Great! @Alex Rodriguez, let’s find time to chat about legal.

@Alex Rodriguez Tagging in @Caitlin Waddick, Finance Working Group for Social.Coop and Organizing Circle @Flancian and @Matt Noyes here who might have more information.

Thanks for the updates! Who is involved in possibly standing up the Legal WG? I have some relevant experience that I'd love to share with them.

28 August 2024

In Organizing Circle we decided to pass of work that @Eduardo Mercovich did on drafting a new 'new members' onboarding email. We started a discussion on how to deal with the stipend budget allocated to the OC, and uncovered some objections and desires for clarity (no decision was reached and we will continue with a scoping and sense-making session next call). In the works are calls with MayFirst and Bonfire to increase connection and Fediverse/cooperative information exchange.

Updates:

• Tech WG is onboarding new members and has transferred the domain host (Gandi) credentials to the collective holding.The recent OC-TWG meeting was not well attended and we will try again in September (tentatively September 23 at 1830 UTC).

• Community WG had very good feedback from their public posting on how the recent anti-racist issue played out (https://www.loomio.com/d/SndQxA2g/statement-from-moderation-team-involving-recent-racism-reports). Vote is out to offically approve new members!

• Finance WG is having a lot of discussion on process and documentation of that process, particularly for expensing and dispersement of stipends. FWG is actively asking all WG and Circles to decide how they want to spend their allocated Stipend. There were open questions raised about how to contextualize the open books that social.coop already has via https://opencollective.com/socialcoop, possibly by an annual transparency report. Another point was brought up on how to get the organization to be billed directly rather then individuals.

• Legal WG is possibly waking from slumber. It was never really stood up but there are some threads floating around on how to get the right expertise together around this topic. Stay tuned.

14 August 2024

We had a very quick meeting (30 minutes!) that mostly focused on updates with several members needed to leave early.

Organizing Circle (subset) and Community Working Group members met on 1 August. Overall there is a strong interest in community building (both internally and externally) in this group, including UI/UX development for onboarding new members. There was a strong frustration with Loomio as a platform both in tracking the outcome of votes and in navigating large threads. There is a recognized need for more DEI support (there was a anti-racists reporting actively being dealt with at the time of the meeting). There were no signs that the group felt overburdened or overwhelmed with moderation duties at this time.

Historically social.coop required new members to join a working group, as a result Community Working Group is technically quite large and only a smaller core of people are actually operationally active. CWG and the Ops team was historically two groups, one focused on proactive community building and the other on moderation. The Ops team has effectively become CWG at this point and there is a desire to do more proactive community building moving forward. I (@Kathe TB) wonder if there might be a need for more clearly defined domains and aims for the group. There was broad support for a quarterly check in.

Working group updates

• Community: Planning a report-out from recent anti-racism moderation, currently in draft. Met with Organizing Circle members (report out above)

• Finance: Meeting currently in planning phase.

• Tech: No one to give update on call.

• Legal - defunct (considering merge with Finance)

There were no active Loomio discussions.

31 July 2024

Main take aways from today's conversation touched on: upcoming meetings between OC and working groups, better onboarding of new members, federating the fediverse, and anti-racist moderation. Tech WG is continuing to move forward with the alpha server and had some updates on the character limit requested change to Mastodon. Community WG is working through a sticky bit of anti-racist moderation. Finance WG is prep-ing for the meeting with Organizing Circle.

OC and WG meetings: We have a meeting on the calendar between Community WG and the Organizing committee tomorrow, Tech WG tentatively scheduled for late August, and Finance WG is organizing a scheduling poll. To remind folks, this is to make sure that OC understand what the WGs are doing and how OC can better support the WGs.

Onboarding: This topic emerged in two ways, instance registration specifically and member engagement more broadly. From an instance registration prospective we want to make this process more transparent, specifically enable folks to track their registration request as it goes through process better. More broadly this could be part of an overall push to increase member involvement in operations of the coop. @Flancian will take on moving the registration project forward with Tech and we'll continue to talk about member engagement in OC as a backlog item.

