9 April 2024

Today I suspect we had some timezone crosses with the EU switch. We still had a good showing with over half of Organizing Circle attending. Our next call is going to be in two weeks (April 23) at 1200UTC.

We had some check-in on personal to-do items and other working group activities in social.coop. We heard back from @MarieVC (social.coop/@MarieVC) and @Kathe TB about their experimentation with Loomio decisions and wikipedia documentation; expect a decision thread on this shortly. We started talking through operational roles and how to support redundancy in this group (see backlog for additional items).

Meeting agenda, notes, and recap are here: https://www.loomio.com/d/MOtve6Tw/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-9-april-tuesday-1200-utc

23 April 2024

We seem to be settling into a pattern for the agendas in Organizing Circle:

1. Opening with check-ins and agenda co-construction

2. Updates - member ToDo followups and operational circle reports

3. Community discussions - tracking Loomio thread conversations

4. Open agenda items

5. Close out - member ToDos, circle backlog, and feedback on process

Updates

• Finance Working Group is experimenting with participatory budgeting for our donations/support to related FOSS projects. Some glitches getting the right Loomio format set up but learning a lot about this process.

• Tech Working Group had a successful open house! Word is they are considering doing more in the future.

• Community Working Group is mentoring and training new moderators (woho!).

• Legal Working Group is still defunct.

Open items

We are following the Loomio thread on disabling images very closely as a use-case for how to propose action items from the larger community to an operational circle. We'll be following up with Tech Working Group and the Loomio community afterwards for feedback and look into developing guidance. We are curious where the agenda and minutes for the Tech Working Group is? We had some questions on disabling images and realized none of us knew where their minutes were.

Several new idea's were discussed including: asking for two rather then one member from each working group to attend Operational Circle, developing annual patterns for regular strategic items, and visiting each working group with the ask "How can we help?".

https://www.loomio.com/d/U7Trdp3o/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-23-april-tuesday-1200-utc

7 May 2024

Today we focused on updates from the working circles/groups and tracking two major discussions on Loomio.

Finance Working Group is still finalizing the list of organizations for participatory budgeting. Current plan is to move forward with dot voting to allocate $3400 (USD) in two rounds. During the gathering of this list it was uncovered that we are underpaying for our Loomio services given our community size (possibly grandfathered in?). FWG decided to reallocate ~$400 (USD) from the 'donation' pool to rectify this, moving forward this might be an explicit budget item.

Tech Working Group is in the process of standing up a development server alpha.social.coop to help train new members and create a sandbox to test out new features. There were two new members who are onboarding. The open house was successful with feedback on a roadmap for the working group collected. Meeting agenda's and notes for TWG can be found here: https://www.loomio.com/d/UwAeiBgE/tech-meeting-minutes (maybe only open to people in the TWG?) and https://doc.anagora.org/social-coop-tech-group (where we write them down; open).

Community Working Group is realizing how complicated their workflow is with about 9 different platforms involved in moderation. CWG did vote to approve new members. There may be a diversity problem emerging (said 4 white men with facial hair); CWG is looking to fill an 'at-large' (most advisory) position to help remedy this without putting additional burden on under represented groups. There is likely a broader discussion around inclusivity in recruitment vs rendition to be had across the working groups and circles to be had at a later date.

Loomio discussions: There are two major loomio discussions we are tracking: expanding word count, and alt text images.

• https://www.loomio.com/d/C4HKmTOa/proposal-to-revisit-extending-the-character-limit-for-posts This is an old idea that which has seen renewed interest! Folks are interested in expanding the character limit for mastodon posts from 500 to 1000. It was proposed as a majority vote with a block option. May of the opposition votes are personal preferences (based on comments) with no block votes at this time. After some discussion we propose a term decision (~6 months was suggested) with evaluation metrics (workload shifts for moderation, negative impact on user experience), Matt with Eduado will compose a counter proposal and see if this moves through the Loomio community under a consent style vote.

• https://www.loomio.com/d/gdjfsyx8/would-people-be-interested-in-disabling-images-in-favour-of-alt-text-for-world-sight-day-and-the-global-accessibility-awareness-day- This thread to disable images to center alt text in recognition of World Sight Day and Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Tech Working Group has evaluated the proposal and it would break the upload feature given the current state of the platform. Instead they propose possible feature expansion of the Mastodon source code to encourage good practices around alt text creation. This would be less visible but have a higher potential impact. Paired with this suggestion is a suggestion of funding software 'bounties' to encourage feature development. @Flancian will follow up on these suggestions.

We did not get to the more strategic discussions on the agenda today but will prioritize discussing the following on https://www.loomio.com/d/EVT5dfyO/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-7-may-tuesday-1200-utc : expanding representation in OC from the working groups from one to two members, annual patterns of strategic topics, and compensation logs w/ how to encourage working members to take pay.

https://www.loomio.com/d/EVT5dfyO/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-7-may-tuesday-1200-utc

21 May 2024

Today we had brief updates from the working groups, checked in on the conclusion of the character limit Loomio discussion, and then talked through sense-making with the compensation/stipends.

Working group updates were brief, no new developments from Finance nor Community working groups. We didn't have a representative from tech reporting in. Community working group is still discussing the diversity issue. From this diversity and engagement discussion, we are going to investigate contacting MayFirst and see how they approached member engagement and collective governance.

Loomio threads: https://www.loomio.com/d/C4HKmTOa/proposal-to-revisit-extending-the-character-limit-for-posts/32 The character limit thread resolved without intervention from Operating Circle in alignment with how we were going to suggest. We are curious if folks want help tracking the re-evaluation deadline in 6 months. No other active threads were identified.

We decided to break off topical discussions from the agenda threads into their own threads on the Organizing Circle for better visibility. We will spin off threads on: compensation, annual patterns, increasing WG representation on OC, OC wiki page development, and conversation with MayFirst.

Compensation: For context, Finance Working Group has allotted a set amount of money for each working group for stipends or compensation. Working Groups decide how to allocate this amongst the members. At issue is a reluctance of people to actually draw those stipends. Some reasons that were discussed were: tax implications, difficulty moving money, and questions about valuing time vs experience. We generally recognized the value in tracking labor to support the operations of social coop as part of making the collective sustainable. We will revisit this topic next meeting and start a Loomio thread for asynchronous discussion.

Our meeting times are shifting to accommodate planting schedules. We will meet Wednesday June 5 at 1200UTC.

https://www.loomio.com/d/NxT5QSKh/organizing-circle-meeting-2024-21-may-tuesday-1200-utc