PS. I'll be putting the new form online before the #BuyTwitter vote tomorrow

FYI on process, I got this note from a local co-op movement friend (Simeon Chapin) a few days ago and responded as such:

Simeon: Yo - I requested a membership to social.coop days ago. No notice yea or nea. who is granting access?

Me: I will poke Mayel today, but right now it's kinda ad hoc honor system, so if you want to get set up, follow these 3 steps:
1. Set up a recurring sliding scale payment via opencollective here: https://opencollective.com/socialcoop
2. Join the Loomio governance group here: https://www.loomio.org/g/ibncxoDR/social-coop
3. Set up your profile here: https://social.coop/members-only

One other thing. This tweet makes me think we should have a bit more information about us on the landing page. Perhaps links to the OpenCollective and Loomio groups so people can see who we are and lurk.

Makes perfect sense to me. I'll jump on the code ASAP and send @mayel a proposal.

Speaking of which... @mayel can we have a close icon at the top of the overlay? The only way to close the form at the moment is to reload the page.

We could maybe take some content from the welcome email: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1weUraqvakTjAP4ZzlJDqyC0fxbyHZhO2-6p6JyZl1Fg/edit#

Thanks for taking up the suggestion!

BTW, I just created a draft membership spreadsheet in our shared Sandstorm folder:
https://oasis.sandstorm.io/shared/0zNn81lb5-gv6y_jcoFwdFMH65uoxiugYCOwnU8laWn

We now have a database on the server for this :) See attached for what it looks like.

We're about to click on the invite button for a bunch of people and send out the following email. Any feedback let me and @matthewcropp know!

Thanks for applying for membership in social.coop!

We're excited to have you join our band of co-operators who have been working for the past few months to start translating the #PlatformCoop vision for democratic, accountable social media into a working model on Mastodon!

Your Social.coop Account Details

You can login at https://social.coop with your email and the following temporary password, which we recommend changing right away:

You probably also received a separate message to verify your email address - you can actually ignore that one.

Your profile on Mastodon and the Fediverse is:

social.coop/@user
@user@social.coop

Joining the Co-op

Our aim is to be a transparent instance governed by our users. While a scalable model is still very much in development, we are currently using OpenCollective for finances and Loomio for governance. The Loomio group is currently publicly visible, but to participate in governance, you must be a full co-op member.

To join, head over to our OpenCollective page and commit to a monthly contribution of anything between $1 and $10 (USD). When that has been set up, you will be invited to be a participant in the Loomio group. For those unable to pay, we are developing an “honorary membership” system in which a certain number of free memberships can be offered (as a percentage of the number of paying memberships). In this way we hope to be able to balance accessibility with financial sustainability for our co-op.

Getting Started in the Social.Coop and Broader Mastodon Communities

Toot an Introduction:

Once you are logged in, write up a toot introducing yourself. In your post, include the hashtag #introduction, hashtags for particular interests and affinities you have (say #PlatformCoop, where you live, etc.), as well as #SocialCoop, which we have been using for discussions of the instances and occasional co-op-focused 'toot-ups'.

Explore Some Hashtags for Folks to Follow:

Hashtags are more important for discovery on Mastodon than they are on the centralised platforms, and are thus a good way to find folks with shared interests to follow. Spend a few minutes exploring topics of interest to you, and follow folks who seem to have interesting things to say.

Do a little background reading:

This article is a great place to start to learn more about how Mastodon works, both from a user perspective and a bit under the hood.

Conclusion

Thanks again for your interest in joining the social.coop community! We’re excited to be taking the big step from a theoretical interest in platform co-op social media to cultivating a real online co-op community space, and are glad to have you a part of this adventure!

Let’s toot soon!

Mayel & Matt Cropp
Social.Coop Membership Committee

Nice database!

And great introductory email. I love it. Can't wait to toot toot toot!

Sorry for not making it in time (I'm in the UK right now). I don't have a clear idea about this but I'd say wait until policy is a fairly safe approach for me.

To follow up, the full membership acceptance process proposed in the draft bylaws is:

1. People may apply at https://social.coop/about
2. Based on policies previously agreed through proposals in the full group (see Governance), the application is approved or denied (through a proposal in the Loomio membership working group)
3. Approved applicants receive a Mastodon account
4. After 42 days of probationary membership without having their account frozen: 4.1 They are expected to begin making monthly contributions (membership dues) between USD $1 and $10 (via OpenCollective), unless they have been approved as (non-paying) honorary member by the membership working group (see below) 4.2 They are invited to join the (Loomio) group, and are expected to get involved in Governance, and to participate in at least one working group

For the Honorary Memberships, the proposed approach is:
In order to foster a diverse community, membership dues are based on a model similar to "buy one, give one" – the number of honorary members should be linked to the current ratio of co-op members to total annual contributions, for example:
100 members contributing a total of $1500 annually = 25 honorary members
100 contributing $3000 annually = 50 honorary members
100 contributing $6000 annually = 100 honorary members

My thinking is that, as we have a bunch of folks flowing in, we should schedule a call to reality-test these assumptions and develop a proposal to bring back to the full group. I will create a schedule poll to get that call rolling...

Hi Matt,

could you please elaborate on the following: "100 members contributing a total of $1500 annually = 25 honorary members 100 contributing $3000 annually = 50 honorary members 100 contributing $6000 annually = 100 honorary members" ?

I'm not 100% I understood what you mean. Thanks!

I was quoting from the draft bylaws language that I believe @ntnsndr wrote - perhaps he could clarify? I think figuring out something clearer will be something we need to do on the call...

I'm afraid I didn't write that part of the bylaws. I assume the basic logic is that we scale the allowance of honorary members according to the size of the paying base so we can afford the costs that they bring.

Hangout link - it appears markdown does not work in outcome sharing messages specifically.

The living agenda doc for today's meeting, and the Hangout link

See ya at 12pm Eastern, @mayel, @michelekipiel, and anyone else who can make it!

I'm in, waiting for you

Mayel and I met at noon; notes and next actions are on the above linked living agenda doc.

We need to address the time zone problem... I looked up 12PM EST in duck duck go and the result was "7PM CEST", which is also the time I picked in the poll...

Argh, you're right - it's currently Eastern DAYLIGHT time EDT, not EST, which is super confusing - @mayel did find that multi-timezone scheduling tool; what was it called?

I should be aware of what my own time zone w/ daylight savings time is, though. Apologies for the confusion... :(

No worries, this whole daylight saving thing is mighty confusing. I'm just pissed I couldn't attend the meeting because I basically planned my sunday afternoon around it. Thanks for the notes though, interesting stuff!

Ps. I can't access the bylaws on sandstorm, could you please add me so I can review the document? Thanks!

@michelekipiel join here: https://timezone.io/join/a89c59be5f5ef0b6

I've sent an invite from sandstorm

Thanks! The document looks pretty neat to me (though I have zero previous experience with coops and I might be missing some key points)