19 December 2024

Today we revised the 2024 recap and made a plan for feedback/dissemination to social coop. We also selected a new At-Large member to start at the New Year!

2024 Organizing Circle Recap

Broadly our activities over 2024 broke down into three categories: how we do things in Organizing Circle, coordination activities across working groups with Social.coop and started broad discussions on various topics. We 1) held regular meetings every other week, 2) developed a sense of team, and 3) decided to operate Organizing Circle mostly following Sociocracy patterns with formal agendas, facilitation, note taking, and documented our discussions/decisions on the wiki and in loomio threads. We facilitated coordination between working groups (Tech, Finance, and Community) by exchanging regular updates in our meetings and setting up meetings between Organizing Circle and each working group during the fall. We improved and updated documentation on wikipedia. Finally we started several important discussions on a range of topics including social.coop decision making structures, compensation, and onboarding, as well as collaboration with the external cooperative movement.

We are particularly proud of how we operate as a circle, although there are places to improve. We created a safe/brave space where each member is heard by the rest of the group and created good C-factor in the group (reference from Luis Razeto Migliaro) https://geo.coop/articles/how-create-solidarity-enterprise. Each member has something valuable to offer the group and is missed when someone doesn't attend. Clear agendas (with topics, timings, and durations) make it easier to know how and where to contribute as a member. We are able to hold each other accountable with our todo and update agenda items. Finally this group provided a space for an overview discussion spanning social.coop as an organization.

There are some things that have not worked well over the last year. We have started several conversations around big topics that are unresolved and not clear how they would be. Relatedly there is a backlog of discussion topics that we were unable to clear. The role of Organizing Circle in the broader governance of social.coop is still unclear. We are reliant on 1-2 members of the circle for meeting facilitation and administration duties. How to develop and maintain policy documents still feels tenuous. There is a general feeling of under-engagement of our membership and capacities. While we have tremendous volunteers, we don't know who is donating what time and worry about burnout. Finally there is a feeling that we are not leveraging lessons learned from other organizations and have under-developed our volunteer training.

3 December 2024

We had an initial retrospective review of 2024 today, we will revisit this next call.

Broadly our activities over 2024 broke down into three categories: how we do things in Organizing Circle, coordination activities across working groups with Social.coop and started broad discussions on various topics. We 1) held regular meetings every other week, 2) developed a sense of team, and 3) decided to operate Organizing Circle mostly following Sociocracy patterns with formal agendas, facilitation, note taking, and documented our discussions/decisions on the wiki and in loomio threads. We facilitated coordination between working groups (Tech, Finance, and Community) by exchanging regular updates in our meetings and setting up meetings between Organizing Circle and each working group during the fall. Finally we started several important discussions on a range of topics including social.coop decision making structures, compensation, and onboarding, as well as collaboration with the external cooperative movement.

We are particularly proud of how we operate as a circle, although there are places to improve. We created a safe/brave space where each member is heard by the rest of the group. Each member has something valuable to offer the group and is missed when someone doesn't attend. Clear agendas (with topics, timings, and durations) make it easier to know how and where to contribute as a member. We are able to hold each other accountable with our todo and update agenda items.

There are some things that have not worked well over the last year. We have started several conversations around big topics that are unresolved and not clear how they would be. The role of Organizing Circle in the broader governance of social.coop is still unclear. We are reliant on 1-2 members of the circle for meeting facilitation and administration duties. How to develop and maintain policy documents still feels tenuous.

We will continue this conversation at our next meeting and open 2025 with goals and motivations for the new year!

21 November 2024

We decided 1) how to fill the empty At-Large seat, 2) that we were going to spend the next call with 2024 close out reflection, and 3) that our first meeting in 2025 we were going to select a candidate to fill the at large seat and set priorities for the new year.

