Social.coop "Regeneration Team" Formation

@wulee It's great that this kind of matter is coming into the general sphere. Lacking the time or skills to feel I should participate in the Tech Ops subgroup, I've nevertheless wondered just how sound the basic material economy of social.coop was, and what kinds of steps were needed to make it viable, resilient and fair, as membership of the instance leaped upward, and new non-tech folks (like me) came in. It's painful that this insight should emerge under the present circumstances . . but a signal that such things need to be more up-front in a regenerated social.coop?

Subgroups are needed, but also are some kind of problem? Too soon to tell whether the weekly summary thread started by @michelekipiel is the way to handle this business of transparency? Likewise, hard to say whether the 'official social.coop account' in Mastodon that he advocated here would enable us all to get on the same page, regarding the basics of invisible work, housekeeping, needs and intentions in this space.

I figured this will be buried, and maybe stuff sounds redundant now, but I copied part of my response from earlier on the thread:

< CW: somewhat angry/frustrated response to reading some salient comments by iansmith and robertbenjamin, not just in this thread :

1 - At the moment, we have a critical safety to community and trust issue within the fediverse that should be taken seriously.

Cooperative decision making in such a large group is great for business-as-usual, and it is good for slow change and stuff non-radical to the community. On the other hand, S.C is in a crisis of needing fast and radical change, yet stuck having critical decisions bogged down by bikeshedding and polite (and often white, male, and privileged) naysayers, including yourself. People who would prefer to re-frame the necessity to delegate (yes, delegate, collectively, by the membership community) to a smaller, swifter-acting team requiring intense legwork -- with a mission that will impact our reputation and our very existence -- as advocating for a dictatorship or Junta.

2 -
a - Echoing horatiotrobinson here, it sure doesn't sound like you trust a diverse team of chosen representatives to do a good job (why is that?). But will dragging in a lot of the community who may be ill-equipped to do this, who may not have time, and most importantly, who are not cognizant of their privileged worldview, to decide these critical matters via majority votes and polite methods of silencing dissent in the interests of incremental, non-radical change... will that truly bring a more equitable result? Because I guarantee you that most (hopefully all) folks here believe in making S.C the best it can possibly be, safe from harassment and abuse, and a successful model of a cooperatively-operated, federated,non-corporate online community that empowers, rather than silence, marginalized voices sounds pretty great. But checking one's privilege means NOT chiming in about how they think it should be done if they don't have some level of experience, expertise, awareness, and ability to actually do this.
b - For example. I am a scientist, and while I can collaborate with a novice undergraduate student about some matters and perhaps delegate some tasks, the undergraduate student has a lot of learning and listening and reading to do, regardless of how hard a worker and how well-meaning they are. For deeper, more effective, and creative discussions, I collaborate with a peer doctor professor in the same field (but not necessarily the same sub-discipline, since we'd think too alike, also a danger).
Trust. Trust in a team chosen to be better suited to do this than many copies of you. That is what is being asked for. >

I can't find words of appreciation good enough for this post so I'll stick with "fuck yeah, this". Sorry for cursing.

We need to get this problem sorted and, as @nev pointed out, the last thing we need right now is excessive bureaucracy slowing down the change.

The idea is simple: let's elect a temporary R-Team, give them the power they need to sort out the necessary solutions so the cooperative can survive and make ourselves available to carry out the practical tasks that would overwhelm them, if we left them alone.

How on Earth this could look like a junta to someone is beyond me.

I apologize if any of my words have given an impression that I am not strong supporter of the vast majority of what is being laid out or trying delay implementation of what I believe is the intent. Feel free to contact me directly to call me on anything I've said or to get perspective on my work in some of these areas on this platform and off. For which I would also be thankful to hear of yours.

The most baffling thing to me (that has left me thinking all day) is wondering how the minds of genuinely good people with good intentions, and people of considerable intelligence (in some cases with vast experience and understanding of the cooperative movement) can be tricked into seeing representative democracy, delegation, and a vote of confidence on qualified people who think alike (along cooperative values) as something fundamentally undemocratic. I can only imagine there's a complex psychological effect taking place that has more to do with poorly articulated fears on an instinctual level than anything else. It just doesn't make any rational sense.

Representative democracy hasn't been proposed. Propose it, and I might agree. What's been proposed is a unknown committee with unilateral authority over all aspects of the coop. The US government has no such body. Mondragon had no such body.

