Associated mastodon thread https://social.coop/@ktoddbrown/112004219226639697

Thank you for posting this in advance! Apologies for missing the last few ones but I've been having calendar malfunctions that I intend to solve for this instance and the next few ;)

Unfortunately, Tuesdays at 13 conflicts with one of the meetings for my day job I just can't skip right now -- the weekly sync for the employee representation group which is currently navigating layoffs. On the 12th I will likely be able to only make it to the last half hour.

Could we maybe move this one later or earlier in the medium term?

Thank you and apologies again!

@Flancian. We are proposing to meet on Tuesday, March 29th at UTC 12:00 (instead of 13:00). Would that work for you?

Dear All,

I probably won't be there tomorrow, unless my current cold prevents me from doing what's planned.

Wishing you a good meeting!

@MarieVC (social.coop/MarieVC) Hope you feel better soon!

Notes

• 1300 [5 min] ADMIN

  • Who is here?

    • Matt N, Caitlin W, Kathe T-B, John A, Eduardo M, Eduardo (Flancia)

  • Does anyone need to leave early?

  • Confirm our next call on 26 March.

    • TODO: Propose an hour earlier for call at 1200 UTC

  • Review recap from last call; anything critical that needs to be added to the recap? 

    • https://www.loomio.com/d/xMeTqRsg/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-27-february-tuesday-1300utc/3

    • Looks good!

  • Who is note taking? Matt

  • Who is facilitating? Kathe

• 1305 [15 min] Check in:

  • How are you showing up today? What are you bringing into the space? [https://www.nycnvc.org/feelings]

  • How is being an adult different from what you expected?

• 1320 [5 min] Updates: What is the status of your to-do items? Can someone help you?

  • Kathe will post notes and create recap in meeting thread

  • Kathe will post recap in the general governance scoping thread

  • @Eduardo Mercovich will follow up on (1) hardening the wiki with admin groups (2) shared MayFirst calendar event for OC meetings (3) Sage3 board for brainstorming

  • @Caitlin Waddick, @[email protected] will let the Finance WG that they should go ahead and draft a proposed budget for 2024, Organizing Circle will consider drafting more strategic guidance in the future.

  • @Matt Noyes and @Kathe TB will check in with members who could not attend.

  • TODO: @matt noyes add a regular meeting event to MayFirst calendar

  • TODO: Move Wiki hardening conversation to backlog 

  • TODO: Check in with folks who couldn't make it

    • Eduardo M - Kathe

      • Here!

    • Flancian - John

      • -> now here :D one hour earlier will be perfect.

    • Marie - Caitlin

• 1325 [5 min] Updates from working circles

  • Finance

    • Haven't met yet. Caitlin requested budget creation

  • Tech

    • Open house - welcome new members, like what CWG did recently to incorporate new people

    • Brainstorming better tools to deal with spam waves

    • Resiliance to restore from backups. Set up a secondary instance to provide continuous restores

    • Access controls to Wiki... Flancian suggests keeping it open until it needs to close.

      • We will close it to 'everyone in social.coop only' once single-sign-on is up and working fully.

    • Issue: should edit access to any wiki content be restricted to e.g. members of a particular group?

      • Flancian: has a personal opinion and would prefer not to impose extra access control.

      • John: SGTM a priori

      • Matt: we should focus on which subset of documents should be 'protected'. E.g. bylaws shouldn't be changed without a vote.

        • Flancian: Protecting those pages makes sense

      • Kathe: it seems we are converging to this intermediate solution where we protect individual pages that need to be kept constant, pending votes for legal reasons.

      • TODO: protect core governance pages on wiki.

  • Community - onboarding new members (meet.coop, mayfirst)

    • 5 new potential members of Community circle to learn moderation process

    • Needs a loomio vote to agree to new moderators

    • There is a cost burden for new members in this working group. Could compensate some of this with folks stepping down

    • meet.coop switched over (BigBlueBotton), looking to reactivate stewardship board

    • Matt N self-nomiated for MayFirst board. Pending.

  • Legal - defunct

• 1330 [5 min] Update: What was said by the group in active Loomio threads. Do we need to respond to anything or integrate something into our discussion?

