Organizing a growing Social.Coop: an idea for a proposal

I love where this is going! Thanks for taking on the challenge of getting the ball rolling here.

Why are we using another platform for discussion? My Safari browser spun and spun when I tried connecting to pad.disroot.org. I loaded it in Firefox but received a "You have been disconnected" message.

Can the discussion be pulled back into Loomio?

Would it be better to just post the doc here? I liked the idea of having one people could mark up, but if you can't access it, that's no good....

Try it and see what happens!

I hesitate to have it in 3 places... Does it work to just open the attached doc and post comments in the thread?

I don't know. Try it and we will all learn.

Much of this is new for me.

Firefox finally loaded the page. Not sure what the issue was. I'm largely in favor of the idea creating in an Organizing Council (OC)

I think the shift toward representative democracy would probably be a good one, and I feel generally happy to see steps made in that direction.

To better explain the rationale for this kind of shift, I wonder if there are some numbers that could be attached to the changes we've seen since November 2022. For example: how large was membership before, and how much has it increased? How much has active membership increased? How have hours put in by CWG and the other working groups increased? How large an increase have we seen in interactions requiring moderation?

We now have

• 1,920 (approx) registered users on the instance

• 578 active users/week;

• 750 Open Collective financial contributors;

• 341 people registered on Loomio;

• 86 on Meet.Coop.

As of 11/25/2022 the numbers were

• 1,800 registered users

• 622 active

• 641 Open Collective contributors

• 270 registered on Loomio

• 66 on Meet.Coop

Two years ago:

• 1,200 registered users;

• 165 active;

• 317 OC contributors. (Don't have Loomio stats handy. No meet.coop then.)

179 reports received by the Ops Team since November, up from 6 reports over the previous 3 months.

Thanks for the numbers. I'm not sure what meet.coop is. Can you link to documentation its relationship to social.coop?

https://wiki.social.coop/Platforms.html We are a multi-member user of Meet.Coop, a cooperative instance of BigBlueButton.

Ah, ok. I totally must have registered there to attend the 101 meeting at the end of last year. Lots of platforms to keep track of!

Thanks for these numbers. I’m confused why we have more registered members than we have OC contributors.

I thought that was the point — contribute to fund a communal instance?

I actually would be interested in eg sponsoring open user accounts for those that can’t afford it — but ideally that would be clear that people donate to fund those open accounts.

As I voice my support here, I want to note that it's interesting for me to see myself taking this position because most of the time I prefer the idea of direct democracy (or better yet, consensus decisionmaking). But from the few conversations Loomio I've had the privilege to participate in since joining the server, I can really see how this could be important for where we are right now. Even leaving aside the obvious problems of increased complexity with growing membership, the low turnout for most votes has been worrying me. It feels like a situation where concerted organization by a motivated minority could result in approval of decisions that don't reflect the values of the community as a whole.

Having a dedicated body that meets regularly and makes the core decisions could help to protect against this.

I wonder how many of those on social.coop that do not participate on Loomio also are not active on social.coop. Is there anyway to correlate activity between the platforms?

I don't know. I tried posting a poll on Mastodon about who votes and who doesn't, but got precisely zero responses. I imagine a more coordinated polling effort, being intentionally boosted by others interested in seeing the results might give better data, but even then, Mastodon posts can easily zip by without being seen by people who are only occasionally active (even on a daily basis).

Please post the doc inline here. Once we have the new wiki launched that will be great to onboard all onto, but for now it should at least all work on Loomie

The EtherPad doesn’t work well on mobile (see screenshot) and I can’t see / open the ODT on mobile either. An image of the matrix attached in this thread would be appreciated.

I agree that there is a clear need for a coordinating/organizing circle and think that this is an excellent start on a proposal. Do we formally have sociocracy adopted for our governance team/circles?

Thank you for this initiative. I definitely see the tension and love the way you effectively respond to it with this already impressive draft.

