Agenda

1500 [5 min] ADMIN:

• Who is here?

• Does anyone need to leave early?

• Confirm our next call on 13 March (Thursday) 1500 UTC

• Review recap from last call

  https://www.loomio.com/d/ZIEx8Dt2/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-13-february-thursday-1500-utc

• Who is note taking?

• Who is facilitating? Kathe

1505 [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 invent a holiday, what would you celebrate?

1515 [10 min] Agenda co-construction (potential items, topics discussed at previous meetings, work in progress) / Consent on the agenda

• 1525 [15 min] Financial strategy

Context: We need to define a coop financial strategy to guide operations of the Finance Working Group. This includes management of our financial resources to support social.coop activities and the broader fediverse. Specifically how do we ensure that our member donations are spent in alignment with organizational values ensuring ongoing operations of social.coop. This includes both accountability of past spending and anticipated future expenses. Success here is ongoing abilities to pay direct costs incurred in operations and providing financial support to develop a healthy fediverse. (Source: https://share.mayfirst.org/s/WyKxiJ8C4gLbFxf)

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. (More here: https://www.loomio.com/d/ZIEx8Dt2/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-13-february-thursday-1500-utc)

Round: Is this first round of scoping complete? Are there any points to add?

Formulation: Given what you have heard, what are the points that seem important to you to prioritize?

• 1540 [15 min] Capacity building (scope and formulation)

Context: We need to ensure that the coop has a robust pool of candidates to draw on for future working groups and ongoing member participation in operations and governance. We need to consider sequencing including access-engagement-education-operations. Specific skills include technical, administrative, and conflict resolution. (Source: https://share.mayfirst.org/s/WyKxiJ8C4gLbFxf)

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. (More here: https://www.loomio.com/d/ZIEx8Dt2/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-13-february-thursday-1500-utc)

Round: Is this first round of sensemaking complete? Are there any points to add?

Formulation: Given what you have heard, what are the points that seem important to you to prioritize?

• 1555 [10 min] Reviewing documentation (scoping)

https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Documenting_a_proposal

1605 [5 min] Updates from working circles

• Finance

• Tech

• Community

• Legal - defunct

1610 [5 min] Updates: What is the status of your to-do items? Can someone help you?

• Call a round to check in with people

1615 [5 min] Tasks: What are you taking out of this call as a task or todo item?

1620 [10 min] Feedback: What worked well with this call and what could be improved? Explain why.

Regarding the fiscal policy discussion, one thing I intend to bring up is our role in supporting the technical innovation that can advance the federation and decentralization on the internet

If I borrow terminology from Ben Tarnoff's Internet for the people, there are multiple layers of that stack, social.coop belongs to the "platform" layer, we previously donated to coop-cloud which belongs to the "cloud" layer, but not sure if we have adopted a position on other layers including the "pipes" (e.g. community networks and connectivity justice projects like EII in Detroit)

So what Intend to ask is: should our community contribution become a fiscal policy where we continually explore other projects that can benefit from our support and highlight them then propose a contribution to a subset of them?

@Ammar I like the cross-stack approach. I also think the 6th cooperative principle, Intercooperation, should guide these decisions. I am happy with the way the FWG created and facilitated the discussion and decision-making on who to donate to, if they are willing to do it again, maybe with support from one of us?

@MarieVC (social.coop/@MarieVC) Sorry for the delay, I wrote up a recap from the scoping rounds just now. Could you update the agenda?

@Kathe TB I've updated the agenda, is this what you had in mind? Thanks for the invaluable recap work!

Notes

1500 [5 min] ADMIN:

• Who is here? Kathe, Ammar, Calix, Mitt, Eduardo, Caitlin

• Does anyone need to leave early? Leaving 15 minutes early  -CW

• Confirm our next call on 13 March (Thursday) 1500 UTC - Kathe is going to be on travel and Edu M will plan on facilitating

• Review recap from last call

• https://www.loomio.com/d/ZIEx8Dt2/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-13-february-thursday-1500-utc

• Who is note taking? Matt

• Who is facilitating? Kathe

1505 [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 invent a holiday, what would you celebrate? Nap day ftw!

