Dear All,

The agenda for the next meeting is ready. Last time, we experimented with building the core part of the agenda together, using the elements highlighted in yellow.

I will incorporate the additional elements that the OC members might suggest on Monday 6 May. I'll send a reminder for the meeting (PM via Mastodon) at that time too.

Notes

1200 [5 min] ADMIN

• Who is here? Kathe, Caitlin, Marie, Matt, Flancian

• Does anyone need to leave early?

• Confirm our next call on 21 May (Tuesday) 1200 UTC

• Review recap from last call

• https://www.loomio.com/d/U7Trdp3o/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-23-april-tuesday-1200-utc/4

• Who is note taking? Matt

• Who is facilitating? Kathe

1205 [10 min] Check in:

• How are you showing up today? What are you bringing into the space? [https://www.nycnvc.org/feelings]

• If you could have any view from your office window (or the place where you spend most of your time indoors), what would you choose? Explain why.

1215 [5 min] Agenda construction:

• Short term proposal dev, backlog items

• Recruit new member to replace Jon Allsop, asking for two reps instead of one

1220 [5 min] Updates: What is the status of your to-do items? Can someone help you?

• Call a round to check in with people

• Eduardo - Sage3, more powerful than Miro if you connect it to your own docs, less polished in UI, designed for scientists, FLOSS + requires more commitment, have to install software

• Kathe posted recap and wrote annual rhythms

• Flancian: how did we get to sage3/miro as tools? What kind of task do we want to organize?

  • Kathe: we wanted to use this to visualize organizational structure, etc.

  • See also https://alternativeto.net/software/miro--formerly-realtimeboard/?license=opensource

  • Excalidraw is open (yet also hosted) and easy to use

• Where to keep to do items? 

  • http://scrumblr.ca/ ? (to evaluate).

• Flan: set up PWs for Nextcloud, linking loomio to wiki (not done)

• Meta: it would help if we had all todo items in one place. It could still be the default agenda template.

  • Marie: will copy the todo list at the end of each meeting to the agenda for the next meeting.

• Matt: had a conversation with X (who?) but it still hasn't settled. CWG update incoming.

• Marie: agenda, reminder - did both

• Caitlin: I got nothing!

1225 [5 min] Updates from working circles

• Finance - participatory budgeting process: $3400 to donate to other orgs promoting cooperative causes, in two rounds - 6mos apart; dot poll;  FWG decided to make $400 donation to Loomio to make up for paying less than appropriate rate.

  • Q: 

    • is https://www.loomio.com/d/eBaTPliz/planning-for-participatory-budgeting-contributions the source of truth for this process?

    • has this been announced in the instance proper (e.g. posted on mastodon)? Not yet. Caitlin will send announcement to Flan or get Mastodon permissions to post announcements

• Tech - flancian

  • Our minutes are at https://www.loomio.com/d/UwAeiBgE/tech-meeting-minutes (maybe only open to people in the TWG?) and https://doc.anagora.org/social-coop-tech-group (where we write them down; open)

  • Hosted open house - 9 people, sharing, road map discussion and feedback, meeting notes are in same loomio thread

  • Welcomed new members!

    • Evan and Dan

  • Our consensus-take on accessibility day

  • Our take on character limit

  • want to have a dev instance, alpha.social.coop so people can participate in dev process

• Community - 

  • vote to approve new members

  • diversity concern

    • at-large positions as a way to tackle this concern; they offer the possibility to participate without taking on the burden of e.g. oncall work

    • Kathe: we should have the conversation to support higher diversity in all working groups

  • Matt: one small thing that we found can have impact is the scheduling of meetings

  • Kathe: is the issue retention or recruitment?

• Legal - defunct

1230 [5 min] Update: What was said by the group in active Loomio threads. Do we need to respond to anything or integrate something into our discussion?

• alt text for World Sight Day and the Global Accessibility Awareness Day

  • TWG discussed it, want to do something for accessibility, but not ready for this May, risk of breaking things by eliminating images... 

