I just want to say I absolutely love this idea. I am a big affinity group believer and think that adjacent but independent groups finding points of common contact is The Way. They seem directly in-line with what I believe we're doing here, they seem like great people, and pending a bit more information about their membershipping process I would love to invite them as full members here and would be interested in making membership bidirectional. I have also thought for a long time that it would be super rad to get more connected to the broader cooperative community, including folks like NASCO doing housing coops and other groups doing worker co-ops.

I'm not positive I'll be able to make the meeting but I also very enthusiastically support joining May First! I am already a member and host my personal website, nextcloud, email etc there and I absolutely love it 🥰

Meeting Notes 2022-11-07

Below are the meeting notes from the May First Membership Discussion that were collaboratively transcribed in the meet.coop room.

Agenda:    

1. Greetings

   1. edsu: thank you for being here :)

   2. mattnoyes will run this meeting

   3. round of introductions

      1. mattnoyes: in Colorado; in the Community Working Group ("CWG")

      2. moon_baron (he/him): mostly here lurking, part of social.coop

      3. Alain: from Belgium, part of social.coop for a few months/one year.

      4. Billy Smith: hardware engineer, into materials (also has a cool nginx tshirt! :)) - Conference schwag. :D

      5. Bogdan: live in the US, currently in Berlin. member of social.coop for two years but mostly inactive, first meeting here. In exploration mode for the past eight months. Focusing energy on cooperatives now, mid west / canada, tech coops in particular. Software engineer with a focus on data sovereignity / digital self determination.

      6. Bob Haugen: interested in the topic, plan to be lurking today.

      7. calix (they/them): part of https://coopcloud.tech, which was part of social.coop since early last year; first general social coop meeting, have been to some TWG meetings in the last few weeks. Been part of an organization that is part of May First.

      8. Ed Summers (he/him): Live in Maryland, working as a software developer. Glad to be here.

      9. Eduardo Mercovich: from Argentina, studied biology, member of May First for a few years. Recently joined social.coop. Prototyping complex socio technological systems, happy to be here.

      10. Eduardo (Flancian): Site Reliability Engineer. TWG/CGW apprentice.

      11. Jamie: long time listener, first time caller :) In software developer working on FarmOS, based in NYC.

      12. Joeri: joined social.coop a week ago. Long time open source user / contributor, in the Drupal community. PHP + Python, LAMP oriented. Training organizations on how to use Drupal and build sites. Live in Spain. Would like to learn more about self-sufficiency, working with local communities, build a nicer future for all :)

      13. Juni: Portland, Oregon. Transformative justice. May First and Social.coop member for ~2y.

      14. Kaleb (he/him): Austin, Texas. Cloud Infra and IoT deployment background. Into AI Ethics. Interested in seeing how social.coop runs.

      15. Mariah: From San Antonio, Texas. Doing research in Spain on free culture. Free Software advocate, curious about the inner workings of coops.

      16. Michael Potter: In Los Angeles, Linux focus. Part of both coops for ~18 months now.

      17. Nathan: In Colorado; founding member of social.coop. Member of May First for ~10y or more (!).

      18. Paul Bowman: (audio issues, moving to chat).

2. What is May First?

   1. What would be the benefits of social.coop becoming a member of May First (e.g. NextCloud calendars)? Any introductions that May First members would like to make?

      1. Eduardo Mercovich: a tool for progressive movements. The emphasis is not to be confused with a cheap hoster, but rather to push forward progressive agendas for social justice and related; to help those from a technological point of view. It became what it is today after the merge of two cooperatives from the US and Mexico. Highly bilingual. Gives services such as Hosting, Email, Nextcloud, XMPP server.

      2. Nathan: regularly work with them on support issues; when I first joined I was with a news organization; it has long been a democratic non-profit, committed to language justice; last few years they have restructured by-laws and aligned with the cooperative movement; they have diversity that is rare in tech spaces and have cultivated it intentionally.