1515 [10 min] Agenda co-construction (potential items, topics discussed at previous meetings, work in progress) / Consent on the agenda

1525 [15 min] Financial strategy (formulation)
Context: We need to define a coop financial strategy to guide operations of the Finance Working Group. This includes management of our financial resources to support social.coop activities and the broader fediverse. Specifically how do we ensure that our member donations are spent in alignment with organizational values ensuring ongoing operations of social.coop. This includes both accountability of past spending and anticipated future expenses. Success here is ongoing abilities to pay direct costs incurred in operations and providing financial support to develop a healthy fediverse. (Source: https://share.mayfirst.org/s/WyKxiJ8C4gLbFxf)
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. How can Organizing Circle support Financial WG? (More here: https://www.loomio.com/d/ZIEx8Dt2/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-13-february-thursday-1500-utc)

Round: Is this first round of scoping complete? Are there any points to add? Is this complete enough to move forward with brainstorming?
- OK

Formulation Round: What can we do to accomplish and address this scope?

- Identify base costs as obligations
- Surplus then distributed via a particpatory budgeting process
- Nomination of  organizations - can we recycle 2024 list instead of starting from scratch? While keeping door open to new ideas.
- Ask FWG for year over year report on income/expenses. Budget for 2025 obligatory expenses: servers, tech svces, stipends for WGs, based on 2024/2023 spending.
- data science: visualization of contributions and spending over time
- policy regarding how much $ do we need to keep in reserves? (add to base costs?) Need to specify purposes/uses of reserves and criteria for the amount/%.
- Expansion: should we try to provide more value to our members (with additional services)? Put this in budget.
- Pay for outside consulting: Legal WG support, set aside $ for legal services? Equity planning outside consultant? Cooperative engagement assessment/consultation? 
- Keeping in mind: continuity of support is an headache, create long term relationships
- Identify: % members who use Social.Coop but do not contribute, tracking that (until now, it is/was alright to not contribute)
- prioritizing fediverse moderation in supporting groups (e.g. IFTAS?)
Summary
part one: basics
- Retrospective analysis: Yes
- Obligatory costs analysis, tracking, budgeting: Yes
- Annual cadence for reports: Yes
part two: what are we doing with our surplus?
- Exciting discussion about stewarding surplus for benefit of SC and our broader community, might want to broaden this to include others
issues:
- How can we increase engagement and build on collective intelligence for broader discussion?
- Co-op responsibility in Social.Coop -- open a space for discussing this and related issues (rotation of tasks/roles, etc.)
- how to streamline participatory budgeting process? rank choice vote between a set of buckets? Call for guiding principles, prioritized?

1600 [15 min] Capacity building (Formulation)
Context: We need to ensure that the coop has a robust pool of candidates to draw on for future working groups and ongoing member participation in operations and governance. We need to consider sequencing including access-engagement-education-operations. Specific skills include technical, administrative, and conflict resolution. (Source: https://share.mayfirst.org/s/WyKxiJ8C4gLbFxf)

Scope: We see capacity building as member focused engagement to build our operational teams. 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 splits into the following phases: awareness, 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 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)

Round: Is this first round of sensemaking complete? Are there any points to add? Is this good enough to move onto formulation?

- need to define members? by participation/contribution https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy 
- focus on developing ourselves as cooperativists, commoners (would love the reference please!). :).
- Access => member awareness of what is possible to do is first step

Formulation: How could we acomplish or address these needs? -- lets divide these into domains/topics
- Onboarding process should be part of this discussion -- design a journey
-- onboarding for S.C. and for working groups 
-- include a survey (Matt has an example)
- ongoing conversations (like Cecosesola
- greater use of sortition
- Isn't this related to the idea of co-responsability and participation, if everyone has to give a few hours of work during the year? We cannot love what we don't know. 

