have an immediate need to access past spending and plan for 2025 spending. We have a long term need of identifying broader financial strategies with the larger social.coop community.

Capacity building

Scope: We see capacity building as member focused engagement to build our operational teams. This splits into the following phases: access, engage, educate, and revise. Broadly this can include thinking about skills gaps, recruitment needs for specific working groups, and broader conversations about the nature of cooperatives in the context of social.coop.

Working group updates:

• No updates from Finance

• Community is humming along with good handoff practices

• Tech is working an issue downloading contacts on Threads (looking to recover this from the backup). Mastodon upgrade is done, the alpha server is up, and we have a new server provider (yeah coops!). Four folks were on the last call and the group is working on onboarding. TWG 2025 Roadmap https://anagora.org/twg%202025 .

• Legal still struggling to get the first meeting scheduled

30 January 2025

We decided how to take the 2024 Organizing Circle 1000GBP stipend and discussed concerns around legal income in certain countries. (see notes for specifics). We also discussed priorities for 2025 and some emergent themes were: strategic guidance on financing, onboarding both general social.coop and working group members, setting up an equity assessment and planning group, ongoing improvement of OC documentation and operations, facilitating 'Big Topic' conversation with general social.coop (including: decision making process, and interaction with other instances), and capacity building for self governance and management work of social.coop.

Updates from working group:

• Finance - none

• Tech - Alpha instance is prototyping expanding the character limit and there was a backup taken before Threads was suspended. Working through some budgeting questions with new VPS.

• Community - Finalized discussions on how to implement Threads suspension (notification and such to social.coop mastodon). There were some visitors from other instances here to watch our practices (and some folks form the WG are going over there), very favorable impression and we should do more of this! Finally a reminder that not everything needs to be reported, there was an example of how to address issues via direct DM rather then through the reporting mechanisms.

• Legal - anyone who wants to help is welcome to try to get this first call scheduled!

Link to agenda and notes here: https://www.loomio.com/d/go0k1Nwv/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-30-january-thursday-1500-utc

@geesegoosesocial.coop Yep, Hometown has come up a few times as a popular alternative. I would have to check with @Flancian regarding past conversations about migration but I know it's been considered!

@Kathe TB Thanks for all your work!

Just joined in the past couple of weeks, thank you for having us. As a personal note in regards to Hometown: I (Emiliano, who manages this account) have had really good experiences with it in the server where I have my personal account (https://comicscamp.club). Dunno if this has any bearing on anyone else's opinion, but I personally like it. I am ok either way, though. :)

Thanks again, and solidarity!

16 January 2025

Happy New Year! After a break for the December holiday season, we spent much of the call touching base and re-grounding our work. We consented to the write up of the 2024 Organizing Circle work located here https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle#2024_Recap and we started building out a priority list for 2025 strategic discussions. We decided to move future working group updates to the end of the call to give ourselves enough time for strategic discussions.

Working group updates:

• Finance - Has an update on the community contribution budgeting: https://www.loomio.com/d/xTmPqphN/community-contributions-budgeting-an-end-of-year-short-update-from-finance-working-group and is working on documentation.

• Tech - Draft a roadmap for 2025: https://doc.anagora.org/twg-2025! We became members of iocoop.org, which allows us to spin up virtual servers that are coop hosted. And all are welcome to join TWG meetings.

• Community - Talking through the impact of the Threads votes: https://www.loomio.com/d/u1OkUA6M/clarity-on-stance-with-regards-to-threads/0 The working group is working on details on how to carry out the suspend status.

Full notes https://www.loomio.com/d/gSUZoM4r/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-16-january-thursday-1500-utc