@MarieVC (social.coop/MarieVC) @Caitlin Waddick, Finance Working Group for Social.Coop and Organizing Circle

Here is my understanding of what happened:

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.

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.

Result: 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.

@Caitlin Waddick, Finance Working Group for Social.Coop and Organizing Circle and @MarieVC (social.coop/@MarieVC) Does this match up with what you understood happened yesterday?

@MarieVC (social.coop/MarieVC) It is not "the first time." It is established practice in the Community Working Group. It is not a new proposal: it is straight out of the Annual Budget, which you have seen and probably voted for and that was approved by the membership.

Deciding whether to take the stipends is an administrative task, not a strategic one.

In this particular agenda item, we are NOT discussing:

** whether the amount budgeted for stipends is the right amount

** ways to value our contributions with the creative use of money or non-monetary tools.

** ways to use money and other tools to encourage and promote the participation of diverse people (race, class, sex, national origin, etc)

** whether stipends are a good idea, such as the effects of stipends in how people choose to contribute (i.e. Do volunteers who receive a monetary recognition work harder? Does paid work discourage member participation?)

** other ways that we might name the stipend, such as “an honorarium” or “salary” or “gift” etc.

** how to optimize stipends in the budget to meet overall strategies for SC

** whether we need to have a pizza party to show recognition for all volunteers, even if they don’t serve working groups

** whether to hire a consultant to help us navigate the issues

@Caitlin Waddick, Finance Working Group for Social.Coop and Organizing Circle I won't continue the discussion here, I think a quick decision can be made at the next meeting, if you confirm that the three possibilities listed by @Kathe TB are those proposed by the FWG.

Recap

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.