• - then we have to track this! and come up with what happens if it isn't done :(

- Social.Coop = "commons-cooperativist platform" 
- Micromoderations and more: read the https://fediverse-governance.github.io/ 

TABLED TO NEXT MEETING:
1555 [10 min] Reviewing documentation (scoping)
https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Documenting_a_proposal

Round1: What works well?
Round2: What is not working well with this policy?

1615 [5 min] Updates from working circles

• Finance - not met

• Tech - not met

• Community

  • Working trhough some minor issues with coordinator rotation

  • Reminder that social interventions via DM on mastodon can work well - micromoderation. Building social realtionships

  • -  MicroModeration as by-stander intervention 

  • see fediverse papers

• Legal - defunct

1620 [5 min] Updates: What is the status of your to-do items? Can someone help you?

• Call a round to check in with people

1615 [5 min] Tasks: What are you taking out of this call as a task or todo item?
Matt: find Leo S piece on social.coop finances
Matt: pick up onboarding conversation with Marie and Eduardo
Kathe: proposals for finance, working group, recaps
Ammar: read fediverse papers
Caitlin (via Matt): ask FWG to discuss how OC can support
Calix: re-read participatory budgeting process from last year
Eduardo: go back to onboarding process and integrate these ideas, meeting to revise/revive onboarding
Marie: happy to participate, agenda and reminders. Agenda and recaps are daunting and important work!

1620 [10 min] Feedback: What worked well with this call and what could be improved? Explain why.

- Scoping/formulation distiction is good and useful here.
- Still other things we need to talk about.
- Gratitude to Ammar and Calix for new perspectives.
- Like silent reading -  very helpful, and peaceful
- efficient, no particular suggestions
- love how diverse views enrich discussion, always grateful and marvel at this
- sometimes get lost in levels of meta, but that may be me
- we should all be able to facilitate in this way
- like the way we can open up a discussion, find threads, and re-integrate it, not something that happens everywhere
- tackling big topics, carving off topics

Recap

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.)

Future agenda suggestions

I'm suggesting round prompts and timings below, these are flexible and ment to be guidelines. @Eduardo Mercovich and @MarieVC (social.coop/@MarieVC) thoughts?

[15 min] Review - Documenting OC proposals
https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Documenting_a_proposal

• Solo: Take 3 minutes are review the policy above.

• Round: What are your clarifying questions?

• Round: What worked well with this policy?

• Round: What needs to change with this policy?

[10 min] Decision - Financial Operational Baseline

• Round: What are your clarifying questions on this proposal?

• Round: Does Finance Working Group need more capacity to generate this report?

• Round: Do we consent?

[5 min] Decision - Financial Strategic Development in Big Conversation

• Round: What are your clarifying questions on this proposal?

• Round: Do we consent?

[10 min] Decision - Onboarding and capacity building

• Round: What are your clarifying questions on this proposal?

• Round: What are your reactions to this proposal?

• Round: Do we consent?

[10 min] Scoping - Big Conversations

Context and scope: We need to have clearer lines of communication between the working groups and general membership of social.coop both (Loomio and Mastodon users). We want this to facilitate feedback on current operations and spark new directions for the coop. Specifically we would like to center discussions on how to

1. improve general decision/voting process, and

2. strategize how to interact with Fediverse (both corporate instances like Threads and other cooperative instances like cosocial.ca). Recent work in this space, like the publication of the Fediversalist Papers study in which Social.coop participated, must be taken into account.

3. Co-responsability and participation, it doesn’t have to be money, but since we are a coop, do we require something to give back? Do we want everyone to –for example- have a bit of time per year on moderation? (so as to better know and understand what needs to be done behind the curtains for everyone to have a good experniece)?

4. [pending decision above Financial and onboarding topics added here]

Round: Is this context clear?

Round: Is there additional scope that needs to be considered?