The numbers shared here were “just for illustration pending input” as part of the base operations budget for FWG to meet OC policy. Having received no input or response from other working groups, FWG submitted a budget to the OC that mirrors Budget 2024. I have posted it to Loomio for clarity: Budget 2025

23 October 2025

Most of this meeting addressed budgets for this year and next. We also heard updates from the working groups and Selection Jury. There is an ongoing conversation about a hackaton for onboarding material with cosocial.ca.

Community Working Group is moving along, generally positive and support the collaboration with cosocial w/re onboarding material. CWG is also helping to onboard the first member (who was invited a few months ago) of Legal Working Group. Finance Working Group has a budget update (see below). Tech Working Group has no update but servers are up!

The Selection Jury has met and is sense making and gathering information for OC and Legal WG member selection. Volunteer recruitment for Tech and Community working group has been generally successful. We could use a few more volunteers for Finance, as well as broader OC/LW candidate pools.

The proposed 2025 budget was unanimously approved. These include:

2025 BUDGET - PASSED  

• member contributions: 14,000 GBP

• core: 3,055 GBP

  • payment processing: 952

  • fiscal hosting: 600

  • hosting: 780: 70×12 = 840

  • domain name: 90

  • May First: 200

  • Loomio: 373

• stipends: 3,500 GBP

  • Organizing Circle: 1000

  • Finance: 500

  • Community: 2000

  • Tech: 0 (based on past TWG decisions)

• strategic & community: 4,680 GBP

  • community contributions: 3,600

    • participatory budgeting

  • meet.coop: 1,080: 90×12 (paid automatically via open collective)

• core + stipends:

  1. approved as they come in (though no approved budget for 2025)

  2. combined annual expenses (6,555 GBP) are approx. half of annual member contributions (14,000 GBP)

  3. given current balance (approx. 29,000 GBP) provides for a 5+ year runway for core + stipends

We decided to start a "sense-making" thread to illicit feedback on future budget considerations. Several categories for sense-making: core expenses, cash reserves, discretionary expenses, and community contributions. The FWG and OC invite open comments, questions, and feedbacks for next year's budget. This thread is a "meta-discussion" about how to set priorities for spending. How much do we want in cash reserves or discretionary funds? 

Some suggested text include: "We are looking for guidance on some of our budget process from the coop. Specifically we know we need to cover core expenses (eg server costs) and pay our glorious volunteers a modest stipend. We want to support feature development as identified by TWG. However this still leaves some money unallocated. We have identified a need for cash reservers and in the past we've allocated community contributions. The question on the table is are there other expenses that do not fall inot these categories that should be considered? After X time we'll continue building in this thread the level of cash reservers we want to keep and any other broad guidance to guide future budgets?"

Link to notes: https://www.loomio.com/d/4yPdSMjK/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-october-23-1500-utc-

25 September 2025

Member selection and volunteers

We are following up on the timeline for member selection and our volunteer call. We are moving forward with three randomly selected members from the Mastodon active list who will meet Oct 8, 22 and 29th. @Ammar created a Loomio thread https://www.loomio.com/d/TZrD5I6C/call-for-volunteers; @Melissa Santos created a form for sign ups here https://share.mayfirst.org/apps/forms/s/sGpeGSpKjzbqafY2XnPNkHnS, and @Kathe TB will push announcements to the Mastodon server every other day between now and October 22th.

Letter to future OC

We started scoping a how-to letter to the future OC. We want to be clear that the process can be modified and be motivational/encouraging of the future circle. We should include processes that we've found useful and be clearly future focused. We'll pick up with some formulating discussion on this next call.

Working group updates

Community is adding moderators to public calendar and working through how to off-board members. Tech working group continues software updates and had a successful reboot; hoping to have more progress on the alpha server and RSS cross poster in Q4 to report. There were no updates from Financing and Legal is still in pre-launch.

For more details go here: https://www.loomio.com/d/MjL6ROmz/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-september-25-1500-utc-/2

Somehow forgot about FWG in the descriptions and updated this.

11 September 2025

This meeting covered updates from the working groups as well as decisions on the member selection for Organizing Circle and a new Legal Working Group, and an action plan for call for volunteers for Tech and Community working groups.

