Social.coop - Organizing Circle

Mon 16 Jun 2025 12:38PM

Organizing Circle Meeting: 2025 June 19 (1500 UTC)

MarieVC (social.coop/@MarieVC) Public Seen by 8

The Organizing Circle for social.coop will meet 2025 June 19 (Thursday) 1500 UTC - 1630 UTC. We will meet here: https://socialcoop.meet.coop/kat-aiw-mpv-6vv

Kathe TB Thu 19 Jun 2025 12:34PM

Agenda

1500 [15 min] Check in [no notes]:

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

What is your current favorite break activity? How are you pausing during your day?

1515 [5 min] ADMIN:

Who is here?
Does anyone need to leave early?
Confirm our next call on July 3 1500 UTC
Who is note taking?
Who is facilitating?

1520 [5 min] Inform and Review recap from last call

https://www.loomio.com/d/oEdDMqte/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-june-5-1500-utc-/4

1525 [10 min] Updates from working circles

Finance
Tech
Community
Legal - defunct-ish

1535 [30 min] Formulate -> Decision: Big Conversation

Context: 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. Specifically we would like to center discussion on how to

improve general decision/voting process, and

strategize how to interact with Fediverse (both corporate instances like Threads and other cooperative instances like cosocial.ca). Recent work in this space, like the publication of the Fediversalist Papers study in which Social.coop participated, must be taken into account.

the nature of cooperatives and commons, and the roles, responsibilities and powers of members

Co-responsibility and participation, it doesn’t have to be money, but since we are a coop, do we require something to give back? Do we want everyone to –for example- have a bit of time per year on moderation? (so as to better know and understand what needs to be done behind the curtains for everyone to have a good experience)?

Financial Strategic Development:

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

Consider using the DisCO framework (Livelihood, care, and love).

Open conversation on using resources not just to support other projects... e.g. education support for members... support instances in trouble.

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

Round: How could we hold these conversations?

Past discussion from June 5 2025

We seemed to circle the following breaking down into three basic steps of inform, multi-mode engagement, and follow up invitation:

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)

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

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

Microblog recaps of Loomio threads and Loomio recaps of Microblog threads

Loomio thread for each topic with phases with the thread

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

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

Round: Are we ready to move forward with a decision?

1605 [10 min] Review: Strategic priorities

Solo: review https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Strategic_priorities

Round: What is working well with this policy?
Round: What should change?

Round: Do we have consent to do [something]?

1615 [5 min] Tasks

What are you taking out of this call as a task or todo item?

1620 [10 min] Feedback

What worked well with this call and what could be improved? Explain why.

Kathe TB Thu 19 Jun 2025 4:30PM

Notes

1500 [15 min] Check in [no notes]:

How are you showing up today? What are you bringing into the space? [https://www.nycnvc.org/feelings or https://feelingswheel.com/]
What is your current favorite break activity? How are you pausing during your day?

1515 [5 min] ADMIN:

Who is here? Kathe TB, Ammar, Caitlin, Eduardo M, Flan, Marie VC, Melissa S
Does anyone need to leave early?
- Flan and Edu needs to leave at the hour.
- Melissa too (CWG meeting)
Confirm our next call on July 3 1500 UTC
Who is note taking?
- Caitlin and Flan
Who is facilitating?
- Kathe
Consent to agenda

1520 [5 min] Inform and Review recap from last call
https://www.loomio.com/d/oEdDMqte/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-june-5-1500-utc-/4

(Kathe covers these)
Flan: we could do cross-posting from Loomio to Mastodon as per a past proposal of Nathan Schneider, this could be a TWG topic.