We will fill the At-Large seat in a one-off nomination process. An open call for volunteers and nominations will be posted to Loomio for the month of December. In January we will go through a sociocracy selection process where each OC member will discuss their first nomination for the position from the pool of candidates, OC members will then have an opportunity to change their nominations based on what they heard, and finally the facilitator will put up a candidate based on the discussion for consent of the OC members. OC members are asked to review the candidates and have a nomination ready prior to the first January call.

The final 2024 meeting we will have a end of year reflection including what we did & what happened, what worked well (heart), and what might need to change (delta). This is in preparation for a 2025 planning session in January.

In January of 2025 we will hold an Organizing Circle planning session that will include goals, timelines, and priorities for the year.

Updates from working groups

• Finance Working Group decided against a second contribution poll and have no plans to meet for the rest of the year. Six organizations were chosen from the first round and there is a write up pending. OC is asked to decide how to announce and promote these organizations and donations publicly.

• Tech Working Group had no presence today.

• Community Working Group is meeting today, no updates.

• Legal Working Group has not moved on scheduling a first meeting, likely to be in 2025 now.

https://www.loomio.com/d/HIWLuKXj/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-21-november-thursday-1300-utc

7 November 2024

Organizing circle discussed the process for selecting new OC members and heard updates from the working circles.

Historical Organizing Circle had an open Loomio thread for self-nomination (https://www.loomio.com/p/Tru1HSil/join-the-new-social-coop-organizing-circle-a-call-for-nominations-) followed by a random Jury selection from the mastdon and Loomio rolls. This jury then selected a set of people who self-nominated based on a criteria that tried to balance diversity and expertise. The set of people where then put to the coop for a vote. This process was set for the initial stand up of the Organizing Circle (https://www.loomio.com/p/OI8kEjVz/social-coop-organizing-circle-proposal ) but does not necessarily need to be followed moving forward. We do need a way to add new people and want to ensure that we have continuity and regular turnover. We will revisit this topic at the next meeting.

Updates

• Finance working group: Discussed member recruitment and pulling together an end of year report for 2024.

• Tech working group: Still struggling with billing. Wiki.social.coop is updated (image upload is fixed!). Looking at joining a coop owned server for our hosting.

• Community working group:

  • We need a better way to talk about how to take strategic positions (informed by politics) as social.coop; current conversations on Loomio have been challenging for members and not felt good. OC will figure out a container for these conversations in the new year.

  • There was some discussion around Matrix alternatives to chat. We need further discussion within the working groups and beyond on this.

  • Update to the on-call procedure on the Wiki about members facing mental health issues

• Legal: No update

https://www.loomio.com/d/ulUMWRz7/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-7-november-thursday-1300-utc/4

@Graham That is a great question. @Flancian Do you have an answer or did the notes get copied down wrong?

@Kathe TB Excuse my ignorance, but in the bit about TWG you mention "mailgun quotes". What's a mailgun quote?

@Matt Noyes 24 October actually. Absolutely correct however, I'll change it. I blame jetlag!

@Kathe TB I think we need to change the date in the title -- this was for our most recent meeting on Oct 9th(?), right?

24 October 2024

We primarily caught up on updates this call. We affirmed that we need to recruit a new At-Large Member and will reopen the nomination process.

There was a meeting between the Organizing Circle and Finance Working group (notes here https://www.loomio.com/d/1Owjg9CG/finance-wg-and-organizing-circle-call-26-september-2024/1) Historically Finance Working group has met infrequently (quarterly) and generally dealt with very routine reimbursement request approvals. We are in the enviable position of having a financial surplus. This year is the first year we are trying out a budget approach and looking to crowd source donations to aligned efforts. There was some tension in this meeting between wanting to operate as unstructured as possible and recognizing that we likely need more processes in place. Currently our server and other bills are paid by individuals who then request reimbursements (this also means these accounts are held privately). This has created problems where individuals leave or forget to pay and the entire coop is impacted. Actively trying to work through this and it might require us to develop a legal structure. Finally, the work Organizing Circle is currently doing to increase communication between the Working Groups, especially recaps, was greatly appreciated and felt that this work should be elevated even more (eg coop-wide announcements on Mastodon).

