Agenda

1500 [5 min] ADMIN:

• Who is here?

• Does anyone need to leave early?

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

• Review recap from last call

  https://www.loomio.com/d/gSUZoM4r/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-16-january-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]

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

• OC stipends (2024 and 2025), scoping and formulation

Context: Social.coop has an existing budget with 1000GBP allocated for each working group (including organizing circle) to spend on stipends. It is entirely up to the working group to decide how to spend this money and the following specific proposal was brought forward yesterday.

At the meeting on 28 August 2024*, we discussed the following proposal: we take the budgeted stipend and divide it into individual portions. Each individual will decide how they want 1/n fraction of the budget stipend allocated according to three options: 1) accept an expensed disbursement through open collective, 2) return it to the OC stipend budget and have the stipend split by n-1 ways, or 3) return it to social.coop directly as a donation.

We did not explicitly explore any alternative ways to handle the stipend as a group and instead went straight to asking folks how they wanted to decide their allocation. After an initial round where people talked through their preferences, @MarieVC (social.coop/MarieVC) objected that she did not have enough information to decide and was feeling pressured by how this was dealt with. We decided to take a step back and work some sense-making discussions around how OC will deal with their budgeted stipend instead. Currently OC has not decided how we will deal with our stipend budget (2024 and 2025).

*Minutes and recap: https://www.loomio.com/d/q2kTbamu/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-28-august-wednesday-1300-utc

Scoping: What have we learned from this proposal? Is it complete? This proposal is for 2024, how do we proceed in 2025?

Formulation: Based on our discussion...

• 2025 Priorities, scoping and formulation

Context: At the last OC meeting*, the following points were identified during an initial round to define the priorities for 2025.

Priorities linked to the life of the cooperative:

• Equity Planning -- a new committee to report to OC that works toward reflective practices of power  or specifically an equity audit  https://www.loomio.com/d/AsBv2ckV/proposal-to-post-to-membership-for-equity-audit-committee-as-a-short-term-working-group-  [2018 history: https://www.loomio.com/d/I53Omaes/comment/1708683]

• Co-op Education on how to make proposals, etc. (the wiki could be useful here)

• Organize a public discussion on how social.coop interacts with corporate presences in the Fediverse 

  • added: (Threads, Instagram, etc.). How can we make the policy better/ clearer? What  are the relevant dimensions to take a desicion? How can we make better proposals (in Loomio)? 

• Organize public discussion events -- on Meet.coop on big questions

• General governance - How are decisions made in social.coop + how to think about decisions (or pressure to make a decision) that have an impact on the various working groups (e.g. technical decision, more work for TWG, care of the people who deal with it)

• How do we hear all voices on a decision and gather feedback from those impacted

• Idea: if we want to be more participatory, and we already work sort-of-sociocratically -- should we onboard more formally onto sociocracy?

  • Likely some tension between sociocracy delegated-power and democracy camps, but interesting.

• Portability and templating

  • How do we document and package Social.coop so other groups can use it as a base for their activities?

Priorities more specifically related to the OC:

• Equity planning (belonging, including, diversity, care, justice, etc.); as part of that, we could have some 'breakout groups' (subgroups of the OC) that run for a limited number of months and report back with suggestions.

  • We want to make sure we have reflective practices about power.

  • We want to include people in the coop that have experience in these practices.

• Shared governance of OC - horizontal leadership: we rotate roles: facilitating meetings, announcing the meeting, notestaker, writing recaps.

  • Proposal: quarterly we reassign roles, thus building capacity within groups and reducing over-reliance on individual members.

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

• Meeting notes archiving and organizing https://www.loomio.com/d/PIeVbXCH/determine-a-meeting-notes-location-for-oc-and-wgs-

• Revisit onboarding process and documentation

• Stipends

• Review and update wiki

• New services (e.g. messaging): OC can work with WGs and drive cost/benefit analysis and make decisions

• Working group updates to end

*Minutes and recap: https://www.loomio.com/d/gSUZoM4r/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-16-january-thursday-1500-utc

Round1: Is this list complete?

Round2: What 1-3 things do you want to prioritize? Can we come up with a common ~12 topics for the year? 

1. Jan - Setting goals and priorities

2. Feb -

3. March -

4. April -

5. May - [request for only one meeting this month]

6. June -

7. July -

8. August - Summer break (?)  [request for no meeting or only one meeting this month]

9. September -  [request for only one meeting this month]

10. October -

11. Nov -

12. Dec - Annual close out  [request for only one meeting this month]

1525 [35 min] Items to be consented at the start of the meeting

• 1525 [20 min] Item 1

• 1545 [20 min] Item 2

1605 [5 min] Updates from working circles (might be dropped this time to have enough time to finish the main items on the agenda / alternative proposal: write and share updates for each WG in advance)

• 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.

