Working group turnover time?

I think that this is (in general) a requirement when you are also looking to make payments to working group members for their time. There is the potential for messy situations otherwise.

I note that only a small fraction of the active membership actually vote on any proposal. In conjunction with this discussion about WG turnover, I suggest that we contemplate a change to the bylaws that requires every member to cast a vote on any proposal. Think about it before making a formal proposal to to do so.

@Andrew Shead It is true that there is low turnout. But I don't think requiring full participation is the solution to that. I think we should instead design our governance more to meet people where they are at and invite them in. The use of sortition here is one way of doing that. We could even cast the net wider, and simply nominate WG members based on random lottery among ALL members.

Having a way for folks to gracefully rotate out of active roles (reducing the risk of exhaustion/burnout) is a great idea. The volunteer / sortition process seems sound.

Theres often misunderstandings around this but currently we have working groups, which are our corresponding Loomio groups. Other than the Finance Working Group they have open membership.

Community Working Group (CWG)

The CWG Operations Team has closed membership. When it was created it was intended that it would carry out the ops with the open CWG setting policy. Whats happened is that the ops team has been largely left to carry out work as it saw fit. Generally thats worked fine. A significant proportion of its members have been in the team for a long time. They have regular monthly meetings. Minutes are posted to the CWG Loomio

As can be seen from the linked thread about their creation, it was planned that there was an intention for rotation of members within the ops team(s?).

Tech Working Group (TWG)

Has had a steady flow of active participants, I dont think there ever really has been a closed ops team. Theres always lots to do and not always enough people to do it in a timely manner, so new folks willing to get involved have always been warmly welcomed to join in.

A couple folks whove been about for a few years still jump in from time to time. Recently theres been more people getting involved and going to the (generally) regular meetings and/or otherwise involved in the work & chat (much chat happens in their matrix room). It appears to be all flowing pretty well currently.

Finance Working Group (FWG)

was pretty abandoned/dead and we kind of relied on one (or two?) people to handle approving payments. Last year it was proposed to move to using metagov with a small closed membership in the Finance Group Loomio and metagov automatically approving Open Collective payments based upon the results of votes in that Loomio group - Im not sure metagov is working?The FWG has occasional meetings.

General Observation

Compared to previous times the Loomio groups of all our working groups are not as active. They do get used occasionally (a thread every month or two?) for discussion or decision making, but it feels like a lot of the conversations have moved elsewhere.

@Darren Thanks for this summary. I am constantly confused about working groups/ops teams, etc. At the beginning, my understanding was that working groups were supposed to be bounded entities, so there was clarity about accountability. This has been an issue for me lately; when interacting with TWG, for instance, I'm never quite sure who to talk to about what.

I think we should have a clearer structure. But I think you're raising a really important point: There should be two parts of this:

• The designated members responsible for a given area of work (the working group)

• The more open community of participants who follow and contribute to that area of work (in Loomio or various ops teams)

This would help make it clearer who is responsible for making sure things get done.

Also: Legal! There is officially a Legal Working Group, but I don't think it actually exists yet.

@Nathan Schneider The way we operate is described in the bylaws.

Structure

Social.coop is a user-owned cooperative, operated through group decision-making and open management of monetary, labor, and service contributions.

Governance

Decisions regarding Social.coop are made via Loomio

The working groups were always open Loomio Groups, never bounded groups.

Decisions we made created the CWG ops team then later made a small closed finance working group

If i was unsure about who to talk to in the TWG about something I'd ask in their Loomio or matrix chat room.

Feels like this conversation is beginning to significantly overlapping with the recent thread about making a closed organising circle.

I worry that operating via closed groups reduces the ease with which members can jump in and help with the work of running the coop (reduced the pool of volunteer labour). Also feel it risks encouraging discussions about coop matters, which likely would benefit from wider coop input, also being held more within these closed groups.

@Darren Hmm, in my understanding, there have been core members of any given group that should be elected or at least approved, so there is some clear accountability.

