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.