Operational (Working Group) Member Selection:

Context: Social.coop is a volunteer run organization. To both avoid burn out of our operational volunteers and the reduce our 'bus-factor' (ie have many people know how to do the things that keep us going), we need to rotate and renew membership on our operational working groups. As we grow as an organization we are evolving a more formalized selection process for some of our working groups (Organizing Circle - OC and Legal Working Group - LWG), and are looking for less formal volunteers for others (Community Working Group - CWG and Tech Working Group - TWB). OC was stood up in 2023 via a sortition process that forms the bases for the policy below.

Briefly here is the purpose of the current (and anticipated) working groups:

• Community Working Group moderates our Mastodon instance and new member joins. This group generally maintains a budget for moderator stipends.

• Tech Working Group maintains our instances and generally tends our tech stack. This group generally maintains a budget for tech services.

• Finance Working Group budgets and authorizes charges to our Open Collective account.

• Organizing Circle coordinates efforts between the working groups and catches anything that does not cleanly fall into work group domains.

• Legal Working Group mitigates legal risk to our volunteers and organization. Specifically this new group will be tasked with 1) aggregating concerns from members around legal issues 2) tracking international developments to regulate social media and 3) develop a organizational structure to shield volunteers from legal risk. This group will maintain a budget for legal and professional consultations.

Policy: We will convene for a random committee (Selection Committee - SC) of 6-9 active Mastodon users. Before SC meets, OC will call for volunteers for working groups and circles that will include CWG and TWG. From this pool, SC will then select members from the volunteer pool for the empty At-large OC seats and any new working groups that are standing up (e.g. in 2025 we have 3 At-large OC seats and are standing up a new Legal Working Group).

Timeline and who:

(see https://www.loomio.com/d/4ao03ABX/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-september-11-1500-utc- for details)

Updates:

• Community working group: It's been a rough week for the moderation team. There was a large spam wave and political tensions are high. The open community call had a small attendance of existing volunteers; a smaller and narrower turn out then was hoped for but fun conversation none the less. There is a need for new members in the working group.

• Tech working group: The Mastodon instance was updated including security patches. The alpha instance continues to move forward to social.coop specific features/modifications. There is an rss instance(?) under development to allow better broadcasting of the operational announcements on the server including meeting announcements.

• Finance working group: We now have a core budget and have identified non-core expenses. Open collective does not have a way any longer for organizations to pay expense directly (e.g. a 'corporate' credit card) but is looking into it as a long term project.

• Legal working group: Efforts to stand up a legal working group seem to have gone silent again. Organizing Circle will add a stand up action to the member selection jury mandate (see above).

See https://www.loomio.com/d/4ao03ABX/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-september-11-1500-utc- for the full notes

19 June 2025

We iterated on a strategy on holding Big Conversation with the broader social.coop community. We broke this down into three basic steps of inform, multi-mode engagement, and follow up invitation:

1. Inform: We need to make more visible the work that goes into maintaining social.coop. Communicate WG activities with regular announcements in Fediverse with link to meeting recaps.

   1. Create a template to make these announcements quick to read.

   2. In the future automate cross-posting.

2. Engagement: Invite open comment on specific topics with a Scoping-Formulation-Decision framework in each mode of engagement

   1. Fediverse announcement and threads on topic

   2. Loomio thread for each topic with phases with the thread

   3. Meet.coop monthly calls on open Loomio topics (rotating faciltator from OC)

3. Invitation to operations working groups to continue to move forward any policy changes

Updates: Finance working group is in the process of organizing a meeting; thinking about . Community working group has not met recently and no issues to report; Zulip is going well. Tech working group met recently; current hot topic is the Mastodon TOS debacle (default TOS including forced arbitration and irrevocable content license) which is undergoing revisions (no social.coop's charge); Bonfire resurfaced as an possibility (https://bonfirenetworks.org/).

For notes see: https://www.loomio.com/d/O10JzMAb/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-june-19-1500-utc-

5 June 2025

Community WG has been experimenting with Zulip and it seems to be going well! There is a request to make more explicit the $0 membership (which is effectively true), some discussion around if this will reduce member contributions. CWG likes the idea of a member dashboard that includes all of our services in one page.

