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