👏 🙌 🙏

Hi all. I will have to leave at 1pm UK time today i'm afraid (one hour)

Notes

• 1200 [5 min] ADMIN

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

  • Does anyone need to leave early? John at 1pm, Eduardo

  • Confirm our next call on 9 April 1200UTC

  • Review recap from last call; didn't happen, does anyone want to pick that up?

  • Who is note taking? Matt et al.

  • Who is facilitating? Kathe

• 1205 [15 min] Check in:

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

  • What food do you have a special relationship with? Why is that?

• 1220 [5 min] Updates: 

  • Eduardo living in strange times under new right wing govt., "Flan did my work ;-)"

  • What is the status of your to-do items? Can someone help you?

    • Call a round to check in with people

  • Kathe: thinking about how to delegate some of the coordination duties/scale herself.

  • Caitlin: pass.

  • Flan created nextcloud accounts for everyone, did not set up calendar event, will share accounts.

  • Matt: had 'create a standing calendar entry' in todo, hasn't happened yet.

  • John: no to-dos.

• 1225 [5 min] Updates from working circles

  • Finance

    • budget proposal passed: - https://www.loomio.com/d/xqw7FtUT/toward-an-annual-budget

    • need to create a participatory budget process for decisions about how SC can contribute to other projects (as we dedided to do)

    • Platform 6 --> [name] Co-op, long-standing ask for SC to contribute financially for fiscal hosting. SC made an annual recurring 600 GBP payment to Platform 6. 

    • Domain name registry is getting settled

  • Tech

    • w/re Wiki: prefer not to have namespaces, don't want to add extra walls

    • protected pages on wiki (editable only by wiki admins) - do we need them? Why are protected pages + full revision history (which we have) not enough? Would like to understand.

      • OC come back to this

    • TWG Open house scheduled (and announced? if not already imminently) for Saturday 13th April, 1600-1800 

      • road map

      • new staff needed (4ish, currently 2.5)

  • Community

    • About new members

      • We are reviewing the procedures for welcoming new members, and will follow them -- emi is on that.

      • Want to strike a balance between welcoming people who are eager to participate; and making sure that we follow established procedures to get the community acquainted with members

    • Regional meetings

      • Driven by katanova

    • IRC idea, community discussion

      • Ideally the process of building community should also be a community process :)

      • Bootstrapping problem: where to have these discussions in the first place

    • Next meeting of the group is next week and we'll cover these

    • Flancian: participated in Fediversalist Papers interview

      • Darius Kazemi (hometown)... moderation, suspensions, etc.; governance; loomio; software/tech issues (e.g. spam resilience, blocking and federation); goal is to interview multiple instances and facilitate cross-instance communication, affinity networks... coordinated responses to e.g. spam, fascism... 

    • Process for community scoping:

      • community decisions vs individual projects

      • MarieVC: some experience setting up a citizen forum around climate change. We didn't establish objectives/rules upfront and that ended up resulting in disruption down the road, even well intentioned. Would recommend having guidelines established upfront. 

  • Legal - defunct

• 1230 [5 min] Update: What was said by the group in active Loomio threads. Do we need to respond to anything or integrate something into our discussion?

• 1235 [5 min] Decision: Membership aspects/dimensions

  • Context: In order to move forward with an engagement plan for the community we need to identify and define where we are right now. This will be used to develop introduction material and orientations as well as look to build out our governance model by defining the aspects of membership or ways we connect as members.

  • Proposal: We identified the following types of involvement with social.coop all types currently are open to volunteer entry.

1. Microblogging - Mastodon server account: inactive, invisible, and visible

• Entry: Required OpenCollective account, no mandate on contributing (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Bylaws)

1. Financial contribution - OpenCollective account: non-contributing and contributing

   • Strategic contribution - Loomio account: inactive, invisible, and visible

• Entry: Required OpenCollective account, no mandate on contributing; required mastodon account

1. Operational contribution - Working group involvement and key role holders

• Entry: social invitation, and sortition process

1. Social groups - non-working groups: e.g., reading groups, Matrix discussion board, regional meet-ups

• Round: Does this sound like good enough definitions of our membership involvement and current entry points? Revisit this in 6 months [Sept 2024]

• Discussion

  • Matt: on addressing the possible perception that the current phrasing implies hierarchy/a one-way process.

    • (Addressed)

  • MarieVC: like how we cover the diversity of ways to engage, not overfitting on one way.

  • Caitlin: on how working group membership interacts with finance, as a well-defined source of truth of members is needed to do due diligence for stipends.

    • Matt: the CWG does. TODO: Matt will find and share CWG rules

  • DECISION & TODO: Kathe will post this decision to the Wiki (Flan will help as needed.)

• 1245 [5 min] Decision: Describing current decision making

  • Context: To build a better more deliberate governance model we need to know where we are starting from. This is looking to capture how we currently make decisions and operate as a collective.

  • Proposal: Decisions in social.coop break into strategic and operational. Strategic decisions guide operational decisions and are currently made via a staged proposal process and modified consensus (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Bylaws). Operational decisions are taken on via working groups and key role holders, loosely by domain but often modified by capacity.

  • Term: 6 months [September 2024]

  • Round: Does this sound like a good enough summary of our decision making?

