The Common Bond & Scaling Strategy of social.coop?

There was a lot of talk around remuneration for mission-critical roles, but I'm not sure where we're at with it, as of today. So far, mostly everything is done on a voluntary basis, but we will need to change that in the future as the workload will sure increase over time, as the instance grows. Regarding the questions you pose on the surplus and the overall income, that information is available on our OpenCollective page https://opencollective.com/socialcoop

Man another great thread that I will have to wade through its entirety as I am finding people have already been discussing thinking about many of the things swimming around in my head in relation to social.coop growth. All great questions.Nick. For the finance related part it might be if good you joined the Finance working group so we could work some these ideas/questions within that framework. I recently posted a question about starting a budget document if there hasn't already been one. It seems like many of these issues around platform management, volunteerism vs remuneration, mission, support initiatives, growth, and the overall financial sustainability of SC would play out best in simple Pro Forma to start.

I've made a request to join. I see it does say something about working groups on the main social.coop Loomio page, I hadn't noticed it before.

This is a great thread. I wish we could sit down in a room for a few hours and work through the issues! I imagine social.coop on the strawberry patch model, or Highlander model: we use our cooperative instance to cultivate/support cooperators who then start new cooperative instances. So maybe we want to think about providing hosting at some point, for example.

I wonder, are these ("Strawberry patch"/"Highlander") ad-hoc, or known terms in coop parlance? I googled them but didn't find anything specific...

Speaking of which - new instance opensocial.africa are looking to adopt the social.coop platform coop model - https://opensocial.africa/@falgn0n/99862640594925966

(edit: @matthewcropp is already on the case :) https://social.coop/@mattcropp/99842682979939582)

The strawberry patch/highlander terminology is lost on me too I'm afraid – but I'm in agreement that the scope of this project is something that could be ironed out a bit, and doing that would help with other questions and issues we're all working with

Neil, you can embed links using the markdown system.

Sorry not to reply promptly! Strawberries grow like rhizomes instead of trees, basically distributed and federated. The Highlander Folk School, which was one of the key education and organizing centers for the civil rights movement, had a strategy of helping people to build their own independent organizations rather than expand Highlander itself.

An example of the impact of the work of the Highlander Folk School: https://www.grocer.coop/articles/co-op-changed-south

I've seen this called replication-based decentralization. For instance, in Charlie DeTar's phd dissertation on consensus.

Any chance you have a link to that dissertation? :D

"InterTwinkles : online tools for non-hierarchical, consensus-oriented decision making"
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/91432

I agree with empowering other instances to form and grow. What do folks see as the threshhold for our own instance? We're at 979 users. If more of the existing users were active I'd say we've already hit it, for me at least. Maybe we should focus on engaging and activating our existing community.

I'm formulating more coherent strategic thoughts that I will share soon, but I'm feeling like the critical mass of new members coming in a short period of time in this recent wave is putting strain on the capacity of our common bond dynamics to maintain the level of mutual trust for much of the informal, volunteer-driven and ad hoc systems we have in place to operate effectively.

So, I'm thinking we need to go after the formalization work that has been ongoing in the CWG with increased urgency and speed, or put a pause on accepting new members until we've and thoroughly revisited our on-boarding process so that we're only accepting new members with an affinity for the co-op movement beyond vaguely liking the idea.

Or something else, but the latest round of tensions is definitely feeling like a sign of structural strain to me that needs to be approached strategically.

i'm strongly in favour of this. Not to say I think we should slow down "moving forward" as such, but I definitely think there should be a pause on accepting new members until we've hammered things out.

Yes, I've been quite taken aback by the forcefulness and dismissiveness of some recent comments. As .coop, we can always refer back to the ICA principles, and Principle 5, the education one, is important to me in a new light, not the normal way you might expect. I'm longing for people to take the time to educate themselves and each other about other people's needs and realities, not typecasting them or imagining negative stereotypes. I know this is a personal weakness of mine, but I do feel pretty upset when people imagine I have some negative intent, or that I am culpably ignorant of something. We've been focusing, in a very stressful way, on stress from outside this instance, but how about charity beginning at home?

I'm longing for people to take the time to educate themselves and each other about other people's needs and realities, not typecasting them or imagining negative stereotypes.

The challenge with this, @asimong is, when dealing with strangers, or almost strangers, that "taking the time" is a commitment of labor and energy in a world that demands more of both than anyone can reasonably provide, so we all have to ration it, and stereotyping is one blunt, but often effective, rationing tool.

If we're a tight-knit community of people with a shared set of interests around which we often interact in other contexts (say, other co-ops, conferences, etc.), it makes sense to ration a decent amount of that energy into developing nuanced understandings of each other. If we're more of a general purpose instance on track to scale to thousands (or more) users, it's functionally impossible, and so we'll have to rely on such tools as formal rule structures and empowered s/elected sub-groups of members that can afford to develop that deeper level of mutual understanding and trust.

I think I can see your point, @matthewcropp -- to me, the opportunity to get to know someone is itself one of the most important features and outcomes of interacting on social media such as this. Maybe I'm in a minority on this -- that's OK. I mean, if I have any time, that's how I would like to be spending it. Making new friends, discussing things with old and new friends. It doesn't have to be so tight-knit, a thousand people is fine, but to me it just means treating people as part of one's virtual neighbourhood, not slagging them off. Particularly if you have a problem, then especially take the time to find out a little. That's what I would like, and that can take as much or as little time as one has.

FWIW I really like that there's so much discussion of coops in the local timeline -- it's a big part of why I chose social.coop.

I'm not sure I see the value in trying to be more general-purpose than we currently are, and I think we we should avoid having growth as any kind of goal. If an influx of users is straining our finances or our moderation capacity, I think it's reasonable to close sign-ups temporarily. There are lots of cool instances out there, and if someone really wants to, it's relatively easy to migrate once we open back up.

Totally agree with you on this. We are obviously not a general-purpose instance and, as much as I like seeing new faces around, sometimes it's just better to take a break from onboarding new members to better focus on what we are and what we want to be in the future.