    • alternatives: contribute as co-op to Mastodon project accessibility features

    • add mastodon feature requiring alt text, prompting for alt text

    • Need to help people learn how to write good alt text

  • start a new thread on proposals on this issue, aiming at October; pulse check...

  • high visibilty vs operational utility

  • tie new thread to announcement of result of poll on the original proposal

  • Eduardo offering to help on design of new feature

• Post length

  • short posters vs long posters

  • https://www.loomio.com/d/0bCHvrTj/expand-the-character-limit-for-posts-toots-in-our-mastodon-instance

  • flancian: some data from around the fediverse (from the last twg meeting): https://gist.github.com/shleeable/101b131653c0ff0e21a81bf99a31c7f0 

  • eduardo: debate in unproductive framework: preferences, hard to decide on this basis, "safe enough to try good enough for now" would be better basis... try it for one month?

  • Kathe: how decisions are usually made on SC, consent vs majority rule... 

  • Marie: "read more" solution seems good, 1,000 is safe/good enough

  • Flan: "read more" is already used (need to check code to be sure). Personal belief vs practices of the group. Frame it as would it negatively impact your experience if others have 1,000 (3,000, 5,000) characters? 

  • Caitlin: impact on moderators? on our cooperative culture? hand this off to CWG?

  • Flan: little or no impact on moderation, probably

  • Matt: +1 -- on the moderation front it might be even easier if it's a longer post, as that provides more context to extract a signal from. Otherwise we end up having to go to the user profile, see conversation thread, etc.

  • Matt: on the decision framework; it would not be unusual to 'try it for six months and see what happens'. Let's try [1,000 characters] for [six] months on safe/good enough basis. Who will propose it? OC?

  • Kathe: would suggest we also define a framework for evaluation (of complexity and results).

  • Eduardo: like the idea of offering people help to customize their experience as needed (e.g. how to switch to a different client or adjust preferences); maximize freedom w/out causing harm

  • TO DO: Matt and Eduardo. Make new proposal: Let's try [1,000 characters] for [six] months on safe/good enough basis with survey of user experience. 

1235 [10 min] Formulation: Replacing Jon A and expanding group to include 2 members from each working group.

• Move to loomio thread?

1245 [10 min] Formulation: What does a compensation log looking for OC and how can we encourage other WG to log? https://share.mayfirst.org/apps/files/?dir=/CWG&scrollto=Community%20Working%20Group%20Compensation%20Log.xlsx

1255 [15 min] Formulation: Annual patterns and what kinds of conversations need to be tracked

• Move to loomio thread?

1310 [10 min] Tasks: What are you taking out of this call as a task or todo item?

• [Kathe] Write recap, start 'formulation' topic discussions on the loomio thread for this agenda

• [flancian] respond to thread about accessibility day with counter-proposals

• [flancian] experiment with embedding loomio/nextcloud in the wiki

• [flancian] publish announcement for participatory finances once we get that

• [Matt/Eduardo]: Make new proposal about post length: Let's try [1,000 characters] for [six] months on safe/good enough basis with survey of user experience. 

• [Matt]: set up sample OC comp log based on CWG model

• [Marie]: Agenda create - note to copy the TODO list, reminder

• [Caitlin]: participatory budgeting process announcement (with Flan's help)

1320 [10 min] Feedback: What worked well with this call and what could be improved? Where would you like more flexibility in this circle? Where would you like more structure? Explain why.

• continue pedal pushing

• missed a couple of meetings, grateful for warmth, nice to experience congregation for common good

• great to be with people who are cooperative minded, it's fun

• happy to join, really appreciate focus on two loomio threads, important for community

• grateful for use of rounds

• great that issue of CWG burden was raised, enjoy finishing the meeting with sense of keeping work within this space as much as possible

Backlog items: The items below are not on the active agenda but should be addressed at some point in the future

• Communications: should there be a SC newsletter?? (like GEO newsletter)

• Tools Exploration

  • SAGE 3 https://sage3.sagecommons.org/?page_id=921

• Long term strategy

  • How do we deal with liability as an organization? Do we need to consider some kind of incorporation or legal entity? If so where?