@MarieVC (social.coop/MarieVC) I might suggest since we have two clear agenda items laid out here (stipends and 2025 priorities) we give those two allocated agenda times. I might suggest splitting the 35 minutes between these two items more or less evenly since they are big discussion items. Both are what I would consider to be the 'formulation' stage with established contexts (aka scopes) from prior conversations.

I might restructure the stipend item presentation a bit. Since we don't have a current proposal I might tag that as 'previous' or just remove the title entirely and state something in the paragraph like "Our prior proposal was as follows." and not highlight it with an underline. I suggest that this entire item would fall under 'Context'. This agenda item also needs a purpose for this discussion, I think we are in the 'Scoping' phase here where we are trying to understand the objection that was raised in the previous discussion. I think stating this explicitly will help guide our discussion.

For the priorities item, I might organize/synthesize the list generated previously and move it over here as part of the context for the item. You might consider opening again with the question "Is this list complete?", asking for priorities, and then slotting them into the agenda. Remember each item will need three phases scoping/formulation/consent which will probably span two meetings on the calendar. Since this is a monthly calendar we have two meetings each month so we can probably take two topics.

Also you might move the tentative into the paragraph and make the H1 header simply "Agenda" that way it will show up more clearly in the index to the right!

Overall well done and thank you for pulling this together!

@Kathe TB Thanks for reviewing! I've tried my best to incorporate your feedback and think about your needs to facilitate the meeting.

Notes

1500 [5 min] ADMIN:

• Who is here? Ammar, Caitlin, Kathe, Marie, Matt, Eduardo, Flan

• Does anyone need to leave early?

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

• Review recap from last call

• https://www.loomio.com/d/gSUZoM4r/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-16-january-thursday-1500-utc

• Who is note taking? Matt

• Who is facilitating? Kathe

IDEA: social.coop video call with people from US and Argentina about surviving, resisting, etc under fascist governments

1505 [10 min] Check in:

• How are you showing up today? What are you bringing into the space? [https://www.nycnvc.org/feelings]

1515 [10 min] Agenda co-construction (potential items, topics discussed at previous meetings, work in progress) / Consent on the agenda: agreed, as is
    
    
1. 1525 [20 min] OC stipends (2024 and 2025), scoping and formulation
Context: Social.coop has an existing budget with 1000GBP allocated for each working group (including organizing circle) to spend on stipends. It is entirely up to the working group to decide how to spend this money and the following specific proposal was brought forward yesterday.

At the meeting on 28 August 2024*, we discussed the following proposal: we take the budgeted stipend and divide it into individual portions. Each individual will decide how they want 1/n fraction of the budget stipend allocated according to three options: 1) accept an expensed disbursement through open collective, 2) leave it in the OC stipend budget and have the stipend split by n-1 ways, or 3) leave it in the social.coop directly as a donation.

We did not explicitly explore any alternative ways to handle the stipend as a group and instead went straight to asking folks how they wanted to decide their allocation. After an initial round where people talked through their preferences, @MarieVC (social.coop/MarieVC) objected that she did not have enough information to decide and was feeling pressured by how this was dealt with. We decided to take a step back and work some sense-making discussions around how OC will deal with their budgeted stipend instead. Currently OC has not decided how we will deal with our stipend budget (2024 and 2025).
*Minutes and recap: https://www.loomio.com/d/q2kTbamu/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-28-august-wednesday-1300-utc

Scoping: What have we learned from this proposal? Is it complete? This proposal is for 2024, how do we proceed in 2025?
Formulation: Based on our discussion...

NOTES: 
    Issues:

• language

• university rules about stipends

• money as tracking and recognizing work

• time

Marie - current proposal works for me.
Do points 2 and 3 require monthly paperwork, or just a one time decision?
Policy: WGs get a budget only to be used for stipends (or not), for 2024 budget. FWG wants OC to make fiscal policy -- how to spend our money. 
WG money is for stipends only.
TWG has a discretionary budget.
Caitlin: At some point we need to have a fiscal policy conversation.
Ammar: people should be encouraged to take the stipend bc of recognition of work and sustainability, valuing labor -- different approach to work than volunteer model.
Kathe: We need to return to conversations of labor tracking...
[love hearing the birds when Eduardo talks!]
Eduardo: Yes, for 2024. Would like to discuss this more going forward, could be other options.


Matt: about the wording of the proposal. Instead of saying 'return it to the OC budget', say 'keep in the OC budget'. (+1)

PROPOSAL for 2024 stipend of 1000GBP - We take the budgeted stipend and divide it into individual portions. Each individual will decide how they want 1/n fraction of the budget stipend allocated according to three options: 1) accept an expensed disbursement through open collective, 2) leave it in the OC stipend budget and have the stipend split by n-1 ways, or 3) leave it in social.coop directly as a return to the main budget (not technically a "donation").

