We now have

• 1,920 (approx) registered users on the instance

• 578 active users/week;

• 750 Open Collective financial contributors;

• 341 people registered on Loomio;

• 86 on Meet.Coop.

As of 11/25/2022 the numbers were

• 1,800 registered users

• 622 active

• 641 Open Collective contributors

• 270 registered on Loomio

• 66 on Meet.Coop

Two years ago:

• 1,200 registered users;

• 165 active;

• 317 OC contributors. (Don't have Loomio stats handy. No meet.coop then.)

179 reports received by the Ops Team since November, up from 6 reports over the previous 3 months.

Thanks for the numbers. I'm not sure what meet.coop is. Can you link to documentation its relationship to social.coop?

https://wiki.social.coop/Platforms.html We are a multi-member user of Meet.Coop, a cooperative instance of BigBlueButton.

Ah, ok. I totally must have registered there to attend the 101 meeting at the end of last year. Lots of platforms to keep track of!

Thanks for these numbers. I’m confused why we have more registered members than we have OC contributors.

I thought that was the point — contribute to fund a communal instance?

I actually would be interested in eg sponsoring open user accounts for those that can’t afford it — but ideally that would be clear that people donate to fund those open accounts.

As I voice my support here, I want to note that it's interesting for me to see myself taking this position because most of the time I prefer the idea of direct democracy (or better yet, consensus decisionmaking). But from the few conversations Loomio I've had the privilege to participate in since joining the server, I can really see how this could be important for where we are right now. Even leaving aside the obvious problems of increased complexity with growing membership, the low turnout for most votes has been worrying me. It feels like a situation where concerted organization by a motivated minority could result in approval of decisions that don't reflect the values of the community as a whole.

Having a dedicated body that meets regularly and makes the core decisions could help to protect against this.

I wonder how many of those on social.coop that do not participate on Loomio also are not active on social.coop. Is there anyway to correlate activity between the platforms?

I don't know. I tried posting a poll on Mastodon about who votes and who doesn't, but got precisely zero responses. I imagine a more coordinated polling effort, being intentionally boosted by others interested in seeing the results might give better data, but even then, Mastodon posts can easily zip by without being seen by people who are only occasionally active (even on a daily basis).

Please post the doc inline here. Once we have the new wiki launched that will be great to onboard all onto, but for now it should at least all work on Loomie

The EtherPad doesn’t work well on mobile (see screenshot) and I can’t see / open the ODT on mobile either. An image of the matrix attached in this thread would be appreciated.

I agree that there is a clear need for a coordinating/organizing circle and think that this is an excellent start on a proposal. Do we formally have sociocracy adopted for our governance team/circles?

Thank you for this initiative. I definitely see the tension and love the way you effectively respond to it with this already impressive draft.

I really think having a sociocracy-like structure of nested circles (connected by leaders and/or delegates) is something to explore and try to make work. So, thank you for that. This with consent decision making would be the sweet spot between democracy and operationnality.

+1 to using sociocratic circles, I have proposal fatigue.

Definitely the way to go, thanks the Matts for making this happen. One point worth making is that it doesn't all have to happen in one go, but can be built out over time, which in my view is the better approach.

I'm one of those newbies and not in-depth familiar with (y)our current organization, but this sounds like a very reasonable proposal to me - also because transparency and diversity are already taken into account in the draft. Thank you!

Added a bunch of comments on the Etherpad. I like the general framework, but we're going to need to flesh out a bunch more details in order to get this right, I think.

I appreciate the general direction a lot. Thanks for getting some momentum going here. A couple initial thoughts:

• Why 7 at-large members? I think it would be adequate to have an equal or equal +1 number at large compared to the WG members. Each member is an additional expense, and also reduces the nimbleness of the group. I worry that a circle of over 10 people might be too large.

• How does this translate to operational responsibility? Does that still occur at the WG level? One observation I have had in WGs is that we often end up with situations where the responsibility is with the group, but then no individual actually feels empowered/responsible to actually do stuff. Alongside the clarity you're presenting for governance, I think we need an improvement in the delegation of ops responsibility.

Interesting - this is exactly what a template on the #OGB would work like https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody I brought this up here a year or so ago :)

I mostly agree with the description of the problem, but less so with the solution. My sense is that the problems arise from an incoherent culture, or spirit (... maybe purpose/mission too).

Decisions made in one working group often have unexamined implications for other working groups.

I would like to be part of a culture where people intuitively check in with the people impacted by their actions.

I imagine people who have a job working in structured bureaucracies are used to working in silos where you do your thing, and it's somebody elses job to knit it together into coherence, but we don't have that here. I see this proposal as creating that bureaucracy (and it can probably succeed).

I wonder a lot at the moment about this kind of organisational inertia, where we keep things going, and keep fixing problems, to keep the thing alive, ... but without there being a clearly felt reason to do so.

It might be more a reflection of me and my relationship with social.coop than the organisation/project as a whole. I think I might just be moving in a different direction. Thanks for reading.

I just wanted to add my overwhelming support for such a proposal. I think this sort of thing will make social.coop a lot stronger, and more agile in facing challenges.

Here are some thoughts:

• as @Nathan Schneider suggested, i also agree we should really spell out our rational for why 7 is the number we've chosen as it has many implications. What's more, it's my opinion we should probably outline when we should consider growing/shrinking this number, and possibly describe the conditions under which we can do so. This proposal (rightly, in my estimation) points out that we should meet a certain quorum for recall, and I think that should maybe also be the case for such a group. Otherwise, I fear we might risk some "stealth" expansion or shrinking of the group as a way to evade the recall quorum.

• when we speak of sortition, is the pool to be all those nominated? If so I'd make that more explicit because it's currently a bit ambiguous.

• it may occur that there are too few nominees for the CWG Ops. I think we'd benefit for some protocols in such an event.

I agree that the sortition process needs to be clarified. I glossed over the word the first time I looked at the document because I didn't know what it meant. The comments added include a Wikipedia link, and if I understand it correctly, sortition is a lottery system (like jury duty in the U.S.).

I love the idea of a lottery system (I might take it a step further and have it be something people need to opt out of rather than self-nominate for), but hadn't realized that that was what we were talking about for selection of at-large members.

On sortition, my thinking is something roughly along the lines of the below:

• A pool of candidates willing to serve as members if the Organziing Circle is identified.

• A randomly selected jury of X-number of members is selected as either an electing or recommending body. Jurors would be paid for the meetings they attend, and if someone does not want to serve, they can be set aside and another random member is selected to ensure the group has the intended number of members.

• The jury meets 3x. First meeting to review the scope of the Organizing Circle member role, and discuss the skills, identities, etc., that would be good to have in the group. Second meeting to interview the candidates. Third meeting to discuss the interviews and vote to either select the members of the Organizing Circle directly, or to make a recommendation if the committee members are still going to be elected via a vote open to all members.

The idea is that it would make the selection process more deliberative, rather than potentially being simply a social capital-driven popularity contest, which is what mass elections in organizations can often devolve into, to the detriment of candidates with marginalized identities or uniquely valuable skills/experiences who don't have a high profile.

