Who can be a coop member / user

I also agree with @thomasbeckett 's comment on the leaving the specific referral/onboarding process to be formalized at a later juncture.

I think it is crucial to have an onbaording process for certain roles with defined rights and responsibilitites. yes. In my collective we are prototyping a self-onboarding process right now, where members have to self-organize to take certain steps to join the oragnisation in their own pace. in the end they decide if they will join (unless the are heavy objections). until they reach that point, it takes quite an amount of self-responsability and will to understand the structures. but they get help in form of a buddy system. maybe this model can be inspiring for us here too.

Idea: For the "ideological" test behind the "involvement/commitment to co-op movement", how do people feel about having part of the TOS be some sort of affirmation of the International Cooperative Alliance's Statement on the Cooperative Identity's Values and Principles?

My question would be "applied to what?" Does this mean one has to affirm co-op principles as a way of life? Those are principles designed to apply to particular business, but it's not necessarily the case that a cooperator has to apply them in every single aspect of their lives. Perhaps it should be more focused on interested in furthering those principles in the world.

Good point. Perhaps it could be framed more as an affirmation of understanding/expectation that the principles and values will be a key basis for decision-making by, and policies of, social.coop? So everyone knows the broadest rules of the road, organizationally, they need to affirm that they've familiarized themselves with the Statement?

Yeah. Though we could be narrower and start with just people who identify with the platform co-op movement. I think an invitation system is a good idea. That's what Riseup does. That way everyone is known to at least someone.

I like the idea of identification with the co-op movement, at least initially. That will give the "local timeline" high value to co-op practitioners.

Curious if 'limited to 5 invites' is arbitrary, or there's some technical social constraints you were thinking of here @mayel.

Could be a good idea, though perhaps there is a less transactional, more organic way to put that forward. Enspiral's a fairly different case, but our Agreements allow for
⋄ any member can invite a new contributor, and
⋄ new contributors get an onboarding buddy (steward), which defaults to the inviting member unless they arrange otherwise.

this isn't an exact science, but is a good hook for people to think about group capacity in terms of how many people they invite.

I think the limitation of invites would be just to prevent anyone spamming with fake invites or something. The steward model might work, but then it would only take two members to game the system. Nevertheless I like John's approach of making trust-building part of the process, rather than assuming we can't really trust each other.

We might also consider a Code of Conduct to maintain a safe space and manage abusive behavior.

I have a lot of materials on Codes of Conduct (CoC) as I've been on a paid working group to create one for Enspiral; I'm pretty strapped in terms of time, but if you start a thread and tag me in it I'll dump what I've got. Having a CoC is super important IMO! Shows commitment to creating safe(r) space, enabling psychological safety, better teaming... etc. This article speaks to the benefits.