I would argue that working groups should be hybrid—open spaces than any member can contribute to, but also formally designated groups of people who are ultimately accountable for prioritizing and implementing group goals.

@Nathan SchneiderThe way that things were done at one housing co-op i lived in, was that the Committee of Management had monthly meetings to look at and approve/dis-approve of the last month's activities by the Co-op Officers, as well as appointing new Officers, but once the Officer's had been appointed, they had relative discretion to do the work within their respective domain-of-responsibility.

This made it way easier to get things done when there was an emergency. The Maintenance Officer could call out an emergency plumber without having to worry about having the budget for this. :D

This also meant that the Officer's could do longer-term planning, which is necessary when you own a set of buildings, with a yearly maintenance cycle, that were financed using a 20-year mortgage. :D

I haven't yet been able to find anything similar for Social.Coop, but possibly i have just been looking in the wrong places. :D

@Billy Smith Thanks, Billy. This raises something I was actually thinking about as a possible solution the other night: What if we elected one person to be the "officer" or whatever for each working group? So the buck stops with someone, and they coordinate the work of others? Is that too centralized?

That could also simplify the proposal that @Matt Noyes @Matthew Cropp and others are working on around a central committee. Maybe the central committee would be composed of those officers plus some sortition-selected members?

TWG operates on the open community of participants model. The CWG Ops team is a set of specific, elected, members. There is no functioning Community Working Group.

@Matt Noyes

When you say the CWG Ops team is elected, what does it mean?

Are there at-large elections where members are selected on a first-past-the-post plurality basis?

@Nathan Schneider said something about ad hoc elections. If we're using at-large elections, it feels like the minimum for reasonable democratic process would be regularly scheduled elections. I much prefer the idea of sortition, however.

The elections are at large and follow procedures in the bylaws. They have been ad hoc simply because it takes time/effort to organize elections, which is important to consider as we talk about possible procedures: somebody has to do the work.

@Matt Noyes The Bylaws don't actually specify an election process to my knowledge: https://wiki.social.coop/docs/Bylaws.html

Also, Matt, could you please update the community wiki to reflect the actual structure of the Community Working Group? https://wiki-dev.social.coop/Operations.

I would argue the "ops team" should just be regarded as the Community Working Group so there is uniformity across the different groups in terms of nomenclatures.

@Nathan SchneiderThanks -- I updated the wiki. We do need to clarify our terminology. The interesting thing is that the TWG operates as an open community of participants (the original working group idea, I think) while CWG operates as a closed ops team. It might be okay for us to use different forms for different types of work?

@Matt Noyes Yeah. It's strange. I don't know where I got the idea that working groups were supposed to be elected. Maybe I am delusional. But we just need clarity in a public place, and some logic. I am worried that while we have had a bit influx of members, the operational folks have remained largely the same.

@Nathan Schneider huh yeah I've been watching for the next elections in order to volunteer, but I guess I'd be waiting a long time...

Seems this thread is very much needed, then. What do you need for next steps?

@Will Murphy Thanks. I am a bit unsure about how to proceed, particularly with another discussion happening about rethinking our governance structure. I've just inquired with the organizers of that thread about the extent of overlap: https://social.coop/@ntnsndr/110045962325972267 @Matt Noyes @Matthew Cropp

I also resonate a lot with @Darren's concerns about ensuring we govern and manage through open, rather than closed, processes. It seems to me that the goal right now is to find a balance between:

1. Open, participatory culture that invites voluntary involvement

2. Clear lines of accountability and ladders of engagement for new members, against tyrannies of structurelessness

Currently I see some potential paths forward as being:

• Create a structure to choose an annual coordinator role for each working group (perhaps by sortition of self-nominees), and integrate them with a spokescouncil body to integrate the different parts of the community

• Clarify the nature of working groups and their respective ladders of engagement in the wiki

• Clarify in the bylaws or elsewhere the structure of permissioned groups, such as ops teams, is more visible and participation is more accessible

Thoughts? Other things emerging?