Federating the fediverse: An interesting side discussion emerged about better integrating with other fediverse instances. This was brought up as a way to bring stronger asks to the Mastodon developers (see below on character limits). And there is an ongoing recognition that we can trade lessons learned and best practices with other instances. This surfaced prior conversations around how to deal with Meta and other misaligned instances on the server. We'll continue to talk about this in OC as a backlog item.

Anti-racists moderation: There was an report recently on some interactions around race (someone disregarding the lived experience of racism on Mastodon vs other social media sites) that caused a bit of a dog-pile on the server and resulting in a lot of visibility. The first report was very nicely done, being informative and respectful, and the community moderation team feels that we have a good process in place to handle this. There is ongoing discussion in how to continue to handle this and the Community WG is meeting to discuss things further.

Updates

Tech working group (notes https://doc.anagora.org/social-coop-tech-group?edit )

• Proposed date for OC meeting with the OG: August 26 at 18 UTC (possibly 19 UTC TBD)

• Character limits: Still working through alpha.social.coop as a dev platform. However the proposal to Mastodon to make the character limit a environmental variable (allowing instances to set this in a config file rather then maintain a separate fork) was reject with only moderate engagement (see https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/30091#issuecomment-2241565907). But this does open the door for the conversation! It brought up how things are decided for Mastodon development (one main dev with a closed team of trusted advisor) being very stable but also very hard to accept community driven change. Could provide additional motivation to federate with other instances to give this a stronger voice. (see discussion above on Federating the Fediverse)

• Single sign on coordination (ETA Q4-2024): Moving to a single sign-on service would streamline registration and other processes, but this would be a big shift for our community. How can we lay the groundworks for this as a possible shift? Tentative roll out Q4 of this year. This will get added to our back-log discussion.

• Registrations issue: We have a known issue with a convoluted registration process for new users. New users can get caught up in the spam filter and we just go radio silent on their application. We need a better way to provide feedback and transparency to users as they sign up. Currently we are using a bespoke piece of software for this and it shouldn't be too much tech trouble to rework. @Flancian will stand up a small working group to explore design and solicit feedback on the new process.

• Loomio to Mastodon cross post: Nathan's Loomio cross posting to Mastodon proposal https://git.coop/social.coop/tech/operations/-/issues/81 This is currently a working prototype and would help connect the Mastodon instance to our operations and governance better. We'll be watching this with enthusiasm.

Community working group

• See conversation about Anti-racists moderation above. This was framed initially as a 'flat footed' response on a controversial topic (Kathe: I applogize if anti-racism doesn't capture spirit of discussion, let me know and I'll edit this comment). Additional suggestion to increase transparency of both the process to respond to reports by social.coop and to consider a specific after instance report; both were floated as suggestions rather then mandates.

Finance working group

• Primarily working on scheduling the OC meeting. Could be interesting to explore how Finance sees their role in social.coop and what work is actually being done here. This could be a lot more aligned with 'legal' then is implied in the name.

17 July 2024

Recap

Decisions:

We accepted a more specific policy on documenting policies (so meta) https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Documenting_a_proposal

Formulating discussions:

There were some formulating discussions around the https://www.loomio.com/d/BtVCdq01/annual-rhythms-of-organizing-circle-

• Keep:

  • Past-present-future structure of the year

  • Good reminder to revisit standing topics

  • Visioning as a co-op is especially good, can we pull in more member engagement

• Change:

  • Focus less on the how and more on the why. How can change each year.

  • Add calendar deadlines (budget! and other working group contributions)

  • Add check ins with fincal sponsor (innovation.coop) and member platforms (meet.coop and mayfirst.coop)

  • Expand to include social.coop not just organizing circle

Updates:

• Finance: No recent meeting to report out. Plan in the works to meet with OC in near future. Still going through community contribution budgeting process.

