How we use proposals

I'm really new to social.coop, and it's my first experience with Loomio, so there are really a lot of things that I am still figuring out (e.g. it's only yesterday that I signed up to receive daily summaries of Loomio activity).

I think it would be really helpful if proposals always started with a clear summary of the context that led to the proposal being formulated. For example, it would have been helpful if the proposal on disinformation had included a link to the recent conversation in which someone had expressed uncertainty over how flagged posts by a vaccine-skeptic should be moderated.

In this case, I know that at least one other participant had been missing that context.

As I noted above, I think that clear norms around the structure of proposals would be really helpful. I also feel that (if there isn't already) there should probably be some deliberative process before a proposal is put forward.

For example, when I lived in a largish (~8-person) cooperative house, we sometimes formed committees to research a particular issue or to have more in-depth conversations about it, and the committees would sometimes formulate proposals for to be put forward to the house as a whole. We would also sometimes work collaboratively as a house to formulate proposals before checking for consensus on them. I can't tell whether or not that is happening here.

If we don't already have a policy on this, I think it would make sense for the working groups to serve as the deliberative bodies for discussing any proposals and perhaps making changes to the wording.

If we do already have a process along those lines, I would like to know more about how it works.

@Dynamic thanks for raising this. these are great questions and concerns. A bit ago I put together a document on the wiki to capture my best sense of how things work here. Does that help at all?

Thank you. That is extremely helpful. This part in particular seems clear and useful:

Before proceeding, explore the operations docs to see if there is a working group relevant to your idea. If there is, be sure to contact them to discuss it.

My next question is: do we know whether the recent proposals (including the ones in the thread on moderation policies, but not exclusively the ones in that discussion) went through this process?

If not, are there things we could do to make it clearer to people with proposal ideas what the recommended process is?

I have the same issues like @Dynamic, first of all thanks for formulating them and making constructive suggestions. Being new, i will give this some time, but my overall impression is, that the actively working members (thank you!) could work on transparency. I looked up some meeting minutes in an attempt to learn, but found them quite opaque. Could you please try to make the ongoing documentation a bit more educative? As it is now, I can not derive much info as an outsider. Thank you!

Hi @tanoujin. Thanks for chiming in. As I've noted, I'm also quite new to social.coop, and I'm still figuring a lot of things out. I do think, however, that we should be careful about requesting additional work from the working groups. They do a lot for us, and based on the very low membership fees, I can't imagine that they are well compensated (I'm glad we are able to afford to pay them any stipend at all).

I might be getting this wrong (and I would welcome correction from anyone from the working groups), but my sense is that a better role for newcomers like you and me is to think and talk about what we want, and maybe some of us will be motivated to take on some of the work of making it happen. My sense is that a big part of that would be starting to have someone who shares the goals we have identified start to attend the relevant working group meetings.

I teach during the school year but have my summers off, and I've been hoping to get involved on a seasonal basis. There might be others who have more time to give at this stage.

In any case, let's keep talking!

Half agreement here - it is less about adding more work than to have minutes that reflect 1. Time of meeting, Format of meeting (platform) 2. Persons attending, 3. Persons missing, 4. Agenda, 5. Motions, 6. Votes, 7. time/place of next meeting.

I know this touches the question of procedure, and I do not ask to default to Robert's rules out of the thin air. But transparency is important to me for several good reasons, one of them being to spare more work on the end of public discussions than you invest in the green salon.

Possibly we can get back to that at a later time, preferably under the condition of volunteering the authors of proposals in a general culture of participation ;)

Let me stress I do not say that to step anyone's toes. Just some observations and ideas. ;)

Cheers

Thanks for starting this thread! I didn't know about the wiki @Nathan Schneider wrote about making proposals so I'm happy that was surfaced!

We trialled Integrative Consent for decision making back in 2021. It is a great process but does require some training and onboarding. https://www.loomio.com/d/lDiAVCsd/should-we-use-integrative-consent-for-decision-making-in-social-coop-

On-boarding in general has been on our list of "to-dos" for improvement for quite a while. I have this dream where one day we'll have this really great map of ways to navigate the web of things that make social.coop work. It's on my ever expanding list of projects...

Thanks for weighing in. There really does seem to be a lot to read and sift through to figure out how the decision-making process works.

One thing I've been wondering about is whether it would make sense to have some different tiers of onboarding, where everyone can vote and participate in discussions, but maybe there are special trainings we should go through before we can start polls... (or threads!... I'm still feeling tentative about whether I should have started this one, or given that I have started it whether there's anything different I should be doing to make sure that people actually see it).

Thank you, Emi. Looks like integrative consent was safe to try. I am ready to join and see how it goes. I believe this will prove useful elsewhere as well.