There was also a meeting between Organizing Circle and Tech Working Group (https://doc.anagora.org/social-coop-tech-group?edit#, see [[2024-09-23]]). Historically Tech Working Group operates on a very ad hoc basis, when things go wrong they get fixed! We always seem to find the people to make this happen but it would be nice to have a clear way to onboard new people to proactively manage burnout. Organizing Circle might be able to help with this by developing role descriptions and recruiting members for TWG. Overlaping a little with the conversation in FWG, it would be really nice to have a coop credit card to point bill paying to. There has been some migration towards centrally managed accounts this year.

Finance Working Group is trying to get their next meeting on the calendar. We need to start the budgeting process for next year and evaluate how this years budget ended up playing out.

Tech Working Group is running into billing issues again. Spam has been a recent issue again and we have run up against mailgun quotes. Spam is a regular Fediverse issue that is bigger then the server; talking with CWG about possible scripted solutions.

Community Working Group notes that there is some ongoing social fall out from recent Loomio discussions/decisions around dealing with bad actors. There is general confusion by very loomio-engaged members on how proposals are put forward and decisions made. Some of this might be helped by more visibility of Organizing Circle and the Working Groups by either a newsletter or more public recaps. Hollie is taking over the coordinator roll (yeah!) and there has been more skills shares on invoicing and calendar practices.

Legal Working Group is still in a proto stage. Historically our fiscal host has been Platform 6, however this is merging with Innovation. Innovation is asking about our legal liabilities, providing additional motivation to get this group off the ground.

Some of us are working on an Ekuman Initiative to develop mechanisms for inter-instance moderation issues, principles, and policies. We noted that this sounded similar to https://ufoi.org/ and there was general interest in seeing how this develops.

There were a few proposals surfaced this meeting, no decisions:

• organize a public discussion on how social.coop interacts with corporate presences in the Fediberse

• tracking projects of the Organizing Circle (and possibly extending this to collaborations with other working groups) specifically in relationship to managing to-do items

• revisit onboarding documentation

https://www.loomio.com/d/lNpR7tcn/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-24-october-thursday-1300-utc

11 September 2024

How Social.coop decides was a major topic of conversation this call. There were several recent issues that came up around bridgy, consensus vs majority voting, participatory budgeting, stipends, and moving quickly with insufficient context. Generally we rely on an incredibly level of civility among our members (truly the community here is amazing!). We noticed patterns where past good practices needed to be relearned (how to pose a proposal on Loomio) and things needing to reach a boil (emergency) before they are dealt with by someone, often too rapidly for full buy in from the group. We have the bylaws (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Bylaws) and past guidence on proposal making (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Make_a_proposal) as well as integrative consent (https://www.loomio.com/d/lDiAVCsd/should-we-use-integrative-consent-for-decision-making-in-social-coop-) that we can work from. We will continue this conversation in the future.

Membership and rolls in Organizing Circle: We are going to go back to the Sortition List to replace our last At-Large member. We are talking about possibly encouraging a double link to the working groups (ie two WG representatives instead of one). We had a brief breakdown of sociocracy roles to talk about possibility of adoption on this circle, but will likely need to review this again in the future.

Updates from Working Groups:

• Finance [skipped]

• Tech WG: Is meeting with OC in the future. Reported a 2 hour outage due to an unpaid bill. Currently working with Finance WG to sort out who is responsible and how to avoid this in the future. There has been some discussion around exploring Bonfire as a Loomio alternative (https://doc.anagora.org/bonfire-socialcoop).

• Community WG: Going well with new people taking on more tasks. Schedule got a little fuzzy around the begining of September but folks generally jumped in when a mod issue came up so the gap wasn't too noticeable.

• Legal [pending]