I really think having a sociocracy-like structure of nested circles (connected by leaders and/or delegates) is something to explore and try to make work. So, thank you for that. This with consent decision making would be the sweet spot between democracy and operationnality.

+1 to using sociocratic circles, I have proposal fatigue.

Definitely the way to go, thanks the Matts for making this happen. One point worth making is that it doesn't all have to happen in one go, but can be built out over time, which in my view is the better approach.

I'm one of those newbies and not in-depth familiar with (y)our current organization, but this sounds like a very reasonable proposal to me - also because transparency and diversity are already taken into account in the draft. Thank you!

Added a bunch of comments on the Etherpad. I like the general framework, but we're going to need to flesh out a bunch more details in order to get this right, I think.

I appreciate the general direction a lot. Thanks for getting some momentum going here. A couple initial thoughts:

• Why 7 at-large members? I think it would be adequate to have an equal or equal +1 number at large compared to the WG members. Each member is an additional expense, and also reduces the nimbleness of the group. I worry that a circle of over 10 people might be too large.

• How does this translate to operational responsibility? Does that still occur at the WG level? One observation I have had in WGs is that we often end up with situations where the responsibility is with the group, but then no individual actually feels empowered/responsible to actually do stuff. Alongside the clarity you're presenting for governance, I think we need an improvement in the delegation of ops responsibility.

Interesting - this is exactly what a template on the #OGB would work like https://unite.openworlds.info/Open-Media-Network/openwebgovernancebody I brought this up here a year or so ago :)

I mostly agree with the description of the problem, but less so with the solution. My sense is that the problems arise from an incoherent culture, or spirit (... maybe purpose/mission too).

Decisions made in one working group often have unexamined implications for other working groups.

I would like to be part of a culture where people intuitively check in with the people impacted by their actions.

I imagine people who have a job working in structured bureaucracies are used to working in silos where you do your thing, and it's somebody elses job to knit it together into coherence, but we don't have that here. I see this proposal as creating that bureaucracy (and it can probably succeed).

I wonder a lot at the moment about this kind of organisational inertia, where we keep things going, and keep fixing problems, to keep the thing alive, ... but without there being a clearly felt reason to do so.

It might be more a reflection of me and my relationship with social.coop than the organisation/project as a whole. I think I might just be moving in a different direction. Thanks for reading.

I just wanted to add my overwhelming support for such a proposal. I think this sort of thing will make social.coop a lot stronger, and more agile in facing challenges.

Here are some thoughts:

• as @Nathan Schneider suggested, i also agree we should really spell out our rational for why 7 is the number we've chosen as it has many implications. What's more, it's my opinion we should probably outline when we should consider growing/shrinking this number, and possibly describe the conditions under which we can do so. This proposal (rightly, in my estimation) points out that we should meet a certain quorum for recall, and I think that should maybe also be the case for such a group. Otherwise, I fear we might risk some "stealth" expansion or shrinking of the group as a way to evade the recall quorum.

• when we speak of sortition, is the pool to be all those nominated? If so I'd make that more explicit because it's currently a bit ambiguous.

• it may occur that there are too few nominees for the CWG Ops. I think we'd benefit for some protocols in such an event.

I agree that the sortition process needs to be clarified. I glossed over the word the first time I looked at the document because I didn't know what it meant. The comments added include a Wikipedia link, and if I understand it correctly, sortition is a lottery system (like jury duty in the U.S.).

I love the idea of a lottery system (I might take it a step further and have it be something people need to opt out of rather than self-nominate for), but hadn't realized that that was what we were talking about for selection of at-large members.

On sortition, my thinking is something roughly along the lines of the below:

• A pool of candidates willing to serve as members if the Organziing Circle is identified.

• A randomly selected jury of X-number of members is selected as either an electing or recommending body. Jurors would be paid for the meetings they attend, and if someone does not want to serve, they can be set aside and another random member is selected to ensure the group has the intended number of members.