The proposal was badly worded. Change it and people will start agreeing.

It's obviously a dictatorship! A military JUNTA, and THEY will kick your doors and take your children away at night!

But please assume goodwill that the white men are totally playing nice and they don't want to cause any harm. Promise! (never mind the last 12 months)

Can you not see the double standard?

Fact: Some people can be trusted and were trusted.

Hypothesis: Some other people just can never be trusted under any circumstances.

Can you not see that placing yourself in the position of an arbiter instead of someone who wants to cooperate and find ways out of the mess we're all in reeks of white male privilege?

My proposal is either people begin to behave like rational adults or this is not a cooperative I can recognise as one observing anything remotely similar to the ideal seven values, and the more our members insist on behaving in that direction, the less I'm inclined to do more taxing work that benefits this exceedingly privileged group of people with the product of my efforts and my continued presence.

Honestly you haven't been following your own advice. You've been throwing an abusive tantrum because not everyone wants to vote on your promised intentions rather than the proposal put forward. The proposal we're voting on is just bad. What is the reason that it can't be amended to have more transparency and accountability? Why is the only way forward for you to badger all of us that don't agree into saying yes?

Maybe take a bit of a look in the mirror before hurling any more accusations or insults.

Abusive tantrum? Rethink that when you find the time to take a cold shower.

I won't be able to make the call tonight, but I'd like to suggest Willow Brugh as a possible facilitation consultant for the process. She's one of the best facilitators out there and has a background in both cooperative decision making and social justice. I reached out to her and she's potentially interested. Here's her portfolio: https://work.bl00cyb.org/

This would be a good idea in some circumstances, but I'm unsure whether it would be workable right now.

I don't have the feeling that a number of people have a real sense of what has happened here, the effort it has represented for a group of people to restore things back to relative sanity, and that any sense of gratitude, goodwill, or cooperative ethics can be extracted from them.

If it has to be extracted by force, spoonfeeding, and mess cleaning every time, and to that we add the expense of professional services because some people just can't do any self-education, that's the farthest thing from cooperative spirit I can think of. It feels more like the US Congress, that wonderful, paradigmatic place of democracy and honest collaboration that @iansmith wanted to talk to me about earlier.

Nobody wants to be torturing people who just don't have it in them, I'm not in the business of implementing Guantanamo for cooperativists, if I'm to follow Ian's scarcely apt epitome of governance example.

There are three basic problems (leaving aside the hosting question) facing social.coop right now:
1) mistrust, fear, frustration, anger, disrespect among the members/participants (not all people on social.coop are actually members)
2) an active membership that seems to be skewed toward white, cis, males (we should be careful here, it would be good to have actual numbers of members and of patterns of participation and not make assumptions, including about how people identify).
3) pluralism of mission/vision - what is our purpose? Do we need to have just one?

I think we need to continue exploring and trying out ways to deal with #1, which calls for innovation in practising radical self-respect and respect for others. This is a one-to-one and many-to-many thing in which policies are at best a support. (It is also about self-work.) If we can make real improvements in this area that could be of help to others trying to build SNS coops.

#2 is the one that calls into question the existence of the organization in its present form. Is it possible to re-organize such that we have equity in operations, ownership, governance without radically changing the composition of the membership itself (ourselves)?
In a labor movement group in Japan, I proposed dissolving the nearly all-male steering committee of which I was a member and re-building on an equity basis. (If that was not possible, start a different project where equity could be built in.) The group rejected my proposal and voted instead to create a "next generation" group, constituted on the basis of equity in terms especially of gender and age. The two bodies function side by side for now, but the next gen. group is building new leadership/operations teams in the shell of the old, taking on more of the operations and will become the new steering committee.

#3 is not necessarily a problem in my view. I think we can have a high degree of pluralism - I like seeing toots that range from tech stuff, to politics, to anime, to rabbits -- but lack of a focus has been identified by others as a key source of confusion about social.coop and how it should be run.

Appreciated the conversation tonight with @gimcgrew @noahhall & @caitlinwaddick - we took some rough notes from the conversation that can be read and commented on here. I have a few high-intensity IRL events coming up that will be sopping up most of my spare capacity until the end of the weekend, but would be happy to see a European organizing a similar opportunity for synchronous discussion that works for you all, time-wise, as it's been useful to process this verbally.