Oh, wow. That's a super interesting proposal. I'd been imagining that the at-large Circle would be identified through randomized jury process, but this is really good... possibly better, though I'm not sure.

I propose that rather pre-nominating possible members, that sortition should occur on the basis of the entire membership, with people able to opt-out if they prefer. I think this would be more inclusive, particularly of people who are less actively involved in Loomio stuff.

I support this. However I see some problems with giving persons two hats at one time, the executive and the supervising hat. Would it be a possibility to reserve the right to vote on supervising issues to the Representatives (7 is workable), while the Execs should be present and be heard at least? We can still move defined decisions of importance to the plenum. Problem2: please let us avoid to become too dependent on technical frames for decision making. Public meetings with transcripts or records are absolutely sufficient - and they have a low threshold of participation.

Im sad to see this idea floated again.

Theres been repeated attempts to form a central governance body for social coop and each time its failed when put before the membership.

As already mentioned by Nick, Im not at all sure that the described problems would be solved by creating a centralised body to govern the coop.

Theres repeatedly been problems finding people to do the work needed to keep social coop running. We've relied upon the heroic voluntary efforts of a number of people whove done whats necessary to keep the wheels spinning.

I just dont think creating another opaque group where discussions are had and decisions made is conducive to getting more people to put in voluntary efforts. I think this is part of why the community working group (CWG) ops team finds itself overwhelmed. The CWG has been largely abandoned and theres no easy way for members to get a feel of whats involved with the CWG ops team work or maybe even help them out with some work/ideas/decisions.

Theres also been problems with closed teams having very low rates of participation (see Finance Working Group - sorry you cant because its closed). If stuff isnt organised in closed groups its easier for members to get an idea of whats going on and to potentially pick up the slack, without having to commit to what could be significant workload and responsibility load of taking on a position/role (eg. CWG ops team member)

I think if CWG ops team is feeling the strain we need to look at getting more folks involved in the stuff theyve been doing, very likely breaking up the workload, maybe pulling some of it back into the open CWG and encouraging people to get involved.

Think rather than creating a new group we need to find ways to drive more member participation in the work that needs doing. Creating new groups doesnt appear to be working so well (legal and participatory budgeting groups have had very little activity). Working out pattern to create easy ways for members to get involved in the work of running the instance and guiding folks into that feels like much more valuable efforts to undertake.

I am very interested in what @Nick Sellen and @Darren are saying. I think the key is to look at our existing practice, including work and culture, and see how to enhance it, concretely, specifically. The rationale of creating a new circle is to cultivate more member participation in the work and governance instead of relying on a de facto do-ocracy combined with uneven social influence/reputation. How to do that is the question. My sense is that organizing people is the key, but who do we imagine will do the organizing? How? Under what conditions? I get the concern with bureaucracy, so if there are specific things we can do to clarify the intent and reinforce the participatory and collaborative practices, let's talk about them. Encouraging people to get involved is not enough, right?

It's an interesting discussern to dip into, as I have been working to solve/mediate this issue for the last 2 years. Reading between the lines, you have the traditional vertical (need more structure/control) vs horizontal, need more culture/trust balance stress.

Let me make a suggestion, you actually need more structure (control) to build a more trust based community, outcome you need to build a bridge :)

Thank you, hamish! I hope to hear more from you. And again, I am asking for public meetings with minutes, a financial report, an organigram with names and functions on it as it is now, and maybe even a founding story. And let me admit it is frustrating to see persons stomping on the breaks when someone asks for minimum structures for an organization that would like to be a co-operative. That‘s what I would take as trust building measures.

I will say that while I am in favour of such an organising group, I very, very much appreciate those who are expressing their disquiet and concerns with the idea. IMHO, it's been constructive and can help us put things into perspective. If anything, I'd personally like to hear even more about what concerns and fears folk have regarding this proposal and what it might become.

By understanding everyone's nightmare scenario, perhaps we can help to avoid it by adopting changes to the proposal or even reconsidering it entirely if we feel the need to.

Strongly agree with this.

Yes! The voices of concern are extremely important here.

Okay, Moon, point taken, I will survive ;) Meanwhile I would like to know what happened to the community working group? It looks like that went wrong - but why? Analysis, anyone? Can we learn somthing from that fail?

My impression is that we were not able to keep up the momentum in the Community Working Group in part because some of its most active members were now on the Ops Team. One way to think of it is to look at the Tech Working Group, which is really an Ops Team -- a crew of people discussing and doing the hands on work. The CWG became redundant since we could just take proposals to the membership without running a preliminary vote in the CWG as was supposed to happen. I think it's best to think work --> structure instead of creating structures and trying to fill them with work.

I agree. And I believe the hands on work is well done - but transparency, trust, communication, this kind of community work needs to be done too, constructively, to build that bridge hamish has mentioned. Look, if the supervising board asks for a financial report they usually do not go down to single payments, that is treasurer stuff and does not need to and should not be known in detail at large. Nonetheless the supervisors could go down to that level if they see fit. It is much the same with moderation. The Representatives/Supervisers approve a report, there are minutes, I as an ordinary member can trust my Reps that all is fine and the Exec is not railroading their way like a military junta in 1970 Chile… that is useful work, and it should be done, imho. And yes, consensus is always the better option, but we do not have to re-invent the wheel. I would join a study group in administration or general co-op organization any time, to learn something new and have a qualified opinion. Otoh I can hardly appreciate what the ops team or the tech group are doing, if I do not know what is going on…

@tanoujin The CWG Ops team and TWG do post their minutes on Loomio, announced on Mastodon

@Matt Noyes Thank you, Matt, I know (by now). Yet the minutes I have seen were cryptic, I was not able to make anything out of it. So I would kindly ask to write whole sentences in an educational style, dreaming of references to an agenda, but any improvemend in intelligibility would be very welcome… it is okay for now, let us focus on the main topics, you might want to mention it elsewhere if you can keep it in mind, otherwise we can come back to that another time. tc

Reading through the comments, one crack at an alternative proposal:

• Create a new central body that is a spokescouncil of recognized working groups, with one participant per working group at each meeting, with some rotation.

• Formalize a process of populating working groups with sortition, nominating members randomly and inviting them to join to replace departing members. Members would not be obligated to say yes. We could have a clear, annual cycle for choosing all working groups to help ensure it happens.

I think this would help retain the goal of decentralized organizing, while also creating capacity for central coordination and mutual accountability among the working groups. And sortition at the WG level would help bring more members into operations teams.

@Matt Noyes @Matthew Cropp

On the first point, I think having at large members is a good practice. When we first started the CWG ops team we included two spots for at large members who had no work obligation other than to attend ops team meetings. This made it easier for people from oppressed groups to participate. Also, the spokescouncil should not add to the work of people on the ops teams. So maybe specify that participating in the spokescouncil counts as an on call shift (speaking of the CWG ops team).