  • Meeting up in real space, Katanova proposal... https://www.loomio.com/d/XeBNprA1/ideas-for-meatspace-gatherings

    • Kathe: not currently in favor to do it now as I know how much work real life meetups can be, but I don't want to squash enthusiasm

    • Catlin: do not think we need to provide an active opinion on this; in the absence of organizing circle guidelines, 'secondary leadership' kicks in: a second member needs to show enthusiasm. People are able to self-organize. Let's see horizontal leadership in action.

    • Flancian: lots of energy in this, we can help support people's efforts with comms and such, personally not interested in organizing one

    • John: face 2 face gatherings great, but huge work to organize, takes more than one excited person, so not in favor of us taking it on. Real world meet-up channels, informal, could be a good way to start, also side meetings at other events... FLOSS/Co-op conferences: DWeb is a natural fit

    • Eduardo M: agree it's a great idea but not a priority for OC; would love to see our locations in a map... informal,  regional/local meetings

      • Kathe: could see a downside with preferring local/regional meetings. There's the potential to create and reinforce cliques; same with your argument w.r.t. cost.

      • John: DWeb folks have a fellowship/scholarship model. A huge percentage of people could still not attend because the US would not give visas.

      • Environmental implications of travel.

      • Flan: virtual  preferred? one day meeting -- "social.coop day"?

      • John: co-ops  are about connectedness, so the way we gather is essential to that organization, finding a way to gather online is important -- difficult to get motivation and engagement...

      • Matt Noyes: I look to MayFirst as an example for online participation. Hearing two different tracks here:

        • Personal understanding based on katanova's proposal is that this is not anybody we have to work on. Regional meetings are definitely on the table and have taken place before. 

        • On the other hand, the online meeting -- what John is saying is an interesting point. We need to take seriously the idea of creating spaces for members of social.coop to interact. We did 'summits' in the past. It's been a few years. We got ~dozens of people there?

        • Caitlin: social.coop should piggy back on other org meetings, 

          • three ideas:

            • informal self-organized (local/regional)

            • online meetings for SC members

            • piggy backing on other events

      • Kathe: we should wrap up. Thinking of drafting a response to the loomio thread that motivated this discussion. Regionality factor.

  • BlueSky bridge - broader discussion of the issue might be good.

    • -> let's discuss later.

  • AI (not a thread yet)

    • -> let's discuss later.

• 1335 [5 min] Decision: Does this sound like good enough definitions of our membership involvement and current entry points?

  • We identified the following types of involvement with social.coop all types currently are open to volunteer entry.

1. Microblogging - Mastodon server account: inactive, invisible, and visible

• Entry: Required OpenCollective account, no mandate on contributing (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Bylaws)

1. Financial contribution - OpenCollective account: non-contributing and contributing

   • Governance and Strategic contribution - Loomio account: inactive, invisible, and visible

• Entry: Required OpenCollective account, no mandate on contributing

1. Operational contribution - Working group involvement and key role holders

• Entry: social invitation, and sortition process

1. Social groups - non-working groups: reading groups, Matrix discussion board.

• Entry: social invitation, self-selecting

  • Comment by Flancian: here we could add the wiki; and possibly Fediverse-based groups

Discussion:

• Caitlin: What is our purpose? We are writing up these definitions so members can figure out how to participate, big part of co-op identity is figuring out what members do. How does this relate to what other co-ops do?

  • Should we 'look around' for how other coops have done? Are we judging people based on these categories or ranking them implicitly? Are we ready to share these categories? Will we alienate anyone?

• Kathe: to figure out what does it mean to participate in SC?

• Eduardo M: read them and they seem sensible. We are going through a similar process of classification in Confluencia. It helped us (as an intentional community) define more clearly certain requirements. Useful to make ways of involvement more clear. Willing to share this with people in OC, to learn from that experience. Documentation opens up pathways forward...

• Flan: microblogging makes sense as a category, makes sense to rank, Loomio is high priority as governance tool, Wiki should be added, not sure if subcategory; we could have discussion groups in the Fediverse proper (e.g. guppe).