My feeling at this point is that, while proposals can always be made better, this one has the potential to sufficiently balance our need to empower those who have been dis-empowered by our processes and culture up to now with ensuring that the core democratic nature of this project is both preserved and rejuvenated. As such, I plan on allowing the proposal to stand for the duration of the voting period, and my vote remains Agree.

Should the proposal fail to pass, I think it will be time to consider a process from which one of the potential outcomes could be the forking of social.coop. Here's how I could envision such a process flowing:
- Social.coop solicits proposals from the members for cooperatively-governed successor instances with a deadline of between 2 weeks and a month for submissions. Proposals much include an identified founding team, an operations plan, a code of conduct, and a clear statement of purpose defining the scope of the intended membership/community and reason for the instance's existence.
- Proposed instances are put up for a dot vote in which each member has three dots to allocate.
- At the conclusion of dot-voting, the top three vote-getters are identified.
- The top vote-getting team is given the opportunity to implement their proposal as social.coop, restructuring and running it in alignment with their proposal.
- The second and third top vote-getting teams may choose, by a vote of the team, to either accept that outcome and continue participating as members of social.coop under the new framework, or receive a pro-rata share (their % of the total dots received by the top 3 vote-getters) of social.coop's Open Collective balance at the conclusion of the vote to use as start-up funds for the launch of their proposed instance under a different domain.

This could be a way of selecting between multiple restructuring proposals that leads to continuity of a single co-op, or it could be a way of organizing an amicable splitting into multiple streams that attempt to achieve different ends by different organizational means.

In the midst of all the honesty, acrimony, and painful work happening, it's very clear that a great number of people care deeply about what we're trying to accomplish here, and I am feeling intense gratitude.

Not naming names. Is it me of some of the people who vociferously demanded a bikeshedding process to be initiated, and confirmed they would be present didn't have the courtesy of showing up to this conference tonight?
What should be interpreted from this?

I'm glad that others took part of the conversation and were able to get better acquainted with the situation and informed about the nuances and complexity of what we're trying to do.

I was away when all this came to a head and have taken the last few days to try to process it. I am currently in a place where I have thoughts but am worried that what I think are reasonable concerns may be taken as evidence of not caring about the issues. The tenor of a number of comments lately on Loomio has made it harder for me to speak out for fear of being misunderstood. I am working to push through this.

My concern is that there are a number of questions and answers, clarifications about the proposal that have been offered in discussion on Loomio, but if one looks at the proposal itself I find it quite vague and hard to tell exactly what this group would be empowered to do or not empowered to do. I worry that this could make things difficult for the group to do necessary work. On the other hand, if the proposal doesn’t pass and then we move directly to a possible fork without the chance to clarify what is left vague in this proposal, I’m not excited about that either. I realize that once people have voted the proposal itself can’t change but I would prefer seeing a clearer one with powers spelled out in ways that have been clarified in discussion threads here. I don’t know if those clarifications would hold up if the group’s scope were challenged later.

So I’m a bit torn here and am still deciding how to vote. I’m hoping this makes sense and doesn’t sound like an attempt to weasel out of very much needed rethinking of the group and a focus on inclusion. I find that work so crucial I want to make sure we can put the group on the best footing to do it.

Having trouble editing my comment on my phone. What I meant in the second to last sentence is the much needed work of regenerating social.coop, not the working group being proposed.

I have been turning this over in my head and am ready for some feedback. I've gotten the sense from this discussion and from people's votes that there is enough support to pass a proposal for regeneration, just not necessarily this one. And I think the gap has to do with putting down some specifics. (I want to be clear that I appreciate Matt starting this discussion and I don't mean any of my concerns with the current proposal as personal insults or attempts to devalue the work that's been done so far.) I don't want to hamstring the process by declaring too many areas out-of-bounds, or insisting everything come to a general vote, but I think there's a middle ground available for a proposal that has a little bit more to say about the anticipated areas of focus of the Regen Team, or some minor assurances that the server will not be taken down unceremoniously without warning. I've seen the arguments that requiring such assurances implies a lack of trust or good faith in the Team, but given that the team has not been chosen yet, that argument seems a bit premature as well. And I think one component of setting the Team up for success would be to make sure that it's created under terms of greater mutual understanding and clearer expectations than the current proposal has generated.