Another concern: if social.coop wants to move toward having official co-op status, we will need positions like those specified in our proposal, even if they are essentially paper positions. [edit: what I mean by "paper positions" is that under many cooperative laws a cooperative is required to have certain executive positions. These are real positions that have legal powers and responsibilities, but the organization can nonetheless adopt bylaws and practices that allow for a much flatter form of governance.]

With all due respect, I’d rather be gangbanged by the ops team for free once a week than taking on a paper position to roleplay democratic control. If you do not want democratic control, don’t go official. These structures are demanded for good reason.

And - correct me if I am wrong - “the CWG died off bc all active Members moved to the Ops team”. Guess why? You need an independent, democratically legitimated 2nd board to hold the exec accountable. Otherwise People drop it once they understand the game. It is interesting to follow this discussion. Possibly the distrust goes both ways?

First of all Id like to say that I really appreciate everyone who has put in time helping to organise or otherwise put time into keeping social coop running. Both the Matts who have presented this idea have put a lot of hours into doing stuff for the coop for years and I am truly grateful

Over the weekend I looked and noticed theres some stuff about the Organising Circle minuted from the Community Working Group Operations Team (CWGOT) meetings in January and Feburary. Minutes are in the Community Working Group Loomio. You have to be a CWG member to view these but any co-op member is free to join CWG (may have to wait for an admin to approve a request to join ?) , theres no work expected if you do so. Generally I try and take a look at both CWGOT and tech working group (TWG) minutes but had missed some the last few months.

Issues

I list here, and comment upon, a number of issues which are identified in the original post, also some others I think are worthy of consideration.

Video call meetings

can be very valuable and Im in favour of video calls being used for coop stuff. Theres often better more deep understanding that can be gained hearing a voice and seeing someone as they explain stuff.

Video meetings can be problematic for some people. Having to be available at an agreed time with a good enough connection is a higher bar to participation than asynchronous text discussions. A video (or audio) recording of a meeting is not as easy to search or, for many people, as quick to digest as text presentations or discussions (maybe the odd diagram?).

Due to personality type, command of language etc. some people will be less comfortable than others discussing issues via video. CWGOT and I imagine this suggested circle would be meeting via video call.

Structureless

Despite some comments in the original post above,that kind of makes hints otherwise, we are not currently structureless. We have a reasonably well defined structure

See this diagram (it wouldnt upload and embed here)

>also see bylaws,& wiki (or could check out our new wiki under development). We dont always follow/work within the defined structure, but as long as everyone is happy I dont think that is a bad thing.

CWGOT overwhelmed

I would suggest CWGOT gets some more members and/or splits off some of the workload elsewhere. Likely both is best if we can find people interested in helping.

Why did they take on co-op strategy? This was never their remit - of course its fine for anyone to chat about that stuff.

They were always supposed to be working in tandem with CWG. I was always a bit disappointed that they didnt really attempt to work along with the CWG structure, but have always been happy and grateful for everyone that took on CWGOT work. I was always somewhat concerned with how their work and decisions were often opaque to the rest of the coop and pushed hard, for months, for minutes to be published and have often made efforts to share them with the rest of the coop.

Inter Group Communications

Ive been active in TWG and CWG and tried to keep up with CWGOT & TWG work. Ive not noticed any major issues. Its easy to post in the appropriate working group in Loomio, message known working group/ops team members on Mastodon, or post to the appropriate matrix group (the matrix tech working group chat feels a lot like its home)

I think (and even modern management theory would agree) theres value in having a multiplicity of places where people from the coop can chat about the coop, whether thats Mastodon, Loomio, Matrix, email, video meetings, real life meetups /conferences or their local coffee shop. Its likely not necessary, desirable or possible for anyone to know everything about the coop.

Suggested structure

Im worried about adopting a structure which may not address current issues the coop faces but will cost money that could maybe used more effectively elsewhere (e.g. more money towards the stuff CWG ops team have been doing).

Its a load of work! People would have to go to the Circle meetings and Circle members would likely be spending time outside meetings learning about all kinds of areas of the coops work, without likely ever having as good an understanding of the issues involved as the actual people doing the work.

TWG payments

Tech working group folks tend to have well paid jobs, the money offered to them is comparitively insignificant. I get the impression that generally they'd rather see it spent elsewhere.

Do-ocracy

This suggestion could equally apply to the proposed structure. Despite at least a couple of "elections" of groups in the coop, I dont think we have had any where we had enough people step forward as candidates/volunteers that we ever had to vote. So we'd likely end up with something like a more formalised and closed do-ocracy anyway. Only those prepared to take on the work involved in the circle get powers to vote on some things.

Exclusion

I think it would be valuable to make efforts to help avoid exclusion. Encourage and maybe offer to pay some folks from marginalised groups to participate more in the organisation and governance of the coop. We can do this anyway and I suspect there would be strong support from members.

Ongoing participation

There have often been problems with levels of participation. People drop out of roles they have been doing, dont attend meetings, dont get involved in Loomio (CWGOT) or matrix (TWG) discussions. In a recent Finance Working Group (FWG) vote to approve an expense (pay rental costs for our server conputers) I was the only person to vote and Im not even officially in the FWG (I was let into their closed Loomio group to discuss a financial issue). Its likely a new closed Organising Circle would also suffer.

Closed group governing the coop

The proposed structure could lead to an additional number of people participating more in organising the coop because they feel they have a responsibility to do so, as they have taken on a role and are getting paid . They would also get privileges/powers over the coop other people wont have.

Personally I find it a bit sad we cant spend some efforts to find a way of making it more easy for/inspire people to step up and help out anyway (this does happen a fair bit in the TWG which is an open group happy and welcoming to new participants)

I know most people are pretty familiar with operating within centrally organised hierarchical structures with a closed group leading things. Apparently many here feel comfortable with the proposed structure. It makes me sad to see repeated attempts to push this type of structure onto the coop.

I haven't spent much time working within such structures. It doesnt feel comfortable to me. I have been largely involved in numerous, (I guess somewhat unusual?) groups, coops, projects, living & working situations over the years with participants numbering from 2 to tens of thousands. From squatter camps (Ive spent a number of years "officially" homeless - the squatter camps were often lovely communities, often very happy homes!) to open source software projects, to renewable energy coops, to community farms, to community land trusts.

Often they have not had strong formal (or any) governance structures. Ive lived through a number of terrible Tyranny of Structurelessness type experiences, but its not always that way. Often I have operated within very horizontal governance structures and my experiences over the years have shown me people will participate (look how far social coop has come!). Obviously organisers will come and go and sometimes projects will come to a natural end, but stuff can work pretty well without adopting a hierarchical organised structure.

We can create any or many different structures and processes through which members can participate with organising the affairs of the co-op, exercise their agency and take on their responsibility as owner members of the coop.

I worry that voting for Organising Circle members will, as often with other representative democracies, discourage people from deeper participation and interest in the organization/governance of the coop - vote away their responsibilities!

I think we would have much better societies if more people actively participated in the organisation and active governance of their housing, workplaces, communities, communication systems, energy & food supplies etc.

I think its valuable for many more people to hone the skills to effectively share the workload and responsibility of doing so together.