1525 [10 min] Updates from working circles

Finance - needs to call a meeting, onboard new members, train new members in use of OC, work toward a new budget, decide if "Community Contributions" participatory budget will be a part of it , complete any budget analysis (via Kathe T-B)
- Kathe: have information on budget analysis, can pass it along.
- Caitlin: hope you show up in person to a meeting?
- Kathe: August is difficult but will try :)
Tech
- https://doc.anagora.org/social-coop-tech-group has the notes, we met on Tuesday (Dan and Flan) -- after quite a long time actually.
- Mastodon terms of service seemed like a hot topic and related to both CWG and TWG.
  - Latest on it is that implementation has been put on hold because of community feedback though, which seems like the right thing and takes pressure off the topic.
  - Q: was this instance or software ToS?
    - This is software support (with a suboptimal default) for per-instance ToS
    - main concerns:
      - irrevocable content license
      - forced arbitration
  - Eduardo: would like to propose an idea. Can we talk less about Mastodon and more about Microblogging?
    - Flan: +1 but I would use Fediverse (agreed with Flan - Melissa)
      - Fediverse may imply other services (microblogging, images, videos, sound/music, books, etc.). Microblogging is more specific, if we are talking about mastodon services (Melissa: yes, Fediverse feels more inclusive than microblogging alone). +1
      - Does Fediverse == ActivityPub? (semantics question by Ammar)
        
        yes, pretty much! there are other protocols but this is by far the main one.
  - Bonfire update (https://bonfirenetworks.org/)
    - They reached out for us to update to 1.0 and give it a try now
    - TWG: make a1 pg to inform what is that we could test.
Community
- Pending onboarding process review/ redesign (connected with profile hub/ identity providing).
  - Melissa: (sorry I dropped out so I couldn't take notes here, I had connectivity issues)
  - Eduardo: on identity providers. A community that provides identity is very valuable and social.coop could do this.
- Reporting on the Zulip experiment? here's a 10 day invite link - creates you as Admins so you can play around - https://socialcoop.zulipchat.com/join/apv4p2vwo3d536baktzeg3hq/
- Melissa: overall CWG day-to-day has been nice and quiet as of late
Legal - defunct-ish
- Kathe: saw a loomio thread on restarting legal

1535 [30 min] Formulate -> Decision: Big Conversation
Context: We need to have clearer lines of communication between the working groups and general membership of social.coop both (Loomio and Mastodon^HFediverse users). We want this to facilitate feedback on current operations and spark new directions for the coop. Specifically we would like to center discussion on how to

improve general decision/voting process, and
strategize how to interact with Fediverse (both corporate instances like Threads and other cooperative instances like cosocial.ca). Recent work in this space, like the publication of the Fediversalist Papers study in which Social.coop participated, must be taken into account.
the nature of cooperatives and commons, and the roles, responsibilities and powers of members
1. Co-responsibility and participation, it doesn’t have to be money, but since we are a coop, do we require something to give back? Do we want everyone to –for example- have a bit of time per year on moderation? (so as to better know and understand what needs to be done behind the curtains for everyone to have a good experience)?
Financial Strategic Development:
1. need clarity on criteria for consideration, how does this spending support the values, mission, and aims of social.coop
  1. Consider using the DisCO framework (Livelihood, care, and love).
  2. Open conversation on using resources not just to support other projects... e.g. education support for members... support instances in trouble.
2. ongoing support of an organization has a higher impact then a one-off donation
3. how can the process effectively leverage and build off of past discussions and decisions

Past discussion from June 5 2025
We seemed to circle the following breaking down into three basic steps of inform, multi-mode engagement, and follow up invitation:

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)
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)
Invitation to operations working groups to continue to move forward any policy changes

Round: How could we hold these conversations? Anything to add/anything missing?

(Two minutes reading time.)
Caitlin: looking at the past discussion (wasn't present). It's helpful to look at these specific suggestions like e.g. loomio thread/monthly call.
- 2.1 regular microblog announcements, "Periodic Post": really like those. They would make catching up after some absence from "the news" more tractable.
- Periodic posts/regular announcements with same format seem particularly useful to keep inviting engagement from the community.
- The ideal solution is: easy to find, brings all these aspects together.
Eduardo: nothing new -- except I already feel the need to write this down as a 'minimum spec' for working groups to review/adopt as needed.
Flan: Holding a synchronous meeting seems really important here! Ideally all work that happens for the community should take place in the public and be published for review/comments in one feed/one place (as per Caitilin's comment). There is a tech element here that TWG should help out with (cross-posting, etc.)
Marie: proposal written is clear and specific. Monthly meeting: is it too much for people? an "Open Hour" sounds do-able: a regular meeting to discuss whatever is relevant at the time. Not the same people every time who are leading. Cross-communicate: different formats: publishing locations for updates, not trying to write new content.
Melissa: Helpful to show people what the work is. Call it "Open Office Hours" rather than a "meeting." People will show up to an open discussion.
Ammar: Announcements and office hours sound good.