So, I'm wondering if anyone either (a) is already working on a followup proposal with more specificity about, for example, anticipated areas of focus, tentative milestones, progress report schedules, or similar topics that could make it feel like a clearer, more substantive proposal without overly limiting the latitude the Team will eventually have, or (b) would be interested in working with me and others to create such a proposal (or without me! it's inescapable to acknowledge that I'm of the privileged class over-represented among our membership, and doubtless not one of the most qualified members to create a diversity program).

It seems like a quick turnaround would be necessary and I'm ready to put in some time over the weekend and early next week to that end - with this thread to work from I think we could have something ready rather quickly. But I don't think I'm alone in being less than eager for the discussion to move to splitting without making a serious, earnest, and thorough effort to address the topic with all of the current membership.

This proposal does not have enough support and there is no clear alternative proposal. Maybe instead of a proposal, we need initiatives?

For example, there is nothing stopping people from brainstorming solutions to the insufficient diversity of our membership and the members most active in operations. Months ago, when the CWG was being renamed, there was some discussion of an initiative to build Equity in operations.

We have many initiatives already: the Tech WG and a few people are heroically keeping Social.Coop online and thinking about its future hosting. New versions of the Code of Conduct, Reporting Guidelines, and Conflict Resolution Guidelines have been created, taking into account the most recent criticisms and suggestions. The Reading Group is on line to have a chat with the author of Values at Work, and a group of people interviewed Social.Coop member Michaela Fisher about her global coop learning journey. Informally -- people have been taking the initiative to speak to each other directly, to defuse tensions and listen to each other, this practice can be coordinated and made a part of how we function.

All of this can be done without a big proposal (specific proposals, e.g. on hosting solutions, are important), and most of it is already being done. We are making this road by walking.

I understand the sincerity of your good intentions and that you believe at heart that this is good enough. It's good enough for all the people who still don't see anything wrong, and might possibly be good enough for people who haven't quit in disgust. But we're not quite there yet.

It was my hope that building an environment in which those who left would feel at home would make them reconsider. Right after this proposal was set up for vote, I was hopeful and determined to contribute a significant number of work hours to pull this project together. Only to be met with insulting comparisons, bikeshedding, derailment, and total lack of respect by a few of our members who still haven't been called out for their disappointing behaviour.

If you see such behaviour in addition to staunch cultural uniformity, talking to an envoy who talked to foreign peoples, and extolling heroicism of a few good men as a signs of progress in the right direction, we couldn't possibly have more different views of what a genuinely global, diverse, and inclusive cooperative group must function like.

I would argue that we don't even have compatible views about what cooperativism must look like. A significant part of our membership is very resistant to cultural change, internationalism, and experimentation. That's fine. It's honest disagreement, and it's obviously a perfectly respectable thing in my view.

What is not fine is to pretend that it must absolutely be enough for another significant group of people and that they should quit if they don't like it.
Some of our members have said something to this effect, that social.coop may not be for everyone. And at least one member has said that only now he's feeling that social.coop is becoming what a cooperative should be like. Obviously, another US anglo white man. Now that all the other people have left or are about leaving it can finally feel like home.

I hear you, it's not that I don't listen to you guys. It's that after having listened I still really believe at heart that you are fundamentally wrong.

As you would expect, in loyal honesty, my opinion is that it's quite possible that after this vote is done next saturday we won't pass at least two or three tests of the seven cooperative principles.

I saw one of our members register his disappointment saying that the disagreement by some people who want to make this a more cooperative cooperative is akin to Monty Python's Life of Brian. Probably referring to the funny situation when the peasants are complaining that the Romans only gave them aqueducts and education, and other things.
That's indicative how some members view some of our members in this situation, not as equals, not as members with legitimate concerns, but these other guys who complain too much about all the good things that those in the cultural mainstream have "given" to them.

No one has taken back yet any statements about "Junta", "dictatorship", and "undemocratic". Because some of our members (but not all of them) can get away with it.

If you don't think this cooperative has been eminently regressive and hostile towards many of its members, and you see the current state of affairs as any kind of "progress", the differences we have may well be irreconcilable and we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Thank you all, it's been a ride. I wish everybody all the best.
Here's a little letter
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PGG5u19RG6f-jfP17rim5MD-zCXz5nG-5KF_51f5B94/edit?usp=sharing

See you around in the fediverse.

