Should we change "request membership" to something friendlier?

Feel free to submit your ideas, I will make a poll about it after few proposals. Here's few I have in my mind:

• Join us now!
• Become a co-owner now!

I will create a poll on the 15th, submit your ideas before that :)!

Sounds like a good idea to me. I'd peronally like something like "Become a member" or "Join social.coop"

Seems like a good idea. Something friendlier than "Request Membership" would be good. Also perhaps the text "Are you committed to the co-operative movement?" could be softened - do people have to already be committed to the co-operative movement in order to join? e.g. could it be "Are you involved (or just interested) in the co-operative movement? You are most welcome to join!"

Absolutely vaild point. I'd say we can drop that part about commitment and replace it with something like "Are you interested in cooperative ownership and democracy?" or something along these lines

This gets into the question raised in another thread recently about the purpose/common bond of our instance - whether we're ultimately aiming for a space primarily for co-operators, or for a co-op instance for all. In the short term I do think there is value in there being a higher bar, in that having people who are already committed to the co-op model means there's a solid baseline of understanding and values.

I'm thinking that, after next week's code of conduct call, I will aim to schedule a call to specifically discuss this question, and will create a thread for it.

I see your point, but, in the light of the discussion about inclusivness we had a few days back in the anniversary thread, I think we can do better and avoid sounding "cold" :)

I think I agree with Michele here. I understand the value of that solid baseline, but I reckon the process of choosing social.coop as opposed to any other mastodon instance and the monetary pledge for membership provide sufficient barriers to people with only cursory interest in cooperatives. I think you'd be unlikely to stumble across social.coop in the first place unless you're the sort of person that would fit in here.

That's all speculation, mind 🤷‍♂️

Do we have stats for the number of people viewing info about the instance vs the number following through with applications? Some data could help inform the discussion, but I really have no idea how easy/possible such data would be to produce...

@idmyn "Do we have stats for the number of people viewing info about the instance vs the number following through with applications? Some data could help inform the discussion, but I really have no idea how easy/possible such data would be to produce..."

I think it might be good to start a thread at the working group level to develop a list of all the data we feel it would be useful to have access to about our instance, and then investigate how me might go about automating its collection and aggregation...

I'll start a placeholder thread in the tech/infrastructure WG

"Become a coop member" might be best, highlighting both membership and coop.

Fine with me, as long as we're not overusing "co-op."

@michelekipiel My bad, forgot to share the results :)!

Also made another suggestion to improve the registration process about memberships overlap with other cooperatives.

Don't have any rush to update the about page and the registration form, but perhaps The Tech Working Group could set up some schedule on implementing the updates?