Agenda

1500 [15 min] Check in [no notes]:

• How are you showing up today? What are you bringing into the space? [https://www.nycnvc.org/feelings or https://feelingswheel.com/]

• If you could turn any activity into an Olympic sport, what would you win a gold medal in?

1515 [5 min] ADMIN:

• Who is here?

• Does anyone need to leave early? 

• Confirm our next call on June 19 1500 UTC

• Who is note taking?

• Who is facilitating?

1520 [5 min] Inform and Review recap from last call

https://www.loomio.com/d/KhIUyvAH/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-8-may-thursday-1500-utc

1525 [10 min] Updates from working circles 

• Finance

• Tech

• Community

• Legal - defunctish

1530 [5 min] Inform 2025 OC Priorities

• https://share.mayfirst.org/s/WyKxiJ8C4gLbFxf?openfile=true

• Round: What needs to be added or updated here?

1535 [30 min] Scope -?-> Formulate: Big Conversation

Context: We need to have clearer lines of communication between the working groups and general membership of social.coop both (Loomio and Mastodon users). We want this to facilitate feedback on current operations and spark new directions for the coop. Specifically we would like to center discussion on how to

1. improve general decision/voting process, and

2. strategize how to interact with Fediverse (both corporate instances like Threads and other cooperative instances like cosocial.ca). Recent work in this space, like the publication of the Fediversalist Papers study in which Social.coop participated, must be taken into account.

3. the nature of cooperatives and commons, and the roles, responsibilities and powers of members

   1. Co-responsibility and participation, it doesn’t have to be money, but since we are a coop, do we require something to give back? Do we want everyone to –for example- have a bit of time per year on moderation? (so as to better know and understand what needs to be done behind the curtains for everyone to have a good experience)?

4. Financial Strategic Development:

   1. need clarity on criteria for consideration, how does this spending support the values, mission, and aims of social.coop

      1. Consider using the DisCO framework (Livelihood, care, and love).

      2. Open conversation on using resources not just to support other projects... e.g. education support for members... support instances in trouble.

   2. ongoing support of an organization has a higher impact then a one-off donation

   3. how can the process effectively leverage and build off of past discussions and decisions

Round: Without thinking about how we are going to do this yet, what is missing from this scope?

Round: Is this a complete enough scope for a first conversation?

Round: How could we hold these conversations?

1605 [5 min] Tasks

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

1610 [10 min] Feedback

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

Notes

1500 [15 min] Check in [no notes]:

• How are you showing up today? What are you bringing into the space? [https://www.nycnvc.org/feelings or https://feelingswheel.com/]

1515 [5 min] ADMIN:

• Who is here? Melissa S @ansate@social.coop, Eduardo M, Kathe T-B

• Does anyone need to leave early? 

• Confirm our next call on June 19 1500 UTC

• Who is note taking? Melissa

• Who is facilitating? Kathe

1520 [5 min] Inform and Review recap from last call
https://www.loomio.com/d/T9k6IZNl/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-22-may-thursday-1500-utc

looks like last time was mostly updates
turnover in finance - on maintenance but some membership turnover

1525 [10 min] Updates from working circles 

• Finance -not here

• Tech - not here

• Community 

  • Issues with registration but that is being worked on

  • Experimenting with Zulip within the CWG and that's working well!

  • Question: Can we extend the membership fee structures to include $0?

  • Question: Can we create a single landing page or dashboard for all OC member services? 

    • CWG is interested, not sure if Technically feasible

    • Could we take on being an 'identiy provider'

    • 3 possible leves

      • just a set of links on a landing page

      • the specific personal links for each person

      • support SSO identity provider stuff in general for the members

• Legal - defunctish

1530 [5 min] Inform 2025 OC Priorities

• https://share.mayfirst.org/s/WyKxiJ8C4gLbFxf?openfile=true

• Round: What needs to be added or updated here?

1535 [30 min] Scope -?-> Formulate: Big Conversation

Context: We need to have clearer lines of communication between the working groups and general membership of social.coop both (Loomio and Mastodon users). We want this to facilitate feedback on current operations and spark new directions for the coop. Specifically we would like to center discussion on how to

1. improve general decision/voting process, and

2. strategize how to interact with Fediverse (both corporate instances like Threads and other cooperative instances like cosocial.ca). Recent work in this space, like the publication of the Fediversalist Papers study in which Social.coop participated, must be taken into account.