I am afraid I will soon have to follow in your steps... I am finding the current situation so stressful I am no longer even reading Loomio emails and, as you probably noticed, I disappeared from the instance. It pains me to see the proposal to uproot the current state of affairs by means of a "shock therapy" didn't pass, and the initial sense of urgency rapidly dissipated into endless debate.

I will take a couple more days to decide, but I can't see myself lending any more time to a place where I no longer feel at home.

Sorry.

I have to leave too, I just can't do this anymore.

@matthewcropp, @h, @gimcgrew, @emido, @mattnoyes, @loppear, @fabianhjr, @michelekipiel Thank you for the energy you put into this, I am sorry that the initial proposal did not work out. I would like to help with trying again.

I was among those unable to find a wholly positive attitude towards the previous proposal, but I never could quite express why in a way that didn't feel reactionary, so I agonized, read comments, and held my tongue. Here are the items that stood out to me in as common threads in the discussion:

1. A lack of a sense of urgency and clarity on the impetus for the proposal.
   For some of us, myself included, the events that precipitated this proposal are still shrouded in mystery. Everywhere I look from people in the know I just find answers along the lines of "I've explained it too many times already." After a thorough search, I believe I located the original Loomio thread, but the offending comments have been deleted, so I feel like I'll never really know. Maybe if the next proposal included a preamble explaining the need for urgency and drastic measures, it would be easier for the membership at large to swallow.

2. Time-frame.
   Seemingly at odds with the urgent problems is a 6 month term for the team. Could we start instead with a short-term attack on the immediate issues and go on from there? I expect most of the policy needs could be worked out in an 8-hour intensive session of the regeneration team. With our reserves, I believe we could fairly compensate those involved for a day's work so that it is not an opportunity only available to the privileged.

3. Scope and hierarchy.
   This seemed to elicit the most passionate responses. Aside from the issue of concentrated power, the was also the aspect, highlighted by @nev, that we seemed to be forming another committee to solve the problems with committees. I think, if the 1-day policy workshop idea is agreeable, the need for unilateral decision making in order to effect timely change would be ameliorated. Instead, we could offer an urgent membership vote on adopting the new set of policies that were drafted in the workshop.

What do you say? I can draft most of this proposal if you like , but I'd need help with the preamble described in #1.

Just amazing that people are flouncing over the insufficient dedication of the userbase when NOBODY WILL ACTUALLY EXPLAIN WHAT'S GOING ON.

There's been some resistance to the idea of summarizing what happened from at least three viewpoints that I can identify:
won't do any good, too painful, and rehashing will just stir up the same disagreements.
I don't agree, I think it's necessary to identify the problem or problems if you want to solve or avoid them, but I am not involved or close enuf to the situation to do it myself.
I still think it would be useful to collect the few attempts to explain in the same place (maybe with hyperlinks rather than copying) and see if they are at all coherent with each other.

I observed that some people wanted to explicitly ban Nazis et al and some people wanted to debate the definition, and then some people wanted to ban Wil Wheaton and other people thought he had been unfairly treated, and some people wanted some official groups with official powers and representative democracy, and some people people thought that was dictatorial.
So there's at least three contradictory opinions bumping into each other.

And then some people are exasperated because it has taken so long to do anything, but I am not sure all of those fall into the same contradictory camps.

Did I miss any contradictory opinion? Or something that happened that was not part of any of those contradictions?

A retrospective analysis seems like a good idea. I suggest a wiki so that people can make incremental improvements that can be discussed, investigated, improved. Not sure if git.coop ( http://git.coop ) wiki has discussion pages, but I was working on getting the media wiki back up before all this happened and will try to get back to that soon.

Great idea. Nev and I also exchanged messages about this.

I still have a Loomio account but I won't be any more time here, i only came back to switch this off because I keep getting invited to working groups bullshit.

The time to do this was a weeks ago. There's no need to be insufferable and drive people away to finally listen. I'm not going to say more because all this shit fucking pisses me.

The good farewell letter is above. Hope people are happy with that one.

Bye.

Excuse me, but I'm new to the discussion. Wasn't the Regeneration Team proposal rejected by vote? What is the current proposal and where can one read it? Thank you!

I would also like to add that the deadline to discuss this was far too short - what is the exact urgency?

Thank you for your time in explaining this.

Hi Milos, yes, the proposal was rejected. The current initiative is the Revitalization Team, which you have seen, I think.

Thanks! Yes, I did see it. The names are so similar (Regeneration/Revitalization), I thought it was the same thing!