• Tech: Security update implemented. Unrelated (?) preformance issues that seem to have stabilized. New Virtual Product Server (VPS) stood up for alpha site. Backup testing on new VPS also under development.

• Community: Business as usual. Meeting with OC scheduled. Will be running a poll on Loomio to officially elect new CWG members.

• Legal: Officially defunct but some mutterings about merging with Financial. Not having a legal framework is fine until it's VERY not fine.

Loomio threads tracking: Potential reviving of reading groups?

3 July 2024

Today we focused on clearing some low hanging decisions from our backlog, reviewed some new documentation, and heard updates from the working groups.

We are going to move forward with some listening sessions this summer with the main working groups (Tech, Community, and Financing). These sessions will focus on understanding what the working group currently does and how we can better support them in their work. We hope to have this complete by end of summer.

We are going to schedule some time on calls for a walk through of our 'Admin' access to the mastodon server. We spent a bit of time discussing a possible seminar or workshop series as an outreach/onboarding tool to encourage member engagement with operations. This series feels like a big lift.

We have a wiki page https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle that was overall favorably seen. Called out specifically was the link to loomio threads and groups, sketch of the agendas, simple language, and layout of the decision log. Suggested revisions are to pull out the links from the text and move them to a list at the bottom of the section, as well as adding an annual rhythm for overall meeting topics that includes regular revision of the wiki.

No circle updates today. Our next call will be on July 17th.

https://www.loomio.com/d/xUDqgTRa/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-3-july-wednesday-1200-utc/4

19 June 2024

Our main topic of discussion today was centered on the wiki development. We also heard updates from Community and Tech working groups, as well as ongoing circle projects.

Wiki: Referring to the proposal outlined here https://www.loomio.com/d/kuVrqiLv/wiki-page-for-organizing-circle/2, we went through and reviewed the structure that @Eduardo Mercovich pulled together (gratitude for your work here!). We decided to draft two wiki pages incorporating the below feedback into this original proposed structure.

• Good introduction to the page with a kick-off paragraph of what to expect/purpose on the page.

• Overall a 'new to Social Coop' section is fantastic but probably deserves it's own page, we recommend cross linking this page in a side-bar or header/footer sections.

• Current agreements/policy section should get pealed off to it's own page. Note to integrate the review of these pages into the annual rhythms moving forward.

• Current working topics as well as the minutes/notes will require a lot of maintenance to keep up with. We decided to link in the general 2024 recaps loomio thread here instead https://www.loomio.com/d/QBtcgaOq/organizing-circle-recaps-2024-

• We were torn on including a members list. There were some concerns that this might be burdensome to keep up to date. We pinned this for future discussion

• We lined the operations section here as well as the origin/creation story for the group.

We had updates from Tech and Community working groups today. Community working group is instituting a coordinator role shadow to help folks decide what they would like to take on. The 'At-large' advisory position is working out particularly well for broadening input and feedback into the group. Tech working group is currently at a bit of a lull with no major issues to drive activity. Hometown is looking somewhat inactive with no new updates in the last 6 months (contacting devs to see if it is appropriate for larger instances like ours). The dev instance is up and running; work on expanding the character limit is paused pending dev bandwidth and interest. We touched on some minor truncation and token issues with registration forms.

We hope to have the wiki up for feedback next time and start planning visits to the working groups to formulate annual rhythms and better serve operations of social coop.

https://www.loomio.com/d/RtGvSgIJ/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-19-june-wednesday-1200-utc

4 June 2024

New members: Organizing circle mostly discussed the possibility of onboarding new members into the organizing circle. We didn't come to a decision and instead identified trade-offs between just filling the empty At-Large seat and asking for working circles to consider sending 2 members. We had already asked for a second member from Finance WC in previous meetings and hopefully they will join us next call. Trade-offs identified include double linked working circles redundant reporting, larger groups leading to slower decisions, and asking more time from members already volunteering.