We had a formulation discussion around holding Big Conversations with the coop. We seemed to circle the following breaking down into three basic steps of inform, multi-mode engagement, and follow up invitation:

1. Communicate OC and other WG activites with regular announcements in microblogging with link to meeting recaps (Loomio for OC and CWG; Agora(?) for TWG; ?? for FWG)

2. Invite open comment on specific topics with a Scoping-Formulation-Decision framework

   1. Microblog regular announcements (both from the admin/facilitator account and the server announcements)

      1. Microblog recaps of Loomio threads and Loomio recaps of Microblog threads

   2. Loomio thread for each topic with phases with the thread

   3. Meet.coop monthly calls on open Loomio topics (rotating faciltator from OC)

3. Invitation to operations working groups to continue to move forward any policy changes

Our next OC meeting will continue this formulation discussion.

For more notes see: https://www.loomio.com/d/oEdDMqte/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-june-5-1500-utc-

10 April 2025

Today we had scoping conversations on 'Big Conversation', reviewed an initial financial report, and touched base work working groups.

Scoped "Big Conversation": We need to have clearer lines of communication between the working groups and general membership of social.coop both (Loomio and Mastodon users). We want this to facilitate feedback on current operations and spark new directions for the coop. (link to full topic https://share.mayfirst.org/s/WyKxiJ8C4gLbFxf)

Successful Big Conversations will include: 1) Scoping opportunities, we have some topics from our group and will also need to solicit topics from membership. 2) Hear and consider multiple prospectives from the membership and communicate that listening. 3) Span multiple modalities including synchronous and asynchronous. 4) Compassionate and active listening where emotions are valued and respected, leaving people feeling heard and seen. 5) Increase active participation across social.coop governance.

Unsuccessful Big Conversations would look like: 1) People leaving the coop because they feel disrespected or harmed. 2) Active working group members stepping back because of burnout from moderating or facilitating the discussions. 3) People undermining or sidetracking discussion.

Initial financial report: We were able to successfully pull down the records from Open Collective https://opencollective.com/socialcoop and start the data cleaning process. We refined categories for our reporting.

Updates from working groups: Finance is taking the request for a financial report back to the WG. Tech resolved a PixelFed security issue. Community is going to have a discussion on use of language and there was conversation in the OC meeting about where conversations about defederation belong

see https://www.loomio.com/d/X03D5ONF/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-10-april-thursday-1500-utc/2 for notes

27 March 2025

Organizing circle has been struggling a little with attendance this month for various reasons and we went ahead and finalized several decisions with the three of us who were in the room that had been developing over the last several months. Specifically we decided to request an annual report from financing starting next January (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Annual_base_operations_budget_report), revised a description of socal.coop member types (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Description_of_social.coop_member_types), added a discussion on working group recruitment to our calendar, as well as added strategic conversation topics around 1) member role/responsibility, and 2) financial strategy (https://share.mayfirst.org/s/WyKxiJ8C4gLbFxf). Notable personal projects OC members are taking on includes drafting revised onboarding material and a retrospective report on finances.

Updates from Community Working Group focused on turnover in active group members. There was no representative from Tech or Finance Working Groups.

See https://www.loomio.com/d/h5IKL7Td/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-27-march-thursday-1500-utc for notes.

20 March 2025

We reviewed and revised the documentation policy for Organizing Circle here https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Documenting_a_proposal. Folks were dropping off due to timezone changes and other scheduling issues so we decided that we would move the rest of the agenda to the next call.

We had an update from Tech WG that surfaced a conflict resolution framing from Courageous Conversations from Soul Fire Farm https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14rX3Dzab8-d3jSG_wQ8zovYy6vpyo23C0or0eWoETY8/edit#slide=id.p

Just want to express my appreciation for all of the careful, thoughtful work done by so many of you for the past several years, since social.coop got going.

The recaps are helpful and constructive.