I think it would be better if we looked at our problems, we could maybe list them out somewhere, open up discussions to find solutions, rather than present a "solution" and make a list of problems that may justify it (I kind of get that feeling here)

Theres more I could say, including suggestions for some ways we could try and organise/improve stuff, but I'll leave you with this huge wall of text for now!

Thanks for that insight, Darren! Just to make sure I am getting you right: you are fine with social-dot-coop being the benevolent dictatorship of a clique? So, the only difference to other instances is just that there is a team playing around with advanced group dynamics?

Edit:

Comments on Darrens stance:

1. Option to join the Community Working Group: very welcome, who are the admins?

2. Video call meetings: pro, as an add on, with minutes at least. (I am honing my skills in making transcripts atm... possibly I would volunteer). Best practice: have them relate to the asynchronous text discussions.

3. Operations Team Integration: pro recruiting volunteers. Pro focussing on day-to-day business. Pro taking strategic questions to a more appropriate circle. I strongly recommend to improve transparency on all levels.

4. Thanks for pointing me to the possibility of just joining the groups - there is in fact a threshold for the newcomer that could be lowered by fleshing out the invitation to do so. Comment: agree to "not necessary, desirable or possible for anyone to know everything about the coop." Yes, not everything.

5. A budget would be great.

6. Education and learning is within the scope of coop values... some persons like it, others not so much.

7. See my provocative question. Strongly disagree with a closed do-ocracy. We need transparency as a prerequisite of democratic control. Without that "democratic" is just a hollow label.

8. Participation/Passivity/Apathy: I calculate 5-10% active members from experience. It is not clever to design more seats than you can have occupied. I see that it usually comes down to a small group of notorious active persons. I believe it is crucial to stay welcoming and cultivate openness in that situation.

Suggestion: re-activate the Community Working Group to prepare structures as suggested for the Organizing Circle. Big Picture: active members use the Community Working Group to cooperate. Develop an "Organizing Circle" or whatever the name is, within this structure, with proposals, feedback and vote, to overview operations, prepare strategic decisions of the plenum and what else comes to your mind.

I think it is time to give you some background information about me, skip this, if you are not interested. I was chair of a works council at an integration company for mentally disabled persons before I retired. That is why I compare the Operations Team to the companie's leadership. We had the role of representing the interests of the employees whithin a frame of co-management that excluded economic decisions. This kind of checks and balances is at the core of democracy imho. There are always persons who own the buttons. If they are clever, they welcome some supervision. So, that is where I come from. Thanks.

Hey @tanoujin thanks for your inputs

Thanks for that insight, Darren! Just to make sure I am getting you right: you are fine with social-dot-coop being the benevolent dictatorship of a clique? So, the only difference to other instances is just that there is a team playing around with advanced group dynamics?

I'm not at all sure you are understanding me, how our governance currently is structured and/or if we just have significantly different opinions. Maybe you are and we do.

In an attempt to further clarify my position -

I dont see a closed group structure - where a small group discuss and make decisions on significant issues concerning the coop, as being more democratic and less of a benevolent dictatorship clique than how our governance is currently structured where issues are (should be?) discussed and even voted upon in working groups open for any member to join.

Especially as the people within that closed group, at least for the foreseeable future, would only receive token payments for their time, so would effectively be people with the time/inclination to put in significant volunteer efforts.

Compare this to what we have now where members can (and do) dip into involvement with issues and voting depending on how much time, experience or interest they have.

Whats really gained?

We can create better rhythm to our governance and lines of communication without having to create a closed group to rule over us.

Sure whats been happening at times can be a bit messy or protracted, sometimes theres low participation, I think theres a lot we could do to improve things.

Personally over the years Ive learnt a whole lot during various conversations in the Loomios of Social Coop and its working groups. Its been a joy (although not always easy conversations) to hear from a big range of voices, and to see the votes start to stack up, when we've been dealing with issues people have felt strongly about.

Finally Im not sure its your intention, but your comments here can at times feel a bit unnecessarily abrasive. Sure I can cope.

Yes, Darren, I think I got it more or less by now, your post was helpful to learn a few more things about the coop, thank you.

What I see here reminds me a bit of a tribal structure with plebiscitary elements. You see, I can accept your experiences are leading to different conclusions compared to mine. I also accept this state of affairs as a not-so-bad starting point. I think there would be a lot to gain, but possibly it needs much more time. One important example: escape from the dependency on the engagement of the founders to create a project that is able to survive multiple generations of agents. There is much more, but this is not the place, it do not want to derail the debate.

I do not question your intentions. I am sorry to have caused irritation. I can be a little erratic sometimes. I am working on it.

You know how it is: the dogs are barking, but the caravan moves on. No doubt, the proposal discussed here would imo raise the standard to a level that could motivate me to really engage as an ordinary member.

Anyway I appreciate the instance as the best I can get in terms of social media, and I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who took part in establishing and upkeeping it.

I need a walk through on basic knowledge to improve the quality of my contributions, as already stated elsewhere. I will enjoy reading you and be back at a later point in time.

I'm glad that you apologized to Darren, Tanoujin. I'm not sure exactly where I come down on the issues being discussed (honestly not sure I follow it all!), but the meanspiritedness of some of your comments really rubbed me the wrong way. Seeing nastiness in a policy discussion makes me feel wary of engaging, and I imagine there are others who would feel similarly.

Surely deterring people from engaging would not be good for democracy.

I think the things that the OC can close the meeting for should be clearly defined, with a clearly defined process for changing the scope for why the OC can run closed meetings.

Yeah, ditto -- while I enjoy this sort of process-wonk work, the reality is that I'm over-committed to my eyeballs right now (something like nine positions across six organizations), so I can't volunteer in a responsible way this year.

So while I don't want to see social.coop become too autocratic at any point (although, I question how realistic a threat that is), I also don't want to see it languish for lack of clearly articulated structures for governance and participation, so the "unspoken" structures don't come to dominate. And on that account I guess I lean more towards, "let's lay down some clear, if imperfect, guidelines now, along with some mechanisms to improve them over time" as opposed to just "let's see what happens", if that makes sense?

I really, really do not like the idea of yet another group I'm in creating a final decision-making small and closed executive council, yet branding it as something new and different through language that appeals to people trying to avoid these classic top-down structures. I wish by my age that I knew how to communicate more gently, as I like everyone in Social.Coop, and I do not believe that anyone is doing any coopertivewashing / solidaritywashing intentionally, but this is very disturbing. Having arrived late to the discussion, I understand that my feelings on this will likely not be noticed or given much consideration, as there's so much fervor expressed here to get to work on this and tweak a few items, but I do not feel it would be ethical to just roll my eyes and not say that this is absolutely not what I believe we should be replicating if we do indeed see ourselves as building and showcasing an alternative vision for the world. Will go through some components in the next comment, as I cannot figure out how to do 2 consecutive line breaks in an edit field.

@M. Page-Lieberman - jotaemeisocial.coop It took me ten minutes to figure out how to reply to you. I so appreciate what you have shared here. I hope you will be among those who vote to contribute critically to the discussion.