  • Questions: 

    • Eduardo: we should do this :) Would wager that most members are relatively unaware of how we do things; may not have reviewed bylaws in very long. When were they last reviewed?

    • Matt: how does this relate to the scope of the organizing circle? is our relation to operational decisions around the coop: supervision, coordination, awareness...?

      • Kathe: this is mostly looking to communicate how we do things/how we have done things so far. 

  • Reactions

    • John: loomio - works great, a little illegible some times, any thoughts about using other platforms?

      • Kathe, remove Loomio from statement, and just say staged decision-making process, since it is the tool, not the process

      • Eduardo: we should define the process by which decisions are made; Nathan Schneider has thoughts about this

        • Bonfire as an alternative

        • https://bonfire.social.coop is "up"

    • Matt: do we need to include decision making associated with sub-groups like e.g. reading clubs?

      • Maybe it's too much detail and diversity to include in a first 'high level description'.

    • ADD TERM: 6mos. - how to track terms

      • Default: we use the wiki and calendar to keep track of them.

      • Matt: Loomio might have a feature for this ("revisit this decision on date X")

        • Note that one of the Loomio designers is part of social.coop :D 

      • Let's try both and see what works better? 

      • Kathe will do calendar.

      • MarieVC will do loomio.

      • Flan can try to embed either in the wiki?

      • Rob Guthrie is on Social.Coop and eager to help

      • Scope: description of how decisions are made.

    • MarieVC: like the idea of being clear about decision making and setting terms.

    • Kathe: OC purpose - keeping decisions decentralized, clear domains of WGs and our role is figuring out where decisions belong, general circle-ish (sociocracy)

    • Marie: reassuring to have several circles, e.g. in recent loomio thread, CWG will deal with it and can get help from OC if needed.

    • (look at the item below, I think that Eduado is also note taking :D) Kathe: how will this work with voting and consent model on Loomio?

• 1255 [25 min] Formulation: Based on the identified governance values (transparency, engagement, equity, and simplicity) how are/will we addressing these core governance questions in social.coop?

  • How is decision making communicated and integrated across multiple groups/individuals?

  • How are decisions and processes recorded and reviewed?

  • Discussion

    • Matt: the idea behind setting up the organizing circle was manyfold, but one of the key components was to set up the right structure to allow us to transition to a 'proper' coop structure if we need that. With the nice side effect of relieving the community working group from some of the coordination tasks.

      • Keywords: coordination, organization.

      • Other driving force behind setting this up was more amenable to experimenting with centralized decision making.

    • MarieVC (moved this above)

    • Kathe: aligned with Matt on what the purpose of this organizing circle is. Like the idea of keeping decision making decentralized, keeping working groups empowered and 'catching things that fall between the cracks'.

    • MarieVC: on having several circles. It is reassuring to know that we have 'defense in depth' where e.g. the community working group will tackle things by default but they can fall back to the organizing circle as needed.

    • Caitlin: think it's great that the organizing circle can keep track of what different working groups are doing. Overlap was an issue before, good that OC is tasked with paying attention. Prevents overburdening of active individuals.

    • Flan: +1 on paying attention, the co-op needed this executive function, in a transparent way, very much needed for strategic projects... informal structure good for tactical questions... good that we can tell the OC "we need this thing to happen"; builds resilience. How to drive strategic decision-making? Something we should think about in the future.

• 1310 [10 min] Tasks: What are you taking out of this call as a task or todo item?

  • Matt: find and share CWG rules; standing calendar invites on MayFirst

  • Marie: Loomio > decision-making process (current description) + structure of the next calendar (+ updating it with your comments/items)

  • Kathe: Recap, next agenda, wiki to loomio documentation of membership aspects

  • Eduardo: send out NextCloud passwords. Try to embed either calendar or loomio from wiki :)

• 1320 [10 min] Feedback: What worked well with this call and what could be improved? AND/OR What did someone else say - or do - that mattered to you? Explain why.

  • amazed at how long it takes to come to a decision, moving at speed of trust is good, and slow ;-)

  • dealing with basic things, important, feel impatient but good that we are addressing them, starting big scope

  • enjoyed the call, loved a lot of what I heard, emphasis on decentralization and resilience

  • amazed by all we can learn in one meeting, enjoy the fact we are taking time, bc often we skip that and it catches up with us, creates communication difficulty... 

  • same, thanks for Marie's clarity on Loomio discussion, Kathe's excellent facilitation.

Backlog items:The items below are not on the active agenda but should be addressed at some point in the future.

• SAGE 3 https://sage3.sagecommons.org/?page_id=921

• How do we deal with liability as an organization? Do we need to consider some kind of incorporation or legal entity? If so where?

• Strategically, how do we provide a framework for the Finance circle to help manage surplus?

• Ask for training on 'what it means to be an admin' to orientate new admins.

Recap

We made two decisions today describing how we engage as members with social.coop and how decisions are currently made. Both decisions will be revisited in 6 months (September 2024). We are going to try to different documentation methods (Loomio -> Wiki and Wiki -> Loomio) and see how they go next call. We also started brainstorming how decisions are made, communicated, and revisited, as well as what the role of the Organizing Circle was in the context of larger social.coop decisions.

Experiment with Loomio decision making: https://www.loomio.com/d/7fdFsRj2/social-coop-governance-scoping/19 to formally consent to the membership aspects.