Wiki: We also discussed wiki. We want the wiki to provide both onboarding information as well as document decisions and policy made by the circle. @Eduardo Mercovich very kindly took over setting up wiki pages for us. We need to work this into our pattern of work to keep updated and still need to integrate how we are going to revisit items at the end of the term.

21 May 2024

Today we had brief updates from the working groups, checked in on the conclusion of the character limit Loomio discussion, and then talked through sense-making with the compensation/stipends.

Working group updates were brief, no new developments from Finance nor Community working groups. We didn't have a representative from tech reporting in. Community working group is still discussing the diversity issue. From this diversity and engagement discussion, we are going to investigate contacting MayFirst and see how they approached member engagement and collective governance.

Loomio threads: https://www.loomio.com/d/C4HKmTOa/proposal-to-revisit-extending-the-character-limit-for-posts/32 The character limit thread resolved without intervention from Operating Circle in alignment with how we were going to suggest. We are curious if folks want help tracking the re-evaluation deadline in 6 months. No other active threads were identified.

We decided to break off topical discussions from the agenda threads into their own threads on the Organizing Circle for better visibility. We will spin off threads on: compensation, annual patterns, increasing WG representation on OC, OC wiki page development, and conversation with MayFirst.

Compensation: For context, Finance Working Group has allotted a set amount of money for each working group for stipends or compensation. Working Groups decide how to allocate this amongst the members. At issue is a reluctance of people to actually draw those stipends. Some reasons that were discussed were: tax implications, difficulty moving money, and questions about valuing time vs experience. We generally recognized the value in tracking labor to support the operations of social coop as part of making the collective sustainable. We will revisit this topic next meeting and start a Loomio thread for asynchronous discussion.

Our meeting times are shifting to accommodate planting schedules. We will meet Wednesday June 5 at 1200UTC.

https://www.loomio.com/d/NxT5QSKh/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-21-may-tuesday-1200-utc

7 May 2024

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.

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

23 April 2024

We seem to be settling into a pattern for the agendas in Organizing Circle:

1. Opening with check-ins and agenda co-construction

2. Updates - member ToDo followups and operational circle reports

3. Community discussions - tracking Loomio thread conversations

4. Open agenda items

5. Close out - member ToDos, circle backlog, and feedback on process

Updates

• Finance Working Group is experimenting with participatory budgeting for our donations/support to related FOSS projects. Some glitches getting the right Loomio format set up but learning a lot about this process.

• Tech Working Group had a successful open house! Word is they are considering doing more in the future.

• Community Working Group is mentoring and training new moderators (woho!).

• Legal Working Group is still defunct.

Open items

We are following the Loomio thread on disabling images very closely as a use-case for how to propose action items from the larger community to an operational circle. We'll be following up with Tech Working Group and the Loomio community afterwards for feedback and look into developing guidance. We are curious where the agenda and minutes for the Tech Working Group is? We had some questions on disabling images and realized none of us knew where their minutes were.

Several new idea's were discussed including: asking for two rather then one member from each working group to attend Operational Circle, developing annual patterns for regular strategic items, and visiting each working group with the ask "How can we help?".

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

9 April 2024

Today I suspect we had some timezone crosses with the EU switch. We still had a good showing with over half of Organizing Circle attending. Our next call is going to be in two weeks (April 23) at 1200UTC.

We had some check-in on personal to-do items and other working group activities in social.coop. We heard back from @MarieVC (social.coop/@MarieVC) and @Kathe TB about their experimentation with Loomio decisions and wikipedia documentation; expect a decision thread on this shortly. We started talking through operational roles and how to support redundancy in this group (see backlog for additional items).

Meeting agenda, notes, and recap are here: https://www.loomio.com/d/MOtve6Tw/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-9-april-tuesday-1200-utc