• The jury meets 3x. First meeting to review the scope of the Organizing Circle member role, and discuss the skills, identities, etc., that would be good to have in the group. Second meeting to interview the candidates. Third meeting to discuss the interviews and vote to either select the members of the Organizing Circle directly, or to make a recommendation if the committee members are still going to be elected via a vote open to all members.

The idea is that it would make the selection process more deliberative, rather than potentially being simply a social capital-driven popularity contest, which is what mass elections in organizations can often devolve into, to the detriment of candidates with marginalized identities or uniquely valuable skills/experiences who don't have a high profile.

Oh, wow. That's a super interesting proposal. I'd been imagining that the at-large Circle would be identified through randomized jury process, but this is really good... possibly better, though I'm not sure.

I propose that rather pre-nominating possible members, that sortition should occur on the basis of the entire membership, with people able to opt-out if they prefer. I think this would be more inclusive, particularly of people who are less actively involved in Loomio stuff.

I support this. However I see some problems with giving persons two hats at one time, the executive and the supervising hat. Would it be a possibility to reserve the right to vote on supervising issues to the Representatives (7 is workable), while the Execs should be present and be heard at least? We can still move defined decisions of importance to the plenum. Problem2: please let us avoid to become too dependent on technical frames for decision making. Public meetings with transcripts or records are absolutely sufficient - and they have a low threshold of participation.

Im sad to see this idea floated again.

Theres been repeated attempts to form a central governance body for social coop and each time its failed when put before the membership.

As already mentioned by Nick, Im not at all sure that the described problems would be solved by creating a centralised body to govern the coop.

Theres repeatedly been problems finding people to do the work needed to keep social coop running. We've relied upon the heroic voluntary efforts of a number of people whove done whats necessary to keep the wheels spinning.

I just dont think creating another opaque group where discussions are had and decisions made is conducive to getting more people to put in voluntary efforts. I think this is part of why the community working group (CWG) ops team finds itself overwhelmed. The CWG has been largely abandoned and theres no easy way for members to get a feel of whats involved with the CWG ops team work or maybe even help them out with some work/ideas/decisions.

Theres also been problems with closed teams having very low rates of participation (see Finance Working Group - sorry you cant because its closed). If stuff isnt organised in closed groups its easier for members to get an idea of whats going on and to potentially pick up the slack, without having to commit to what could be significant workload and responsibility load of taking on a position/role (eg. CWG ops team member)

I think if CWG ops team is feeling the strain we need to look at getting more folks involved in the stuff theyve been doing, very likely breaking up the workload, maybe pulling some of it back into the open CWG and encouraging people to get involved.

Think rather than creating a new group we need to find ways to drive more member participation in the work that needs doing. Creating new groups doesnt appear to be working so well (legal and participatory budgeting groups have had very little activity). Working out pattern to create easy ways for members to get involved in the work of running the instance and guiding folks into that feels like much more valuable efforts to undertake.

I am very interested in what @Nick Sellen and @Darren are saying. I think the key is to look at our existing practice, including work and culture, and see how to enhance it, concretely, specifically. The rationale of creating a new circle is to cultivate more member participation in the work and governance instead of relying on a de facto do-ocracy combined with uneven social influence/reputation. How to do that is the question. My sense is that organizing people is the key, but who do we imagine will do the organizing? How? Under what conditions? I get the concern with bureaucracy, so if there are specific things we can do to clarify the intent and reinforce the participatory and collaborative practices, let's talk about them. Encouraging people to get involved is not enough, right?

It's an interesting discussern to dip into, as I have been working to solve/mediate this issue for the last 2 years. Reading between the lines, you have the traditional vertical (need more structure/control) vs horizontal, need more culture/trust balance stress.

Let me make a suggestion, you actually need more structure (control) to build a more trust based community, outcome you need to build a bridge :)

Thank you, hamish! I hope to hear more from you. And again, I am asking for public meetings with minutes, a financial report, an organigram with names and functions on it as it is now, and maybe even a founding story. And let me admit it is frustrating to see persons stomping on the breaks when someone asks for minimum structures for an organization that would like to be a co-operative. That‘s what I would take as trust building measures.

