Organizing Circle Meeting: 2025 December 18 (1500 UTC)

Organizing Circle Meeting: 2025 December 18 (1500 UTC)

December 18, 2025

Attendees:

    Eduardo, Ammar (notes), Dan, Marie, Melissa, Caitlin (facillitate), Flancian. , Flancian

Agenda:

    -- Check-ins: How are you feeing? What are you bringing into this space?

      - https://feelingswheel.com/

      - bad dream

      - tired and done with this year, but happy to see comrades and celebrate a productive year

      - solidarity

      - a mix of looking forward and overwhelm?

      - quite angry, so much rage, work discipline issue

      - in pain from a health issue and causing anxiety and frustration, happy nontheless

[5 min] WG updates

  - FWG & LWG Updates from meeting on 11 December 2025, 11 am Eastern Time (NYC time) Participants:  Caitlin Waddick, Alex Rodriguez, Andrew Escobar, Marie Van Cranenbroek

    - Marie and Alex are joining yaaay!

    - Still working out onboarding new members and link between FWG and LWG

    - Andrew will leave the FWG and join LWG with Alex and Marie.

    - Proposal for getting paid for a project in the works: maybe the scope of work could be around

    - Cait is stepping down from FWG and looking for replacement.

    @edward@social.coop and @ depemig@social.coop as well as Kathe and Alex listed FWG as of interest in the volunteer form.

-- we onboarded Alex onto both FWG and LWG

[5 min] OC/FWG: sensemaking post on Loomio - OC/FWG: Sense check post to Loomio about Social Coop budget for 2026  https://www.loomio.com/p/EYwd7onD/help-social-coop-make-sense-of-the-proposed-2026-budget-what-can-we-do-together-

[task item from Oct 23rd OC meeting: https://www.loomio.com/d/4yPdSMjK/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-october-23-1500-utc-]

  -     - Issues with Loomio when trying to make a sense check with full discussion:

Caitlin might create a new Loomio post for discussion and update both the post and the sense check to cross-link to each other.

  -

-  TWG update

  - Server activities - Major maintenance (it was a Friday); it went well! It leaves us in a good position to have a healthy  ... to do database maintenance with limited disc space (causing roadbumps)... we can go another year without hitting limits.

  - Significant upgrade with 4.5 ... it introduces quote-toots ?

  - New members!

•   - Gabriel

•   - Steve

•   - Ammar

  - "House cleaning/upkeep" in bug tracker to have our priorities clear and well-organized as we go into 2026

  - Bonfire (bonfire.social.coop) question(s) -- It has features that people prefer over Loomio.  It could complement Loomio as part of a transition; we could use both. Or, we could exit Loomio to use Bonfire. Urgency level: none!

    - Edu: given that we're investing resources here, and might invest more, we should discuss and be open about what would be involved/why we would be doing this.

    - Edu: we could use it first in working groups... but now we have Zulip for that. We could discuss in January.

    - Caitlin: agree that we could have a group discuss this in January

    - Flancian: happy to take this and make sure we have some discussion forum in January.

    Question for TWG on upping the character limit: "slow but steady" progress, in the last two weeks ... work to be done to set up the alpha instance (with security) ... it will take some time. Flan will work on it again next year.

-  CWG - no update now

[<5 min] Melissa: the hackathon happened! It went well.

[10 min] getting new members here in January meetings + people moving from roles?

- Kathe will reach out to new people.

- Caitlin will reach out to Kathe

(Meta: time check)

- Eduardo: some of us are ending our term -- ideally we'd optimize for having some overlap with new members.

  - But ideally we'd "cycle out" half the group at a time, which was the intention, although we all started at the same time because it was the first term.

  - Eduardo would personally like to cycle into the CWG, althogh could stay here if needed.

  - Caitlin: found the meeting notes from the last meeting. We mostly covered onboarding, but not offboarding. We said that Kathe and Marie would be cycling out, and later Eduardo?

  -- Link to Dec 4 meeting notes: https://www.loomio.com/d/FIOxlLnZ/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-december-4-1500-utc-

  - Idea: two year terms for the at-large members, with each year only half cycling, to "stagger" the term dates

  - Flan and Caitlin would rotate out of the OC as TWG/FWG rep. Some other WG members rotation planned.

  - Proposals were:

      - Share a Calendar for onboarding/offboarding.

      - Define mentors for new people. A current OC member will volunteer to one-on-one mentor a new at-large member.

      - Use the kanban for some processes. https://share.mayfirst.org/apps/deck/board/1128

      - Would anyone like to write something down to recognize outgoing participants?

      - Eduardo: how can we think of a good flow between WGs and the OC?