I'm aware of sortition being used for gigs nobody wants and gigs more people want than there are spots available. In both cases, it's supposed to be an equalizer, but I really question this belief. In the case of using sortition for elite spots at universities, to sit on executive boards, or win the lottery, there are going to be many, many people who are told that by the luck of a draw, they missed out and cannot participate or have access to those opportunities. As Social.Coop is a digital space, I really do not understand why we're considering adopting this idea of sortition at all or placing numerical limits on participation in any body made up of volunteers. We're dealing with dilemmas of people being burnt out, and some taking on too much of a load, while others are left out of the loop, and an ostensibly concerningly low participation rate, so we decide to create a new executive committee where 99% of the membership cannot via statute participate in the ultimate decision-making? I do not understand. If we want to make sure that all the work gets done that needs to be done, then that's where sortition makes sense. No one would be excluded by not being picked. They would simply be fortunate if they lucked out from doing the undesirable work in a given week - but maybe not the next week. If we want to be fairer still, then we should use rotation of who has to do the undesirable work each week. The most disturbing element of this proposal to me is that the executive committee would be able to reject the recommendations of another body after the latter had done their due diligence and work and determined who they believed needed to get the boot for unacceptable behavior. This is how the gods awful Boston DSA I briefly participated in operated. It's how the mayor of my city operates. The big boss boy or big boss girl or non-binary big boss takes recommendations under advisement from the commissions that do all the work researching the topic and should be trying to figure out who they would like to add to their bodies. Yet, this is what we believe is part of the sociocracy model? Just a quick review, via Wikipedia: "Each circle has the responsibility to execute, measure, and control its own processes in achieving its goals." I do not know if we need to find some clarity on this, but sociocracy is not just provisional consent voting in round-robin, and it doesn't just mean having subgroups, but which are referred to as circles. One of the critically important ideas behind sociocracy is that it enables groups to move forward without all of the bureaucracy and confusion about how and where to go, and it creates less friction and barriers for those who are most engaged in specific work without their needing permission to proceed on the matters that they best understand beyond all others who are not engaged regularly in that specific work. We are a digital space though. Groups can be as big or as small as they believe they themselves may be to get whichever task done - but most importantly to not exclude anyone! If we want to see more people participate, then mentor, mentor, mentor! If we want to see some more tasks being done, then invite, invite, invite! Groups should be open and regularly letting the community of members know which jobs they could use some help with. If the only invitations that are ever sent out are for people to vote on another big idea proposal and comment on it, then naturally, that's the only kind of wide participation that we'll see.

@M. Page-Lieberman - jotaemeisocial.coop

Thank you for posting all this. I am quite new, and am still learning and listening. I'm a big fan of consensus, but have really only "done" it before in a small living co-op of 8-10 people.

I'd love to hear what solutions you have to what I think are pretty clear problems with the current setup.

From my perspective as a newcomer, the big problems seem to include 1) maintaining social cohesion as the group grows (resulting in lack of trust), 2) fatigue in the governance bodies, 3) unclear expectations about the responsibilities of general members, 4) fragmentation of information and conversations across multiple platforms, 4) general onboarding process, 5) lack of clarity on how decisions get made.

I posted a thread asking about how proposals get made, and although I got some helpful responses back, I still don't actually know the answer. At first someone posted a document explaining that proposals should be reviewed and discussed by the appropriate working group, but later someone else posted that they hadn't even known that that document exists. As far as I understand it, it seems that technologically anyone can make a proposal with or without a deliberative process beforehand, and that makes me worry that our written policies could quickly change in ways that don't reflect our collective values, simply based on a motivated person doing an active PR campaign.

Most members don't vote on most proposals, and I don't know whether this is because they don't care, don't know the proposals are being made, don't happen to be online that week, are too busy to keep up with everything that's going on on Loomio, or what.

What I'd like to know is that there is a clear process in place that everyone understand and is on board with. And democratic participation should be easy, not a source of stress.

What do you think we should do?

@M. Page-Lieberman - jotaemeisocial.coop Thank you thank you, I did not find time to read all the backlog, and I just want to echo that everything you're saying matches my concerns. I strongly support your points about making sure this doesn't turn into another level of hierarchical entrenched power and exclusion. The best way to be sure of that is not to simply be confident that the people working on it have good intentions but for everyone to recognize that pitfalls are likely and watch out for them proactively.

@Dynamic As I read it, @M. Page-Lieberman - jotaemeisocial.coop is making several suggestions:

• don't use sortition for any body made of volunteers

• an organizing circle should be made up of volunteers

• do use sortition to distribute work members don't want to do

• let working groups/ops teams operate as sociocratic circles, with autonomy to make decisions that are part of their work (e.g. let CWG ops team have final say on moderation decisions)

• do lots of inviting and mentoring to help get people involved in operations work

Is this accurate? Please correct so we can think about how to address these concerns in a proposal.

@Dynamic Hi! First, please pass to me a link to the thread you started, so I can take a look at it. I've been meaning to respond to you since this morning, but I've had a very hectic day and just got home and can calmly respond. I believe the answer to your very good and extremely important question (because of the far reaching implications, as this is a ubiquitous issue in all kinds of social groups beyond Social.Coop) has a simple answer. The caveat is that it takes a lot of work, as we're referring to culture.

I'm not a fan of referring to certain habits and beliefs via reified social constructions of essentialist retrograde concepts such as gender ("toxic masculinity") and race ("white supremacy culture"), but I really am not sure there's much of a better term for this phenomenon that so many groups like Social.Coop struggle with than bro culture practices. I'm tired at the end of this day and can perhaps record a video elaborating on Tuesday, but first, I ask that you glance at these three quotes (most or all of which, I imagine you're already familiar with):

"How Standards Proliferate", Randall Munroe, July 20, 2011

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I'll use regular expressions.”

Now they have two problems.

Post to the comp.emacs.xemacs Usenet discussion group, Jamie Zawinski, August 12, 1997

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women;

those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are

poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an

academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For

the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us

temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about

genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the

master's house as their only source of support.

"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" (comments at the “The personal and the political panel,” Second Sex Conference), Audre Lorde, September 29, 1979

I can say how we can solve these issues, but I'll be citing those three items.

@Matt Noyes Yes, those are some alternative suggestions I made, but some of them are more so to streamline work that needs to be done, but I'm not sure that they would address the particular experiences that @Dynamic has had, which were discouraging - and which, I know from experience in many groups (especially those which mostly interact online) are fairly typical. What I believe is that we do not need to create new rules or new bodies. What we need to do is be willing to change how we interact with each other and slow down - to be mindful and conscientious.