      3. Bob Haugen: has anyone mentioned their meeting service? It is much better than Zoom. We have done meetings with meetings.mayfirst.org (Jitsi based) and in zoom and have been impressed with how well it performed.

         1. Nathan: initially complained about low quality of video in Jitsi, but people explained that the (positive) ecological impact of lower quality video was not to be underestimated.

      4. Matt Noyes: impressed by the bilingual approach of May First.

   2. How do we collectively feel about the mission and strategy of May First and its alignment with social.coop?

      1. Eduardo Mercovich: ideas and vision are very much aligned. There's some difference in focus/stress -- the coops offer different services currently, but they seem compatible. Already discussed the potential collaboration with people in the TWG of May First and the idea was received eagerly, there is interest.

      2.  Joeri (can be pronounced the same as Yuri): QQ, is there a need to switch away from Loomio/Jitsi?

         1. Flancian: moving to Jitsi isn't an end goal in iteself -- although it would be great to have access to Jitsi as a side effect of joining May First :)

         2. Kaleb: the discussion on Loomio was focused on shared calendars initially.

         3. Matt Noyes: we are members of meet.coop to sponsor a BigBlueButton instance, MayFirst would be another example of joining a coop to increase our services. I love the idea of having access to both.

      3. calix: what is social.coop currently using for shared files? NextCloud has a value-aligned file storage provider.

         1. Flancian: so far I don't think we have a solution for files.

         2. Matt Noyes: some are on git.coop, some are on nextcloud, some are on GoogleDocs, there is no consistent approach, so I see that as a big advantage.

         3. juni: would there be interest in using features such as collaborative sheets/docs?

         4. Nathan: we have been using GoogleDocs, we are trying to formalize our use of opencollective data, so that would be a big help. THey have integrated OnlyOffice with NextCloud that works GoogleDocs like, so you can have web based access to office documents.

         5. Eduardo Mercovich: they are trying to make these services easier to use, so there is good cross-pollination opportunities, there's not enough people separately, but together there could be.

      4. Matt Noyes: for people who have been involved in the tech side of things of social.coop and MayFirst, would there be advantages/synergies to exploit?

         1. Flancian: I'm rather new, but I would say definitely, at least when it comes to best practices at the infrastructure level, before we even talk about tools/platforms we use, just the exchange of information and skills that would come from closer relationship. I can see alignment around possibly running a Matrix server, MayFirst run XMPP server, we could try that, or there could be a chance to explore something like Matrix together.

         2. calix: one question is what the current picture for SSO (single sign on) between apps? There used to be quite a bit of onboarding friction to get members up and running on all services. There used to be an eight step process (!). I believe that there has been some updates to prepopulate those accounts? I think social.coop is experiencing some friction around access to services (Loomio, meet.coop).  We could potentially work on SSO issues together, to try to avoid platform fatigue--having to ask different people.

         3.  Ed Summers: going back to the discussion about calendars; supportive of the idea in particular as so many members have dual membership.

         4. Billy Smith: from dealing with customers before: one of the best rules when you run a service at any level is to try to make sure that giving you money is an easy and smooth process :) Removing friction from signup/signin makes sense; maybe present a menu of services to people onboarding. Attach an FAQ.

         5. Juni: are we discussing A. social.coop as a coop, single entity, gets access to May First or B. every member of social.coop gets access to May First services individually?

            1. Matt Noyes: noting that in meet.coop we are a Multi User Member, so every one of our members can use the service.

            2.  Eduardo Mercovich: Summing up three things: 1. one of the services of May First is Virtual Servers/VPS. We have been discussing the possibility of using a second server in the Tech Group (social coop). 2. Many members of May First are organizations; they get one account which is the organization admin, and that account can open and manage accounts for whoever is part of that organization. There would be a group in social.coop that can do this admin work. 3. Single sign on issue is being worked on which point towards an improvement: A. changing how accounts are managed under the hood, this is nearing completion. B. working on an administration panel which is simpler to use, and using a data driven approach here.