27 February 2025

We had two policy formulations around financial strategy and capacity building resulting in the proposed policies and decisions below (no policy/decisions were finalized). Financial and Tech Working Groups have not met since our last meeting. Community Working Group had some minor issues with rotating meeting coordinator and reminds us all that we can call in users on problematic behavior without a formal report. Legal Working Groups continues to be in pre-launch mode.

Financial strategy

Context and Scope: We need to define a coop financial strategy to guide operations of the Finance Working Group to guide management of our financial resources to support social.coop activities, the broader fediverse, and promote inter-cooperation among coops. We are in the unique position to have more money then we are spending. Social.coop had our first annual budget last year and has not conducted an end of year report historically. We want to steward the resources of the group in a way that supports the broader fediverse community as well as our own co-op. Success here is ongoing abilities to pay direct costs incurred in operations and providing financial support to aligned organizations. We have an immediate need to plan for operational 2025 spending and a long term need of identifying broader financial strategies with the larger social.coop community. Both needs require an assessment of our past spending to identify operational costs and our capacity to support aligned organizations. (More here: https://www.loomio.com/d/ZIEx8Dt2/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-13-february-thursday-1500-utc and https://www.loomio.com/d/NQ3BIMqf/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-27-february-thursday-1500-utc )

Operational Financial Baseline

Policy Proposal: We ask the Financial Working Group to develop a report of our annual expenditures including defining appropriate income and spending categories by the end of April 2025 and beginning of January there after. Based on this report and any anticipated changes to the budget, we ask the Financial Working Group to develop a base operations budget to support core social.coop activities for the next calendar year and identify reserve levels to support these operations (ie our current reserves will support X years of baseline operational budget).

Metrics: The current reserves/balance from past reports should match https://opencollective.com/socialcoop and budgeted categories for upcoming calendar year approximate the end of year report spending for that year.

Term: We will re-evaluate in one year (March 2026).

Big Conversation: Strategic Financial Development

Decision Proposal: We will add a "Big Conversation" (see https://share.mayfirst.org/s/WyKxiJ8C4gLbFxf) on financial strategy with the larger community of social.coop to the topics list. We ask that Financial circle define what kind of guidance they are looking for from the community. We note that the following has surfaced in our discussions on this topic:

• need clarity on criteria for consideration, how does this spending support the values, mission, and aims of social.coop

• ongoing support of an organization has a higher impact then a one-off donation

• how can the process effectively leverage and build off of past discussions and decisions

(Since this is not ment to be referred to on an ongoing basis, we do not need a recorded policy here.)

Capacity building and onboarding

Context and scope: We need to enable ongoing member participation in social.coop discussions, operations and governance. We suggest sequencing: awareness, engage, educate, and evaluate. Here we define membership as contributions to social.coop in the following ways: microblogging, financial, strategic, operational, and social (see https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy). This may include: onboarding new members, filling skills gaps, recruitment for working groups, and broader conversations about the nature of cooperatives and commons in the context of social.coop. (More here: https://www.loomio.com/d/ZIEx8Dt2/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-13-february-thursday-1500-utc and https://www.loomio.com/d/NQ3BIMqf/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-27-february-thursday-1500-utc).

Decision Proposal: We will

• develop a policy on onboarding new members. This will include communication drafts, storyboarding new member journeys, metrics of success, and evaluation terms. This will go on our 2024 OC priorities calendar.

• develop a policy on working group recruitment. This should build in greater support for a sortition process as well as sequence awareness-engage-education and include an evaluation. This will go on our 2024 OC priorities calendar.

• add a broader conversation on the nature of cooperatives and commons in the context of social.coop to "Big Conversations"

(Since this is not ment to be referred to on an ongoing basis, we do not need a recorded policy here.)

See https://www.loomio.com/d/NQ3BIMqf/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-27-february-thursday-1500-utc for full notes.

13 February 2025

We consented to the priorities calendar, scoped out what a fiscal strategy might look like, and also scoped capacity building.

Calendar of topics:

Context: We have found that we tend to leave topics dangling or not get to strategic topics in favor of tending to operational discussions (aka burning fires).