  • Strategically, how do we provide a framework for the Finance WG to budget overall and help manage surplus?

  • "Maintenance care", how to support TWG and its members (cf. xy crisis driven by single mantainer)

  • Compensation log

  • Offering bounties $ to support open source projects or coop efforts

• Short term proposal dev

  • Ask working groups for TWO reps instead of one.

  • Check in on group condition, engagement level, look at moving forward with (a)synchronous engagement

  • Loomio OC Group private/public https://www.loomio.com/d/Vt7LCaPM/using-loomio-for-our-group

  • Ask for training on 'what it means to be an admin' to orientate new admins

  • Annual patterns https://www.loomio.com/d/EVT5dfyO/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-7-may-tuesday-1200-utc/2

  • Contact Finance, and Community for joint meetings topic: How can we help?

Recap

Today we focused on updates from the working circles/groups and tracking two major discussions on Loomio.

Finance Working Group is still finalizing the list of organizations for participatory budgeting. Current plan is to move forward with dot voting to allocate $3400 (USD) in two rounds. During the gathering of this list it was uncovered that we are underpaying for our Loomio services given our community size (possibly grandfathered in?). FWG decided to reallocate ~$400 (USD) from the 'donation' pool to rectify this, moving forward this might be an explicit budget item.

Tech Working Group is in the process of standing up a development server alpha.social.coop to help train new members and create a sandbox to test out new features. There were two new members who are onboarding. The open house was successful with feedback on a roadmap for the working group collected. Meeting agenda's and notes for TWG can be found here: https://www.loomio.com/d/UwAeiBgE/tech-meeting-minutes (maybe only open to people in the TWG?) and https://doc.anagora.org/social-coop-tech-group (where we write them down; open).

Community Working Group is realizing how complicated their workflow is with about 9 different platforms involved in moderation. CWG did vote to approve new members. There may be a diversity problem emerging (said 4 white men with facial hair); CWG is looking to fill an 'at-large' (most advisory) position to help remedy this without putting additional burden on under represented groups. There is likely a broader discussion around inclusivity in recruitment vs rendition to be had across the working groups and circles to be had at a later date.

Loomio discussions: There are two major loomio discussions we are tracking: expanding word count, and alt text images.

• https://www.loomio.com/d/C4HKmTOa/proposal-to-revisit-extending-the-character-limit-for-posts This is an old idea that which has seen renewed interest! Folks are interested in expanding the character limit for mastodon posts from 500 to 1000. It was proposed as a majority vote with a block option. May of the opposition votes are personal preferences (based on comments) with no block votes at this time. After some discussion we propose a term decision (~6 months was suggested) with evaluation metrics (workload shifts for moderation, negative impact on user experience), Matt with Eduado will compose a counter proposal and see if this moves through the Loomio community under a consent style vote.

• https://www.loomio.com/d/gdjfsyx8/would-people-be-interested-in-disabling-images-in-favour-of-alt-text-for-world-sight-day-and-the-global-accessibility-awareness-day- This thread to disable images to center alt text in recognition of World Sight Day and Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Tech Working Group has evaluated the proposal and it would break the upload feature given the current state of the platform. Instead they propose possible feature expansion of the Mastodon source code to encourage good practices around alt text creation. This would be less visible but have a higher potential impact. Paired with this suggestion is a suggestion of funding software 'bounties' to encourage feature development. @Flancian will follow up on these suggestions.

We did not get to the more strategic discussions on the agenda today but will prioritize discussing the following on https://www.loomio.com/d/EVT5dfyO/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-7-may-tuesday-1200-utc : expanding representation in OC from the working groups from one to two members, annual patterns of strategic topics, and compensation logs w/ how to encourage working members to take pay.