Loomio
Wed 9 Jul 2025 11:40AM

Organizing Circle Meeting: 2025 July 17 (1500 UTC)

M MarieVC (social.coop/@MarieVC) Public Seen by 10

The Organizing Circle for social.coop will meet 2025 July 17 (Thursday) 1500 UTC - 1630 UTC. We will meet here: https://socialcoop.meet.coop/kat-aiw-mpv-6vv

KT

Kathe TB Thu 17 Jul 2025 1:57PM

1500 [20 min] Opening

Check in [no notes]:

ADMIN:

  • Who is here?

  • Does anyone need to leave early? 

  • Confirm our next call on July 3 1500 UTC

  • Who is note taking?

  • Who is facilitating?

Inform and Review recap from last call

https://www.loomio.com/d/oEdDMqte/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-june-5-1500-utc-/4

1520 [20 min] Updates from working circles 

  • Finance

  • Tech

  • Community

  • Legal - defunct-ish

1540 [10 min] Decision: Big Conversation

https://www.loomio.com/d/FtIG6kQ0/big-conversations

Round: Are there any clarifying questions?

Round: Is this good enough for now and safe enough to try?

1550 [10 min] Review: Strategic priorities

Solo: review https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Strategic_priorities

Round: What is working well with this policy?
Round: What should change?

Round: Do we have consent to do [something]?

1600 [15 min] Review: At Large Member Selection

Round: How have we done this in the past?

Round: What worked well about how we have done this?

Round: What could change?

Round: How do we want to do this and what are next steps?

1615 [15 min] Close out

Tasks

  • What are you taking out of this call as a task or todo item?

Feedback

  • What worked well with this call and what could be improved? Explain why

KT

Kathe TB Thu 17 Jul 2025 4:03PM

Notes

1500 [10 min] Opening
Check in [no notes]:

ADMIN:

  • Who is here? Kathe, Caitlin, Melissa, Flan

  • Does anyone need to leave early? few of us at top of the hour

  • Confirm our next call on July 31 1500 UTC

  • Who is note taking?

    • Caitlin and Flan

  • Who is facilitating?

    • Kathe / all in favour :) 


Inform and Review recap from last call
https://www.loomio.com/d/IPrGebzT/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-july-3-1500-utc-/6
-- Community Working Group discussed using Zulip for communication. 
-- the Tech Working Group updated Bonfire. 
-- Using Lupine for legal ?? 


1510 [5 min] Updates from working circles 

  • Finance

    • No updates, a next meeting needs to be called -- Andrew organizing

  • Tech

    • 4.4 update is in the works

    • SSO for bonfire is a nice to have that might get work 

    • Andrew asked about budgeting and that led in the direction of rational increase of spend

  • Community

    • Nice and quiet, everything good

    • Meeting later today

    • Will onboard Calix as a moderator

      • Loomio thread for consent to new moderator upcoming

  • Legal - defunct-ish


1515 [10 min] Decision: Big Conversation
https://www.loomio.com/d/FtIG6kQ0/big-conversations
Round: Are there any clarifying questions?
Round: Is this good enough for now and safe enough to try?

  • Q: how normative is the current phrasing? E.g. it says monthly checkups, could it be changed to quarterly without further checks or are we committing to it?

    • A: would like to try for monthly. But the first one is actually a 'demo' so we'll try things and gather feedback.

  • M: would love indeed to get started and see what we learn and change things later.

  • Caitlin: looking for the list of topics.

  • Kathe: is this good enough for all? Can we move forward with this?

    • (Go ahead from the group).

    • Kathe: 

      • will engage with Eduardo for picking the second topic.

      • start the loomio thread and get announcements rolling.

      • rework the calendar.


1525 [5 min] Review: Strategic priorities
Solo: review https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Strategic_priorities
Round: What is working well with this policy?

  • We made some progress on ~all of them.

  • This has allowed me to create better agendas as it has made it easier to track things across several.

  • It feels good not to lose track of these topics (versus what was happening earlier).

  • Only been engaged after this policy was in place; the agendas reflect the alignment.

Round: What should change?

  • Unclear about what we mean by equity accessment.

  • Hasn't looked at this since January though.

  • Overwhelming amount of work possible and all quite abstract, need breaking down.

    • Determine next steps.

  • Didn't know about this list until today.

  • Maybe the list should get validation/feedback from the community.

  • These topics could be organized more like a kanban board.

    • Or just a table?

  • The policy should be more generic and it should point to the living document

  • We should maintain it as a living document.

Round: Do we have consent to do [something]?

  • Kathe would like to draft the policy to make it more generic and less talking about specific issues and focus instead on how the document is maintained and less on what it says. ... It is a reformat. .... The policy in the Wiki will become more generic to refer to the document with the details. 

  • Melissa: would like to pick one area and start drilling down into it.

  • Kathe: points out that the agenda of the OC has a lot of topics from this document - progress is being made


1530 [15 min] Review: At Large Member Selection
Round: How have we done this in the past?

Round: What worked well about how we have done this?

  • Got a variety of members with lots of backgrounds

  • People might not have engaged otherwise in the process (if we just asked for volunteers)

  • (Refresher of how sortition worked)

    • call for volunteers

    • selection committee ("sortition jury")

      • Q: how did we select these jury members? A: believe it was also volunteers.

    • set of people put up for consent

  • We successfully got some people engaged

  • Made sense as a community member

Round: What could change?

  • We could document how the selection committee works

  • We could review how people who participated evaluate the outcome

  • Hard to find items on loomio

  • Started by saying 7 At-Large then scaled to propotional to WG reps We did reach count!

    • \o/

  • How do we move volunters into some kind of queue so they can maintain engagement instead of potentially feeling discarded

  • Current At-Large members: Ammar, Marie, Eduardo, and Kathe 

  • Sortition process: How did the previous sorition jury feel that it worked? Do they think it worked well? (Matt Noyes was happy with it.) 

  • Documenting thoroughly is a priority

  • Could we get someone to write up what the protocol for sortition will be next time?

    • Caitlin: volunteers to pick this up and start by asking Matt what's there from last time

    • (Note that it seems we said we'd shoot for rotating 50% of the OC on every cycle, so the process should take this into consideration).

Round: How do we want to do this and what are next steps?


1545 [10 min] Close out
Tasks

  • What are you taking out of this call as a task or todo item?

    • Kathe: recap, start big conversation, rework prority policy and orgnziation document

    • Caitlin: talk to Matt/bootstrap the sortition protocol

    • Melissa: Loomio thread for moderation and Bonfire testing session

    • Flan: no AIs

Feedback

  • What worked well with this call and what could be improved? Explain why

  • Andrew: would like to understand what the Finance WG should be focusing on; I had not seen the policy work that the OC had done until very recently.

    • Does the FWG need to meet on the budget? Or is this being driven by the OC?

      • The OC stepped in here because we thought based on the capacity/provioning of the group it could add there. But would like to see the FWG do this.

    • Maybe a process for syncing/pushing and pulling updates OC <-> WGs could help here.



KT

Kathe TB Thu 31 Jul 2025 12:39PM

Recap

Big Conversations are a go! @Kathe TB will rework the calendar and get the ball rolling. We reviewed the Strategic priorities policy https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle_policy#Strategic_priorities The policy itself needs to be more generic in reference to the living document. The living document could be reorganized as a Kanban board and updated to make it more useful. Membership selection: we are starting the processing of identifying detailed steps to move forward.

Updates: Finance will meet soon. Community working group has been quite, looking to formally add new mod. Tech working group is looking to update our mastodon instance and exploring Bondfire.