Board/Steering Committee/High Council for Social.Coop?

Thanks Matt Cropp.
A) Desirable, but not because it is a switch from pure participatory collective governance -- I see it as a way to organize actual participation and overcome structurelessness.
B) I love the spokescouncil + sortition approach. ;-)
C) I like the Negri/Hardt formulation: Strategy to the Multitude, Tactics to the Leaders. That is, whatever we call this thing, its function is effectively subordinate to the members, not steering or conducting or governing but just getting the members to decide for themselves where to go and then helping to "make it so."
My concern for this thread: I hope we can avoid getting bogged down in all the permutations of architecture. "Good enough. let's try it and see how it goes" should be our standard.

I agree with @mattnoyes here. Don’t have anything to add to his comments...I agree with them all!

A) yes, without a "place" structure to check in/check back, it disempowers members from accessing governance process
C) Yes! Let's be intentional as possible but then give something a go and iterate of need be :)

Place seems really important -- does that mean a Loomio group? A regular online chat? In offline organizations that is the spokescouncil meeting, how best to organize that in asynchronous space? One possible approach is the "worker-to-worker network," something like a two-way phone tree so that each member has someone to speak with/listen to regularly about the group... But here I go into the bog of architecture!

I was in two labor cooperatives in the 70s and 80s.

The little one (basically one crew) had direct democracy with the president (one year that was me) chairing meetings and not making or carrying out decisions unilaterally -- because that was possible, with about 30 people, half of whom typically made it to company meetings.

The big one (12 crews) needed more structure and had a Board with rotating members chosen from crews. he Board sometimes sent crew to contracts they would have preferred not to go to, but in the interest of solidarity the directives were honored. Los of give and take and good will made everything possible. Not everyone was equally skilled in office politics or equally motivated. Innovations: a Mexican-American crew, a Women-Only crew, and a crew made up of laid-off millworkers from a very conservative town, kept everyone hopping with groups of people training one another on governance and cultural expectations.

This was about labor and income so the stakes were relatively high. While we are a group that seems to be mostly about meet-and-greet, with a high level of tooting personal interests and activities, do we need governance and structure at that level? I will defer to those more in the know, but IMHO we should maybe not grow into a structure that has its roots in vital economic activity until we have some vital economic activity. Discussions going forward, however would be valuable, and I'd love to see something that works like a Wobbly hiring hall.

Reveal: part of my interest is that have a 37 year old son who was laid off from Intel and is looking for work. Incidentally he was a two-year old when we were traveling to coop contracts, what is known as a Hoekid. Our crew had a rotating child care crew and at one point they were doing laundry in Missoula, MT while the parents were working on a unit in the Bitterroots in Idaho. Fun times.

Documents of The Hoedads, Inc., in case they are of interest to social.coop ( http://social.coop ) and/or its members, are held at the University of Oregon. http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv54919

What a rad experience! Very inspiring and another note as to something I'd love to see- a database of resources of docs from model organizations so that we can draw lessons from each others' experiences.

As per "maybe not grow into a structure that has its roots in vital economic activity until we have some vital economic activity" - I feel like that's probably what has inspired this conversation. There are areas of potential economic development and we want to try our best to mitigate issues regarding inclusion/exclusion, burn out, fair compensation etc. based on past experiences that people have had. The current 'loose' means of organizing seems to have reached it's peak and those that are putting in the most work are carrying a disproportionate load.

What would a 'wobbly hiring hall' look like and what are the areas where you feel this diverges from the current framework being presented?

Funny. I also come from a family of "Tree Planters". Will have to connect on that some time.

"wobbly hiring hall" very loosely expresses my hopes for either social.coop ( http://social.coop ) or something like/inspired by it for cooperatives to seek out "card-carrying" member-workers/apprentices and vice versa -- I'd like (my son for example) to be able to peruse help wanteds, craigslist style, knowing that those making the offer are producer or worker cooperatives committed to workplace democracy.

I see similar electronic "pegboards" for consumer cooperatives, farm cooperatives, heath cooperatives, housing cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and movement-oriented credit unions committed to the financial health of cooperatives and their members.

Sorries, "consumer" twice. 😂

Like Emi, I feel like we need more coordination to make social.coop the type of organization that can create or spawn great things like the wobbly hiring hall.