I guess Mike Strode from Kola Nut Collaborative is not here in Social.Coop (SC), but last year, we had an informal conversation, and I mentioned what @freescholar (who is the reason that I originally found out about SC and joined in 2018) said at, I believe, a Libre Planet conference a few years ago. It was that when people are interested in getting interested in free software projects, they should look around and see what they're interested and then jump in. It was of the sense that no one was going to hold their hands, so they'll have to figure it out and get to work themselves - to take some initiative. Mike and I talked about how that makes a lot of sense in the culture of open source software projects, but that this is not necessarily the same for cooperating in many solidarity economy work. And, I'll add now, especially not the case for those not primarily composed of upper-middle class professional white guy tech workers. I can elaborate at another time, but I think we need to do deeper reflection and learn from others if we want to create a community that is healthy and rewarding for people, and in which people feel that it's easy to find their way around and talk to people who have the time for them and support them in their learning and growing.

@M. Page-Lieberman - jotaemeisocial.coop +1 @freescholar

@M. Page-Lieberman - jotaemeisocial.coop Here's the thread I started about how proposals are made: https://www.loomio.com/d/vzhQxDHA/how-we-use-proposals

I'll now go back and read the rest of your post.

@Aaron Wolf @Matt Noyes @M. Page-Lieberman - @[email protected]

This statement by Aaron,

Thank you thank you, I did not find time to read all the backlog, and I just want to echo that everything you're saying matches my concerns.

I think touches on the crux one of our central problems currently.

The Loomio threads are quite long, and anyone who is late to the conversation is confronted with the choice between 1) reading through a massive backlog (which they might not get through) before weighing in with their own perspective, or 2) looking at the most recent comments and responding to what looks interesting (and thereby quickly making the backlog even longer for anyone who is joining the conversation late, while possibly repeating points made upthread).

Proposals and straw polls are a possible tool for cutting through some of this, but then we end up with proposal fatigue. I think that happened, for example, in the "Framework for Moderation" thread here: https://www.loomio.com/d/Ahx86rZJ/framework-for-moderation (you can do a keyword seach for the words "novel" and "long", as well as "CWG" for the various suggestions people made that we should stop going back and forth on details and let the CWG use its judgment).

@Dynamic I agree, hence the attempt by @Jonathan Bean to get help from ChatGPT to summarize the thread and create a proposal.

@Andrew Shead I don't want AI anywhere near my democracy.

Very wise. I just read it and the replies, and I think we should move that conversation to the top of our priority list. I should be able to comment there later tonight or tomorrow. There were some wicked helpful experiences and perspectives shared. The one aspect I found distasteful, which can continue to be seen there is the RTFM response. This is why I also detest Robert’s Rules of Order. No one should need to read assorted explainers (themselves, not always kept up-to-date) in order to not feel overwhelmed with how confusing their initial experiences have been. As you mentioned that you’re new here, I’ll share that I’ve been here nearly 5 years, and I’ve attended two video meetings in all this time after being able to determine when they would be, but generally it’s confusing and such knowledge is kept undocumented and just in the heads of people who do not expect anyone else to be interested in dropping by to observe in order to try to get an sense of what’s going on. This is not a Social.Coop failing. It’s ubiquitous, and I’ve various stories of this practice from multiple groups along the year leading to people who are new feeling discouraged.

It’s mostly a result of automatic habits and a lack of thought put into how to make spaces more welcoming and inviting for others outside of those who we expect to see each week or month to get a job done.

Em ter., 28 de fev. de 2023 às 18:00, Dynamic (via Loomio) escreveu:

@Dynamic I agree with you completely about keeping AI away from democracy.

@Dynamic In addition to the long backlog, some of the posts are walls of text. That can be a slog to read through.

@Andrew Shead I have no time for AI in this or any conversation involving social.coop.

Hi guys I don't know how useful it is but just for fun I asked ChatGPT to summarize our Loomio discussions and the proposal and to write the proposal for us and what are some suggestions for us. feel free to take a look. Let me know if it is any good or what questions need to be tried better?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x2qE0Abrk-md3HFPJ2Uc-IDk8MKXwiFiWqhrHvYALBU/edit?usp=sharing

PDF is also attached.

Can you provide a summary of this conversation I can post to the Loomio group to help people understand the value of this conversation that I will post to google docs or a post?

Sure! Here's a summary of our conversation:

We discussed several topics related to Social.Coop and the transition to a solidarity, regenerative, and equitable economy. We started by exploring the history of Social.Coop, its organizational structure, and the challenges it faces in scaling and achieving its goals. We then discussed some potential solutions, including the formation of an Organizing Circle, the adoption of guiding values and principles, and the exploration of new partnerships and collaborations.

We also talked about your career interests and skills, and how you might be able to leverage these to support Social.Coop and the transition movement more broadly. We discussed the potential value of AI technology in supporting your work, including the ability to conduct research and analysis, create content and messaging, and engage with members of the Social.Coop community and other stakeholders.

Overall, our conversation highlighted the importance of active participation and engagement from members of the Social.Coop community, and the potential for innovative solutions and partnerships to drive forward the goals of the platform and the transition movement more broadly.

@Jonathan Bean It's a fun idea. A little creepy that ChatGPT reads our site and creates content...

@Jonathan Bean I find no value in ChatGPT or any LLM summarizations of our conversations.

I'm finding ChatGPT a useful tool and don't think it serves progressive social movements to vilify or overly fear this technological advance. In fact, we could likely make impressive gains in coordination by utilizing it to summarize trends about which we have very fragmented knowledge - who of us actually KNOWS the extent of social cooperative organizing in the world? ChatGPT will likely be able to represent an accurate 'count' - this could be encouraging to those of us who have been variously fighting for reforms/revolution for years and decades, perhaps lifetimes!

@Stephanie Jo Kent fine, as long as you are so kind to mark texts you post from that sources as Large Language Model Generated (LLMGT), I have no issues with it.

@Stephanie Jo Kent I haven't seen anyone vilify ChatGPT here on Loomio.

However, the inaccuracies of LLM summarizations make them no better than human summarizations. Therefore, as I stated in a previous message,

"I find no value in ChatGPT or any LLM summarizations of our conversations."

@Stephanie Jo Kent ChatGPT may be useful for some purposes (e.g. drafting emails or rewriting one's own resume), but I still don't want it anywhere near my democracy. Using it to "summarize" content isn't really a summarization, but a statistical model of what a human-written summary might look like. It's therefore extremely important that the author of the text being summarized take charge of making sure that the summary accurately conveyed what they were trying to say.

The current ecosystem of LLMs do not parse sentences in order to extract meaning (although there is other, less flashy, natural-language software that is designed to do that). Because of the way the models work, they can seem to produce high quality summaries of some kinds of text, especially if the text is structurally similar to texts in their training data, but there is no guarantee that they will capture all views (it doesn't know what a view is), nor is there any guarantee that they won't introduce extraneous content. This makes them extremely poorly suited to extract information from a long involved conversation in which people are trying to hash out our desires for the future as part of a decisionmaking process.

Posting ChatGPT "summaries" invites readers who don't have time to view the entire thread to assume that the relevant information is represented, and I think it would be extremely unfortunate for our community if our members started adopting stances on proposals based on LLM-generated summaries.

If we can't figure out a real democratic process for representing the diverse views in our community, then maybe the right answer is that the community is just too big. I don't think we're to that point, but if people start seriously talking about LLMs as a solution for extracting meaning from our conversations, then I'd be inclined to say that we've reached that point.