3. the nature of cooperatives and commons, and the roles, responsibilities and powers of members

   1. Co-responsibility and participation, it doesn’t have to be money, but since we are a coop, do we require something to give back? Do we want everyone to –for example- have a bit of time per year on moderation? (so as to better know and understand what needs to be done behind the curtains for everyone to have a good experience)?

4. Financial Strategic Development:

   1. need clarity on criteria for consideration, how does this spending support the values, mission, and aims of social.coop

      1. Consider using the DisCO framework (Livelihood, care, and love).

      2. Open conversation on using resources not just to support other projects... e.g. education support for members... support instances in trouble.

   2. ongoing support of an organization has a higher impact then a one-off donation

   3. how can the process effectively leverage and build off of past discussions and decisions

Round: Without thinking about how we are going to do this yet, what is missing from this scope?

* Ways to engage with Social.coop beyond moderation
* Harvesting of new ideas and priorities

• + e.g. leading book clubs or social groups

Round: Is this a complete enough scope for a first conversation?

Yes!

Round: How could we hold these conversations?

- would like to have some of this on the fediverse/via microblogging
- server announcements to let people know convos are happening?
- school coops were able to expand to more people by doing a better job of explaining what was being done, what decisions were being made "I never knew the coop did all these things" (from 3-4 people to 20+, over the course of a few years)
- consider using workign group personas on to facilitate the calls

1) Communicate OC and other WG activites with regular announcements in microblogging with link to meeting recaps (Loomio for OC and CWG; Agora(?) for TWG; ?? for FWG)

2) Invite open comment on specific topics with a Scoping-Formulation-Decision framework

• a) Microblog regular announcements (both from the admin/facilitator account and the server announcements)

  • 1a) Microblog recaps of Loomio threads and Loomio recaps of Microblog threads

• b) Loomio thread for each topic with phases with the thread

• c) Meet.coop monthly calls on open Loomio topics (rotating faciltator from OC)

3) Invitation to operations working groups

Other notes:

reference Melissa has been meaning to read: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23267
Commit: Online Groups with Participation Commitments

first thoughts: lots of avenues for being involved with the coop - how can we make those things clear to all members and prospective members?

+ could look for addl funding from external sources or use our social.coop budget to do a study or something to learn more about what works for us - this might mean writing a proposal that scopes and develops a plan - get us real concrete about what we want to do
maybe Proof of Concept with our funds, and write up how it goes and then consider external sources

-- onbording new members to the idea of their participation in self-governance of Social.Coop


1605 [5 min] Tasks

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

• Kathe will write up the recap and the formulating discussion 

  • specific tools on Loomio for participation in scoping and formulation discussions 

• Eduardo wants to work more on the onboarding proposal - he will organize a one-off meeting outside of OC, maybe a regular monthly meeting - start with Eduardo, Matt, Dan and maybe Melissa, and then maybe invite more people

1610 [10 min] Feedback

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

started looser, but moved to more structured once people were welcomed

put the focus on something useful, documented ideas

Recap

Community WG has been experimenting with Zulip and it seems to be going well! There is a request to make more explicit the $0 membership (which is effectively true), some discussion around if this will reduce member contributions. CWG likes the idea of a member dashboard that includes all of our services in one page.

We had a formulation discussion around holding Big Conversations with the coop. We seemed to circle the following breaking down into three basic steps of inform, multi-mode engagement, and follow up invitation:

1. Communicate OC and other WG activites with regular announcements in microblogging with link to meeting recaps (Loomio for OC and CWG; Agora(?) for TWG; ?? for FWG)

2. Invite open comment on specific topics with a Scoping-Formulation-Decision framework

   1. Microblog regular announcements (both from the admin/facilitator account and the server announcements)

      1. Microblog recaps of Loomio threads and Loomio recaps of Microblog threads

   2. Loomio thread for each topic with phases with the thread

   3. Meet.coop monthly calls on open Loomio topics (rotating faciltator from OC)

3. Invitation to operations working groups to continue to move forward any policy changes

Our next OC meeting will continue this formulation discussion.