PROPOSAL We will consider the above three options for 2024 and fold in 2025 decision into a broader discussion on fiscal policy. - Consent
Marie: Option 3. 
Matt: Option 1.
Kathe: Option 2.
Ammar: Option not-here-in-2024 :)
Eduardo: Option 1 (accept)
Flan: Option 2.
Caitlin: Option 1

1000/6 => 166.66 GBP
After Marie' portion goes back to social.coop
833.33 / 5 = => 166.66 GBP for each person to take with two going back to the OC pot for dispersement to the remaining 3
166.66 2 / 3 + 166.66 = 277.77 GBP will go to Eduardo, Caitlin, and Matt and will stay in budget for social.coop is 166.66 GBP
(Thank you Kathe for doing the math!!!)(MVC: Yes!!!)

https://opencollective.com/socialcoop/expenses/new
Procedure: 
1. Calculate amounts
2. People receiving stipends should use new OC Invoice.
TASK: Matt will edit CWG invoice template for UC, check with Graham at P6. https://share.mayfirst.org/apps/onlyoffice/22931965?filePath=%2FCWG%2FTemplates%2FCWGOpsTeam%20Invoice%20template.docx


2. 1545 [20 min] 2025 Priorities, scoping and formulation
Context: At the last OC meeting, the following points were identified during an initial round to define the priorities for 2025.
In each meeting we will balance these priorities with burning questions.
Priorities linked to the life of the cooperative:

• Equity Planning -- a new committee to report to OC that works toward reflective practices of power  or specifically an equity audit https://www.loomio.com/d/AsBv2ckV/proposal-to-post-to-membership-for-equity-audit-committee-as-a-short-term-working-group-  [2018 history: https://www.loomio.com/d/I53Omaes/comment/1708683]

• Co-op Education on how to make proposals, etc. (the wiki could be useful here)

• Checking in with working groups, checking in with individual members

• Organize a public discussion on how social.coop interacts with corporate presences in the Fediverse 

  • added: (Threads, Instagram, etc.). How can we make the policy better/ clearer? What  are the relevant dimensions to take a desicion? How can we make better proposals (in Loomio)? 

• Organize a public discussion on how social.coop interacts with other (non-corporate) instances in the Fediverse and cooperatives in the space. "Build a neighborhood".

• Organize public discussion events -- on Meet.coop on big questions

• General governance - How are decisions made in social.coop + how to think about decisions (or pressure to make a decision) that have an impact on the various working groups (e.g. technical decision, more work for TWG, care of the people who deal with it)

• How do we hear all voices on a decision and gather feedback from those impacted

• Idea: if we want to be more participatory, and we already work sort-of-sociocratically -- should we onboard more formally onto sociocracy?

  • Likely some tension between sociocracy delegated-power and democracy camps, but interesting.

• Portability and templating

  • How do we document and package Social.coop so other groups can use it as a base for their activities?

Priorities more specifically related to the OC:

• Equity planning (belonging, including, diversity, care, justice, etc.); as part of that, we could have some 'breakout groups' (subgroups of the OC) that run for a limited number of months and report back with suggestions.

  • We want to make sure we have reflective practices about power.

  • We want to include people in the coop that have experience in these practices.

• Shared governance of OC - horizontal leadership: we rotate roles: facilitating meetings, announcing the meeting, notestaker, writing recaps.

  • Proposal: quarterly we reassign roles, thus building capacity within groups and reducing over-reliance on individual members.

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

• Meeting notes archiving and organizing https://www.loomio.com/d/PIeVbXCH/determine-a-meeting-notes-location-for-oc-and-wgs-

• Revisit onboarding process and documentation

• Stipends and fiscal strategies/policy

• Review and update wiki

• New services (e.g. messaging): OC can work with WGs and drive cost/benefit analysis and make decisions

• Hold all members events to increase involvement

• Figure out how to have an open discussion on how we make decisions as social.coop and how to increase inclusivitiy,  how to handle conflicts/differences

• Document to work on these priorities: https://share.mayfirst.org/s/N9sXL8cjLayd3pg

*Minutes and recap: https://www.loomio.com/d/gSUZoM4r/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-16-january-thursday-1500-utc

Round1: Is this list complete?

• Add checking in with WGs and individuals.

• Organize list into what and how items, phases or subitems. Prioritize

• Get things done outside meetings - asynch.

• Neighborhood -- intercooperation, engagement with other instances

• More events that include whole community - assemblies, e.g. quarterly.

• How to have discussions of hard questions?

HOLD rounds 2 and 3 TO NEXT TIME
Round2: What 1-3 things do you want to prioritize? 
Round 3: Can we come up with a common ~12 topics for the year? 