I will say that while I am in favour of such an organising group, I very, very much appreciate those who are expressing their disquiet and concerns with the idea. IMHO, it's been constructive and can help us put things into perspective. If anything, I'd personally like to hear even more about what concerns and fears folk have regarding this proposal and what it might become.

By understanding everyone's nightmare scenario, perhaps we can help to avoid it by adopting changes to the proposal or even reconsidering it entirely if we feel the need to.

Strongly agree with this.

Yes! The voices of concern are extremely important here.

Okay, Moon, point taken, I will survive ;) Meanwhile I would like to know what happened to the community working group? It looks like that went wrong - but why? Analysis, anyone? Can we learn somthing from that fail?

My impression is that we were not able to keep up the momentum in the Community Working Group in part because some of its most active members were now on the Ops Team. One way to think of it is to look at the Tech Working Group, which is really an Ops Team -- a crew of people discussing and doing the hands on work. The CWG became redundant since we could just take proposals to the membership without running a preliminary vote in the CWG as was supposed to happen. I think it's best to think work --> structure instead of creating structures and trying to fill them with work.

I agree. And I believe the hands on work is well done - but transparency, trust, communication, this kind of community work needs to be done too, constructively, to build that bridge hamish has mentioned. Look, if the supervising board asks for a financial report they usually do not go down to single payments, that is treasurer stuff and does not need to and should not be known in detail at large. Nonetheless the supervisors could go down to that level if they see fit. It is much the same with moderation. The Representatives/Supervisers approve a report, there are minutes, I as an ordinary member can trust my Reps that all is fine and the Exec is not railroading their way like a military junta in 1970 Chile… that is useful work, and it should be done, imho. And yes, consensus is always the better option, but we do not have to re-invent the wheel. I would join a study group in administration or general co-op organization any time, to learn something new and have a qualified opinion. Otoh I can hardly appreciate what the ops team or the tech group are doing, if I do not know what is going on…

@tanoujin The CWG Ops team and TWG do post their minutes on Loomio, announced on Mastodon

@Matt Noyes Thank you, Matt, I know (by now). Yet the minutes I have seen were cryptic, I was not able to make anything out of it. So I would kindly ask to write whole sentences in an educational style, dreaming of references to an agenda, but any improvemend in intelligibility would be very welcome… it is okay for now, let us focus on the main topics, you might want to mention it elsewhere if you can keep it in mind, otherwise we can come back to that another time. tc

Reading through the comments, one crack at an alternative proposal:

• Create a new central body that is a spokescouncil of recognized working groups, with one participant per working group at each meeting, with some rotation.

• Formalize a process of populating working groups with sortition, nominating members randomly and inviting them to join to replace departing members. Members would not be obligated to say yes. We could have a clear, annual cycle for choosing all working groups to help ensure it happens.

I think this would help retain the goal of decentralized organizing, while also creating capacity for central coordination and mutual accountability among the working groups. And sortition at the WG level would help bring more members into operations teams.

@Matt Noyes @Matthew Cropp

On the first point, I think having at large members is a good practice. When we first started the CWG ops team we included two spots for at large members who had no work obligation other than to attend ops team meetings. This made it easier for people from oppressed groups to participate. Also, the spokescouncil should not add to the work of people on the ops teams. So maybe specify that participating in the spokescouncil counts as an on call shift (speaking of the CWG ops team).

Another concern: if social.coop wants to move toward having official co-op status, we will need positions like those specified in our proposal, even if they are essentially paper positions. [edit: what I mean by "paper positions" is that under many cooperative laws a cooperative is required to have certain executive positions. These are real positions that have legal powers and responsibilities, but the organization can nonetheless adopt bylaws and practices that allow for a much flatter form of governance.]

With all due respect, I’d rather be gangbanged by the ops team for free once a week than taking on a paper position to roleplay democratic control. If you do not want democratic control, don’t go official. These structures are demanded for good reason.