At risk of stating the obvious, the ChatGPT summary that was posted by @Jonathan Bean clearly illustrates the dangers of inaccurate information being introduced by LLMs. This entire paragraph:

We also talked about your career interests and skills, and how you might be able to leverage these to support Social.Coop and the transition movement more broadly. We discussed the potential value of AI technology in supporting your work, including the ability to conduct research and analysis, create content and messaging, and engage with members of the Social.Coop community and other stakeholders.

does not reflect any part of our conversation thread as of the time the ChatGPT text was posted, and in fact is clearly geared toward an entirely different style of organization from Social.Coop. Until Jonathan Bean posted the the ChatGPT "summary", there was no discussion of AI at all in the current thread. And we don't engage with stakeholders beyond our own membership. ChatGPT couldn't capture this because it doesn't parse text or extract meaning. There is no comprehension of what has been said. The summary it gave is the best approximation it can come up with for summaries of text that is semantically similar to our conversation.

Democratic conversations by cooperative organizations clearly do not form a large portion of its training data, and if even they did, I'd be concerned that the "summary" it came up with would be a better reflection of some other democratic conversation rather than the ones we are having here.

@Dynamic It is important recognize the limitations of the GPT.

I should point out that the mistake is mine for not providing the proper context for that snippet of our conversation about this thread. In the google doc I do talk to it about my career interests and use of AI as personalized sort of suggester for what and how to vote and just secretarial kind of work, Imagine that everyone of us had an AI programed by us to create reports personalized for use on how to best represent us but of course with our final approval on votes.

So the summary is a summary of my conversation with the GPT AI about this thread and the broader social.coop Loomio and organization. At this point it is in the spirit of experimentation just something to be aware of as the trends around us grow.

I apologize as I have been quite busy and intended to participate more but some things have developed in my life taking a lot of spare time. Maybe there is some tech out there that would help manage the complexity a little better than we are with the current tools. I wish there was a plug in that could analyze the Loomio and allow me to participate with less time investment.

@Stephanie Jo Kent The tech is developing exponentially faster and faster and some say the newest version of GPT4 is pretty much at the level of a minor AGI Algorithmic General Intelligence capable of almost any human intelectual task. I am cautious about this transition but am optimistic that it would be very hard to make an AGI that was smart enough to be used to dominate us but dumb enough not be a benevolent intelligence as it seems in time greater intelligence tends toward greater benevolence as benevolence is the most intelligent strategy in the long game. But there are plenty reasons to still be worried about it.

But right now we can help shape the technology before less benevolent forces shape it.

I think I could probably ask it to make an AI powered Distributed Cooperative Organization platform at this point as I've seen many people simply engineering the prompt with natural language and getting fully functional code for entire apps to implement with very little modification.

I will write up some requirements and try to make it soon, hopefully we can solve this scalability problem with federated DisCOs assisted by algorithmic intelligences. So yes scary, but less benevolent forces are getting an edge and we might be left obsolete if we don't adapt. It is not the strongest that survives but that which is most adaptable to co-evolutions.

@Jonathan Bean

I agree that time is an issue, but I'd really prefer if we focused on social solutions rather than technical ones. I really feel like Loomio isn't currently working well for what we are trying to do.

Can someone help me understand why I received an email notification that I was invited to vote in this sense check but now have a Loomio message saying that I haven't been invited?

@Dynamic same experience!

@Nathan Schneider @Dynamic Ah, I think the problem is that this sense check was for people who volunteered to help with the rewrite. Once they have weighed in, we will make a proposal to the whole group.

@Matt Noyes

What is annoying is getting an email telling me I've been invited to do something, and then logging on getting ready to think through a proposal idea and finding out that I'm not invited after all.

@Dynamic Sorry, my loomio blunder - I tried to send the notification to the folks who had volunteered to work on this but it seems I sent it to everyone who was on the thread.

@Matt Noyes

Thanks!

Thanks so much for the team for working on this! I think this is really solid, and it seems like a good framework for producing more accountability and accessibility in S.c governance, building on the logic of affinity groups and a spokescouncil. A couple of thoughts for some refinement:

• I wonder if we can avoid WG elections altogether. This has not been something our WG have actively been doing, and some WGs were not elected at all. I generally think our membership is high-trust enough that we could invite WGs to organize in a variety of ways, leaning toward voluntary participation, with one point-person to the OC. I think we want to encourage more permissionless participation in WGs rather than set an expectation that it is an office one has to run for. (If WGs want to hold elections, they still can.) See context for my learning on this here.

• If you go for the above, then the recall procedure could simply be applied to all OC members, not just at-large. (Let's aim to simplify wherever possible!)

• In the interest of simplicity, I would simplify the At Large selection process: Just run a sortition process among the membership, with an option to opt out. Again, I think we need to be very sensitive to the time-cost of processes like this, and we are a high-trust network. I think we should try just a simple sortition process.

• For the roles, it seems to me that Membership and Treasurer are actually WG roles (Community and Finance, respectively). So why not just have those go to the representatives for those working groups automatically?

Again, my major concern through all this is to avoid undue complexity. We are a largely volunteer community, and we need to be careful about how much we ask of each other in terms of time for governance. (The more we have to govern, the less we get to toot!) But I do think this kind of coordination body will be an important step forward for all of us. I am so grateful for your leadership in moving this forward.

@Nathan Schneider

I think I agree with all this. I also think that before putting the proposal forward to the general community there should be some language added about why the OC membership would be capped at 9. The document seemed surprisingly specific about that, and it's not at all clear why.

@Dynamic I also felt this, but assumed - perhaps improperly - that this could be amended by the OC if/when it determined that another Work Group might be formed.

@Nathan Schneider "Just run a sortition process among the membership, with an option to opt out." My concern with this is that if the general body is not globally representative with respect to DEI sortition will tend to reinforce and naturalize that condition. (Roughly analogous to the social problems around Large Language Models scraping and normalizing settler-colonial legacy texts.) I encourage a structure that intentionally seeks to reduce the time between 'who we are now' and 'who we want to become'.

@Rich Jensen Sorry for the late reply -- I agree with Nathan's suggest to let WGs figure out how to recruit new members and to have recall apply to all OC members. For reasons Rich mentioned, I do think we should use juried sortition for at large members.

@Dynamic Good point about nine members on OC... the idea is to ensure that the OC is small enough to have high participation. I think the sociocracy target # for circle is 7.

I seem to have two accounts listed. My 'undecided' vote should be struck from the record. Sorry I don't have time to make this adjustment from my side before the impending vote.

Was right at the end of voting & writing a comment when it all disappeared. Guess i missed the time slot. Ive had a lot on and Im very tired. Quickly read thru the proposal. It appears to be longer - more complexity and work involved running all this. But also still quite similar to the original?

Im not sure theres really any changes that address the issues I raised. I wont elaborate at this time as it feels like I could be wasting energy and right now I have little.