1. Jan - Setting goals and priorities

2. Feb -

3. March -

4. April -

5. May - [request for only one meeting this month]

6. June -

7. July -

8. August - Summer break (?)  [request for no meeting or only one meeting this month]

9. September -  [request for only one meeting this month]

10. October -

11. Nov -

12. Dec - Annual close out  [request for only one meeting this month]

1605 [5 min] Updates from working circles (might be dropped this time to have enough time to finish the main items on the agenda / alternative proposal: write and share updates for each WG in advance)

• Finance

• Tech

  • Getting a new VPS for alpha server focused on trying to dev character limites

  • backup done before Threads block

  • VPS wants to bill annually with a possible money back if not used. Should still fit within discressionary budget but wanting to check in with Fianancing. Should be fine

• Community

  • Met with cosocial.ca people (GBlishen and Dawn) - unfortunately there were a lot of pressing issues but didn't get a lot of time to talk. They were there as observers, was something that we could easily do to share how we operate.

  • They invited us to their working group meeting and an all members meeting.

  • Worked out process for defederating Threads

  • Aside: Evan's polls in cosocial - you don't have ot report, you can dm and be direct that there is a possible issue

• Legal - defunct

  • Still to be scheduled, feel free to pick it up if you can and ping Kathe if you do

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.


----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Temporary grouping of items to prioritize... (unfinished)
+ All the voices & governance
  + Organize public discussion events -- on Meet.coop on big questions
  + Equity Planning -- a new committee to report to OC that works toward reflective practices of power  or specifically an equity audit https://www.loomio.com/d/AsBv2ckV/proposal-to-post-to-membership-for-equity-audit-committee-as-a-short-term-working-group-  [2018 history: https://www.loomio.com/d/I53Omaes/comment/1708683]
  + How do we hear all voices on a decision and gather feedback from those impacted
  + General governance - How are decisions made in social.coop + how to think about decisions (or pressure to make a decision) that have an impact on the various working groups (e.g. technical decision, more work for TWG, care of the people who deal with it)
  + Idea: if we want to be more participatory, and we already work sort-of-sociocratically -- should we onboard more formally onto sociocracy?
  + We want to make sure we have reflective practices about power.
  + We want to include people in the coop that have experience in these practices.
  + Shared governance of OC - horizontal leadership: we rotate roles: facilitating meetings, announcing the meeting, notestaker, writing recaps.
  + Proposal: quarterly we reassign roles, thus building capacity within groups and reducing over-reliance on individual members.
  + Equity planning (belonging, including, diversity, care, justice, etc.); as part of that, we could have some 'breakout groups' (subgroups of the OC) that run for a limited number of months and report back with suggestions.
+ 
+ Federated policies
  + Organize a public discussion on how social.coop interacts with corporate presences in the Fediverse 
  + added: (Threads, Instagram, etc.). How can we make the policy better/ clearer? What  are the relevant dimensions to take a desicion? How can we make better proposals (in Loomio)? 
  + Organize a public discussion on how social.coop interacts with other (non-corporate) instances in the Fediverse and cooperatives in the space. "Build a neighborhood".
+ 
+ 
+ Co-op Education on how to make proposals, etc. (the wiki could be useful here)
+ 
+ Checking in with working groups, checking in with i
+ Tracking projects of the Organizing Circle (and possibly extending this to collaborations with other working groups) specifically in relationship to managing to-do items
+ Likely some tension between sociocracy delegated-power and democracy camps, but interesting.
+ Portability and templating
+ How do we document and package Social.coop so other groups can use it as a base for their activities?
+ Meeting notes archiving and organizing https://www.loomio.com/d/PIeVbXCH/determine-a-meeting-notes-location-for-oc-and-wgs-
+ Revisit onboarding process and documentation
+ Stipends and fiscal strategies/policy
+ Review and update wiki
+ New services (e.g. messaging): OC can work with WGs and drive cost/benefit analysis and make decisions

Recap

We decided how to take the 2024 Organizing Circle 1000GBP stipend and discussed concerns around legal income in certain countries. (see notes for specifics). We also discussed priorities for 2025 and some emergent themes were: strategic guidance on financing, onboarding both general social.coop and working group members, setting up an equity assessment and planning group, ongoing improvement of OC documentation and operations, facilitating 'Big Topic' conversation with general social.coop (including: decision making process, and interaction with other instances), and capacity building for self governance and management work of social.coop.

Updates from working group:

• Finance - none

• Tech - Alpha instance is prototyping expanding the character limit and there was a backup taken before Threads was suspended. Working through some budgeting questions with new VPS.

• Community - Finalized discussions on how to implement Threads suspension (notification and such to social.coop mastodon). There were some visitors from other instances here to watch our practices (and some folks form the WG are going over there), very favorable impression and we should do more of this! Finally a reminder that not everything needs to be reported, there was an example of how to address issues via direct DM rather then through the reporting mechanisms.

• Legal - anyone who wants to help is welcome to try to get this first call scheduled!