Policy: We adopt the topics and calendar (https://share.mayfirst.org/s/WyKxiJ8C4gLbFxf) proposed in the share drive and move it over to a wiki page. Term: 6 month, reviewed in June 2025. Metrics of success: development of policy associated with these topics that everyone feels good about.

Fiscal strategies

Scope: We are in the unique position to have more money then we are spending. Social.coop had our first annual budget last year and has not conducted an end of year report historically. We want to root our financial spending in the value of promoting inter-cooperation among coops. We want to steward the resources of the group in a way that supports the broader fediverse community as well as our own co-op. We have an immediate need to access past spending and plan for 2025 spending. We have a long term need of identifying broader financial strategies with the larger social.coop community.

Capacity building

Scope: We see capacity building as member focused engagement to build our operational teams. This splits into the following phases: access, engage, educate, and revise. Broadly this can include thinking about skills gaps, recruitment needs for specific working groups, and broader conversations about the nature of cooperatives in the context of social.coop.

Working group updates:

• No updates from Finance

• Community is humming along with good handoff practices

• Tech is working an issue downloading contacts on Threads (looking to recover this from the backup). Mastodon upgrade is done, the alpha server is up, and we have a new server provider (yeah coops!). Four folks were on the last call and the group is working on onboarding. TWG 2025 Roadmap https://anagora.org/twg%202025 .

• Legal still struggling to get the first meeting scheduled

30 January 2025

We decided how to take the 2024 Organizing Circle 1000GBP stipend and discussed concerns around legal income in certain countries. (see notes for specifics). We also discussed priorities for 2025 and some emergent themes were: strategic guidance on financing, onboarding both general social.coop and working group members, setting up an equity assessment and planning group, ongoing improvement of OC documentation and operations, facilitating 'Big Topic' conversation with general social.coop (including: decision making process, and interaction with other instances), and capacity building for self governance and management work of social.coop.

Updates from working group:

• Finance - none

• Tech - Alpha instance is prototyping expanding the character limit and there was a backup taken before Threads was suspended. Working through some budgeting questions with new VPS.

• Community - Finalized discussions on how to implement Threads suspension (notification and such to social.coop mastodon). There were some visitors from other instances here to watch our practices (and some folks form the WG are going over there), very favorable impression and we should do more of this! Finally a reminder that not everything needs to be reported, there was an example of how to address issues via direct DM rather then through the reporting mechanisms.

• Legal - anyone who wants to help is welcome to try to get this first call scheduled!

Link to agenda and notes here: https://www.loomio.com/d/go0k1Nwv/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-30-january-thursday-1500-utc

@geesegoosesocial.coop Yep, Hometown has come up a few times as a popular alternative. I would have to check with @Flancian regarding past conversations about migration but I know it's been considered!

@Kathe TB Thanks for all your work!

Just joined in the past couple of weeks, thank you for having us. As a personal note in regards to Hometown: I (Emiliano, who manages this account) have had really good experiences with it in the server where I have my personal account (https://comicscamp.club). Dunno if this has any bearing on anyone else's opinion, but I personally like it. I am ok either way, though. :)

Thanks again, and solidarity!

16 January 2025

Happy New Year! After a break for the December holiday season, we spent much of the call touching base and re-grounding our work. We consented to the write up of the 2024 Organizing Circle work located here https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle#2024_Recap and we started building out a priority list for 2025 strategic discussions. We decided to move future working group updates to the end of the call to give ourselves enough time for strategic discussions.

Working group updates:

• Finance - Has an update on the community contribution budgeting: https://www.loomio.com/d/xTmPqphN/community-contributions-budgeting-an-end-of-year-short-update-from-finance-working-group and is working on documentation.

• Tech - Draft a roadmap for 2025: https://doc.anagora.org/twg-2025! We became members of iocoop.org, which allows us to spin up virtual servers that are coop hosted. And all are welcome to join TWG meetings.

• Community - Talking through the impact of the Threads votes: https://www.loomio.com/d/u1OkUA6M/clarity-on-stance-with-regards-to-threads/0 The working group is working on details on how to carry out the suspend status.

Full notes https://www.loomio.com/d/gSUZoM4r/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-16-january-thursday-1500-utc