Ive found it hard (both technically and finding the time and motivation) to engage with this process of review. Guess i could of done more, I tried a few times and found the document was missing, when it did reappear I found the ability to comment on the docs in Nextcloud is blocked to phones (i dont currently have a PC / laptop).

I cant read Spanish but as it was a sense check my vote is a down thumb.

@Darren Sorry for the late reply. The proposal is quite similar but we did try to incorporate people's comments and suggestions. In the updated version, linked above, you can see the previous version with people's loomio comments added in the margin. Sorry it's been a clumsy process. Definitely understand the need to protect one's time and energy.

On behalf of the Finance Working Group, based on our meeting today, I want to express our strong support for moving this process forward. We find that Social.coop's treasury has been continually increasing, due to our generous members, but we are not spending it and using it to provide those members with the service they are paying for. We believe it is necessary to have a more coordinated budgeting strategy, and that can only be done with more integrally coordinated governance.

@Matt Noyes @Matthew Cropp is there anything we can do to help you move this forward?

@Nathan Schneider Thanks for the nudge, Nathan! I will start the proposal today.

I'm a little confused to see references to voting in the doc? Does social.coop use consent decision making? Or is it majority vote?

@Sam Rossiter You can review the bylaws here: https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Bylaws

We have a modified consensus process that combines majority vote with an allowance of blocks, which trigger a supermajority requirement. But different structures within the co-op could use different decision-making systems.

To slightly expand on my comment with my vote against this proposal. It feels like this will lead to further centralisation of control and activity to those with the ability and willingness to attend (sometimes closed) video meetings. Video meetings dont work for everyone (either their tech stack or they just dont feel comfortable operating in such a space)

The Community Working Group Ops Team (which operates via closed video calls) was supposed to deliver what was democratically decided in the CWG Loomio. With this proposal its now taking on the decision making power of the (abandoned - but it didnt have to be that way) CWG. I worry this is indicative of how democratic control in the coop is heading.

As i mentioned, it feels like the lack of participation reinforces the gradual momentum to closed centralised control. But also we often see low participation in more closed processes. Just most members arent aware as their operations are opaque.

I wonder if all these new proposed roles will be filled and how effectively people holding positions will operate (how good will comms in and out of this new body be, what levels of attendance and engagement there will be at meetings)

There wasnt a block option offered for this proposal. I would have been tempted to use it. Although maybe not as Im also not sure theres people willing to put in the efforts needed to organise and effective alternative.

@Darren Thanks for clarifying these concerns.

I do think, however, we need a bit more centralization in Social.coop. A number of initiatives that have needed to happen have simply gotten lost because of inadequate coordination among working groups and participants. (The participatory budgeting effort we were working on is an example!) As a working group member, I have often felt isolated and stuck, and unable to move forward without coordination that is hard to achieve without a shared space. I think we can address your concerns by ensuring the proposal includes:

• Opportunities for voice and feedback async, not just on calls (necessary for timezone justice as well)

• Ensuring all meetings are open to membership unless they focus entirely on confidential, personal, or legal matters that require limited access

• A clearer ladder of participation, so all members have more opportunities to get involved—something sorely lacking in the current structure

I hope we can operate out of a shared recognition that there are some real breakdowns in the current model, and focus our contributions on improving the efforts of those who are trying to make S.c governance work better for us all.

@Nathan SchneiderI agree theres problems but same as with the opening post to this thread I dont agree with the diagnosis presented. I think we have an adequate structure just need more member participation and better process/onboarding of new members to encourage and help facilitate that. Doing so would be far less work than organising and operating the structures described in this proposal and your elaborations and providing good comms into and out of them.

From my perspective the participatory budgeting initiative I tried to lead languished not from a lack of structure but a complete absence of anyone but myself prepared to participate in its development, or even discuss it, despite repeated invitations to the membership to do so.

I dont think its a good idea for me to do all the work on it alone. Combine that with a number of my interactions here on Loomio being met with unnecessary rudeness and me observing the progress of this move for greater centralisation, while having my concerns largely ignored, and you may get a better understanding of why I've found it hard to find the enthusiasm to move the Participating Budgeting initiative forward and what the real cause may be,

Possibly it needs people to volunteer and/or be voted into a "titled" position (of power? - but we already shared the power) for them to feel they have a need or responsibility to actually do something and that this structure will see more activity. I find that sad. I dont want to be all negative but predict that we'll find it hard to muster up active participants to fill all these new roles and take on some of the work of organising the co-op,.as we always have with existing roles. I'll be pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong.

As an outsider I have sympathy with both @Darren @Nathan Schneider positions. Darren I wonder if the process of getting a seat or specific in the OC makes a difference to how you feel about it?

If for example the working group members and OC roles were decided by election by consent would that allay some of your concerns?

Or is it the existence of verticality/ hierarchy that matters to you, irrespective of how that verticality/hierarchy comes about?

@Sam Rossiter The consent election stuff looks interesting. Not totally sure how that would work out in a project like social coop with a large membership where most people know little of each other. My gut feeling is that there would be a trend for a few visible/active folks to be repeatedly pushed for election.

My main concern with the proposal doesnt come from a complete hatred for all possible forms of hierarchy. Its that we are making a load of work to organise all this. More so if we are going to keep good lines of communication into and out of this group and pathways for participation open. Whos going to do all that extra work? Whos going to fill all these new roles? What makes this new group more able to make good decisions than the wider membership where theres a greater breadth of knowledge and experience? Are these few committed souls expected to spend even more time understanding and following all the various workings of the co-op so they can provide better informed decisions? Are we going to create something more opaque and harder to engage with where, as often has been the case to date, a few people get stuck carrying the burdens of running the coop with little awareness from other members or chances for the load to be shared?

@Darren @Sam Rossiter One thing I really like about the proposal is the use of sortition, so people don't have to run for election, which doesn't feel right in a community where I basically trust everyone to hold roles of responsibility.

Darren, I would love to hear ideas on how to better encourage people to participate. My own direct experience from working groups is that it is very hard to coordinate participation and action without intentional collectives spaces for doing so. Otherwise, I will tell you how things usually happen in this co-op, having passed a few proposals and achieved some changes in policy: a ton of individual initiative, and bothering others incessantly until they surprise you with their creativity and brilliance. Similarly, with the PB thing, my expectation would be, under the current framework, that nothing would happen until the bottom-liner proposes and sets up a basic framework into which others can engage. If we all wait for spontaneous collectivity, I am afraid, nothing will get done.

This has been a problem we found in the Finance WG. For months we have been saying "We have lots of money, please spend it!" And nobody is sure how to start doing that. Budgeting is not something that can be done ad hoc; it requires coordination.

That's why I think it is extremely important to have a central space for coordination, commitment, and identifying shared priorities.

[Posted originally in the wrong thread, Loomio on my phone is a lot. Lol

]Interesting notion. I wonder if "polities" could be split while "infrastructure" remained "commoned". In practical terms could this mean an experiment in common tech labor and revenues?

Persynally I am more motivated to defederate from Meta less because of a negative (threat) and more because of a positive affirmation:

I want to be in community with people who want something other than the social logic Meta offers.

Feeling that erosion..