            3. Jamie: (missed this due to a focus shift, sorry)

            4. Nathan: drafting a proposal for our membership in these shared notes, please take a look and contribute :)

            5. Bogdan: on the question of whether everybody at social.coop would have access to May First regardless of whether it's for social.coop "official" use: would be very interested in having personal-level access to these services, even if it means paying more.

            6. Flancian: +1 we would want to prioritize personal use first, if MayFirst is something that offers a service it reduces the friction around us providing it too; the focus on inclusivity is very dear to my heart -- so that you for the opportunity. We have been discussing a lot about what MayFirst can do for us, but we do run social.coop Mastodon instance which might be useful to them? Let's think also of what social.coop could do for MayFirst in general.

         6. Joeri: both organizations seem very much aligned. Using open source is a good thing; are there any disadvantages to the proposal that is being written? Money/budgets, members having to pay more? What about coordinating, integrating software, writing documentation. Is there anything else that would cause us to not want to do this?

         7. Matt Noyes: I think we should definitely discuss this on Loomio if not on the instance itself. We want to go in with our eyes wide open. One thing we have to offer with new members, there's a lot of experience with software development and software development. The work that it takes to build community is real effort, and something that we could do together. Nathan has got us started on the proposal.

         8. Nathan: because our budget is very low, we are way below the lowest tier, we are in the 5-10k Euro range -- which would be like $60 annual. I've always overpayed because the rates are absurdly low, I've proposed a 200/year membership.

         9. Flancian: it looks like it has two tiers, does that come from the structure of MayFirst?

         10. Nathan: the idea is that to use these services you have to turn them on; I suspect having to maintain accounts in parallel between organizationis would be a lot of work; what are the things everyone can use today, and what would be the things we could do on a piecemeal basis by per-commmitee accounts.

         11. Flancian: I would be happy to work on synchronizing accounts, I can draft a future services sentence.

         12. Alain: it seemed interesting for social.coop users to have a full nextcloud account with MayFirst because it would improve the sense of community; I'm a nextcloud user, if we have more social.coop users on the same nextcloud instance we will have more opportunities to share that way. It would be a great step for social.coop users to be closer together.

         13. Nathan: if 100 social.coop users were to create NextCloud accounts on MayFirst we would have to start paying a lot.

   3. What options are available for social.coop becoming a member (e.g. solidarity level of $125 or $250 annually)

   4. What can social.coop offer to May First to further the goal of cooperation among cooperatives? -> Next time?

   5. Next steps? Loomio!

3. Nathan: let's do a check in about recent developments (signups, performance, etc)

   1. Matt Noyes: oncall this last week :) More than 100 new signups! Very exciting though, lots of people coming in with clear intentions. Lots of people coming in because of the Code of Conduct and community norms. And a lot of people are really following through with Open Collective contributions.

   2. Flancian: my impression from opening the invites, which we can discuss tomorrow, we would be getting 5 times as many registrations if it was opened up. 

Draft proposal: We propose that Social.coop become an organizational member of May First Movement Technology [on a trial basis of 12 months, to be reviewed at the point of membership renewal], contributing at the solidarity level of $200/year. The Tech Working Group will facilitate information-sharing and collaboration, including a) managing the May First account administration and b) providing information to Social.coop members about the available services.Projected benefits:

• All Social.coop members without further signup: 

  • Jitsi video chat for any purpose

  • subscribe to calendars (Nextcloud)

• Social.coop administrative use: 

  • Nextcloud file- and calendar-sharing, and use of Nextcloud forms

  • @social.coop email hosting

  • Web hosting

• Possible use of a virtual server to help the TWG explorations and backups.

We also encourage Social.coop members to become individual members of May First for further services, such as personal NextCloud accounts, shared hosting, email hosting, and more.

• Does it make sense to imagine a cross agreement to mutually lower the cost of membership?