• John: +1, this goes back to the why we're doing this -- we want to enable people to become engaged. Dashboard for people to see where, how, why to get involved. (Jane McGonagle) Not a fan of ranking the kinds of engagement though. Would prefer to see it as a flat structure, maybe as a Venn diagram where most people are into microblogging and then engage with some other dimensions.

• Matt: similar to what has been said. Two things:

  • - Using the term contributions is a good idea. Relates to 'contributions accounting'. Good practice to recognize and give credit for all of those. We might want to break down 'operational' further.

  • - Added governance to 'strategic'.

  • - Like the idea of a dashboard!

    • - Flancian: Could be in the wiki, or in join.social.coop (entry point)... visibility to non-members could be good; website...?

Kathe: need to add purpose and context; pin this discussion to next time. TODO: put down understandings of takeaways of call.

• 1345 [5 min] Decision: Does this sound like a good enough summary of our decision making?

  • Decisions in social.coop break into strategic and operational. Strategic decisions guide operational decisions and are currently made via Loomio with a staged proposal process and modified consensus (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Bylaws). Operational decisions are taken on via working groups and key role holders, loosely by domain but often modified by capacity.

• 1355 [25 min] Formulation: Based on the identified governance values (transparency, engagement, equity, and simplicity) how are/will we addressing these core governance questions in social.coop?

  • How is decision making communicated and integrated across multiple groups/individuals?

  • How are decisions and processes recorded and reviewed?

• 1410 [10 min] Tasks: What are you taking out of this call as a task or todo item?

  • Kathe - Post notes and recap to loomio thread. Summarize discussion for main goverance thread. post recap of disucssion on loomio meet space thread

  • Flancian: 

    • figure out how to protect pages in the wiki

      • get the list from... Matt? :)

      • give protect/unprotect bit to some users and communicate the list

      • will work with Eduardo Mercovich and the TWG on this

    • make sure that TWG office hours date is communicated in loomio

  • Matt set up regular calendar date in Mayfirst calendar... together with Eduardo

  • Matt find old DisCO "browser is the toolbox" piece

  • EduMerco:

    • meatspace gathering, could be organized by whomever wants to. Could think about an online meeting bc of legal/cost/sustainability issues.

    • model of involvment: could be useful to show how to get more involved (a map of possible pathways ahead). 

  • Look at examples of how others meet/gather successfully online - add to the loomio thread (already posted) instead of discussion here

  • Caitlin: Reminder to all: At our last meeting (27Feb2024), we Decided to ask the Finance Working Group to officially propose a budget to the membership. So, the FWG will meet on Monday, March 18th to discuss it. (Reference: Older Loomio thread: "Toward an Annual Budget")

• 1420 [10 min] Feedback: What worked well with this call and what could be improved? AND/OR What new thing did you learn about someone else today? Or see in a new light? 

  • Kathe: we could have spent a bit less time on the meatspace topic and a bit more time elsewhere, will try to push for that next time.

  • Caitlin: went by fast

  • Eduardo m: happy to be back from land of semi-dead, glad I remembered it

  • Matt: agenda was well written. Like the idea of crowdsourcing the todo list at the end.

  • John: this drove home the importance of collaboration for a coop

  • Flan: great, Kathe did a great job keeping us on track despite our best efforts, glad to be here, if you are waiting on anything from Tech WG, let me know, we could do a quick vote on agenda priorities.

Backlog items:The items below are not on the active agenda but should be addressed at some point in the future.

• SAGE 3 https://sage3.sagecommons.org/?page_id=921

• How do we deal with liability as an organization? Do we need to consider some kind of incorporation or legal entity? If so where?

• Strategically, how do we provide a framework for the Finance circle to help manage surplus?

• Ask for training on 'what it means to be an admin' to orientate new admins.

Dear All,

Is tomorrow's meeting (Tuesday 26 March) confirmed? If yes, at 1200 or 13:00 UTC?

Thanks again for the notes from the previous meeting, which make it easy to follow the discussions, and the structure of the agenda, to keep track of ideas and decisions.

Maybe see you tomorrow?

Hi all, I am traveling and may not be able to make the meeting. I am in Normandy, so UTC -1, or 14h, I think.
- Matt

Yes it is tomorrow. My apologies on falling behind on the recap and tomorrow's agenda. Tomorrow meeting is at 1200 UTC

Thanks!