      - We have 7 people here. At large members rotate out on a schedule. The reps from the WGs rotate in and out at will.

      - past idea/proposal (from Sociocracy principles): to have 2 reps from each WG... previously discussed: not practical

        - Flancian: 2 reps from each WG sound great/like it could add stability

        - Flancian: could Eduardo stay up to 1 year more as per rules?

•         - Yes

•         - Eduardo: happy to stay if needed!

•         - Ammar: would encourage you to rotate to the CWG if you want that

•         - Ammar: UPDATE on the process this fall for onboarding the new at-large members:

on the flow between OC and working groups. 1. first onboarding call where we went through bylaws/wgs was very well received. 2. from personal experience onboarding to the OC was improved by joining WG meetings/following their updates. Recommend we make all meetings easily accessible to new members by using and sharing a calendar.

    - Eduardo: proposal that we create a small questionnaire for people offboarding to help us learn socially/cooperatively from their experiences. It could have good ROI.

      - Caitlin: love that.

      - Marie: like the idea but been struggling with the last few months of the mandate because of lack of structure and over-reliance on the facilitator. Would suggest the offboarding process is decoupled from onboarding the new members.

      - Caitlin: maybe let's come up with the questions next meeting and we answer them offline?

      - Eduardo: we have had issues with syncing today.

      - Flan: For example we could use hedgedoc: https://doc.anagora.org/organizing-circle

      - On the time cross-referencing notes; Kathe also used to put together great summaries.

      - Let's revisit/discuss next time?

  [5 min] OC/TWG stipends for 2025

• - Caitlin's proposal on Zulip: The OC has 1,000 GBP budgeted for stipends in the 2025 budget.  https://socialcoop.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/511156-OC/topic/OC.20stipends.20for.20year.20ending.20December.2031.2C.202025/with/563666167

• - Caitlin invited TWG to use their stipend budget for 2025 (before Dec 30, 2025).  TWG are figuring ours out, but we do intend to use it!

• - other working groups

• how much has CWG asked for this year?   

• - Line item in the 2025 budget for stipends for OC members: 1,000 GBP

• - Caitlin: propose 4 people divide it evenly, based on past responses

• - Ammar: propose that every OC member that was present during the year gets to choose one of three options: 1. accept the money (personally recommended), 2. Return it to social.coop general budget, 3. return it to the OC stipend pool for other OC members.

• - Eduardo: can we combine options, e.g. half-haf on donate and return to the pool?

• - Caitlin: yes but let's keep it simple.

• - Happy to do the simple thing.

• - Let's vote?

• - All in favour.

• - Caitlin: please write down your name and your option (1 = accept, 2 = return to social.coop general budget, 3 = return to the OC stipend pool).

• - Marie: 2

• - Ammar: 1

• - Flan: 3

• - Melissa: 1

• - Eduardo: 1

• - Dan: 1

• - Caitlin: 1

The math: 

• (1) 1,000 GBP divided by 7 people at the Dec. 18th meeting:  142.86 GBP / person 

• (2) One person returns their portion to SC’s main budget 
  1,000 GBP  - 142.86  = 857.14 

• (3) One person returns their portion to the OC stipend budget, thus the remainder is divided among 5 people 
  857.14 GBP divided by 5 people = 171.43 GBP 

• FWG should expect a submission in Open Collective for 171.43 GBP from each of these OC members: Ammar, Melissa, Eduardo Merco., Dan, Caitlin.  
  @Ammar, @Melissa Santos @em ☯ @Dan Phiffer @Caitlin Waddick

• Please submit by Dec. 30, 2025 using these wiki instructions: https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Submitting_an_expense
   

[15 min?] Celebrate year's accomplishments! (and post them to loomio?)

- proposal: to do this work asynchronously on Zulip

- proposal: do that async- When is our next meeting?

Skipping the Jan 1st meeting.

Next meeting is 17 January 2025 (all in agreement).

[5 min] Jan hackathon https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/January_2026_Hackathon

• - put on loomio: melissa will handle

• - server announcement

• - Luma link: https://luma.com/04uq2wu6?tk=0zFBqL (to get a reminder)

[5 min] Next meeting - can we meet in jitsi.meet.coop and use a shared notes thing that dosn't disappear?

  - Proposal https://jitsi.meet.coop/organizing-circle and  https://doc.anagora.org/organizing-circle is available to use anytime it helps (or choose a different name after the last /) (please include social-coop in the name after the / )

  - Eduardo: we can use mayfirst instance as well.

  - Melissa: will work with the TWG on the urls and update the calendar entries!

  - Thank you!

[5 min] Closing game with Ammar ... Check Outs: how are you feeling after 2025 with OC?

Game: on your turn: do a movement and everyone else copies it.