Organizing Circle Meeting: 2025 August 28 (1500 UTC)

1500 [20 min] Opening

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/]

ADMIN:

• Who is here?

• Does anyone need to leave early? 

• Confirm our next call on September 11 1500 UTC

• Who is note taking?

• Who is facilitating?

Inform and Review recap from last call

https://www.loomio.com/d/n8GfMSPU/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-august-14-1500-utc-

1520 [5 min] Consent on the agenda

PRIORITIES (as identified at the meeting on 14 August): 

• Start with what can do 

• Budgeting process (supports and is recurring)

• Doing some experiments to be reviewed and will help to define the ones for 2026 

• At large member selection and onboarding: time sensitive

• Organizing Circle operations: how do we track tasks (and more, as described in the priorities doc) 

• Forming a Legal Working Group: critical 

• Membership involvement, member participation 

 "Perfection is the enemy of the good." 

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

1525 [15 min] Updates from working circles 

• Finance

• Tech

• Community

• Legal - defunct-ish

1540 [35 min] Agenda to be consented to

• xxx

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.

Thursday, 28 August 2025. Organizing Circle Meeting Notes

Present: Eduardo, Flan, Caitlin, Andrew, Melissa

AGENDA:  Brief check-in, everyone is crazy today. Then, open discussion.

Check-Ins

EM: in the middle of a site migration, going fine so far.

M: having the open discussion meeting on Sunday morning, hopefully people can come!

• Would love to have other people from the OC or working groups join.

• Can use the opportunity to socialize the idea of getting new at-large members.

• Sunday 9AM Pacific / 16 UTC at https://socialcoop.meet.coop/mel-0x5-gmg-8wr

• Is there a goal or specific focus for this meeting or is it an open call?

• The main goal is to get people talking about volunteering in working groups/OC going forward.

• F: will boost and try to attend.

• post from melissa https://social.coop/@ansate/115068770215505350

C: In Vermont; it's still summer :) Dealing with health issues, but in a good mood.

A: Looking forward to Tuesday which is the end of summer in Toronto; and September which comes as a bit of a reset.

F: (is here)

Reviewed last meeting notes:

https://www.loomio.com/d/n8GfMSPU/organizing-circle-meeting-2025-august-14-1500-utc-

• Let's skip the 'big discussions' topic since we're doing a lightweight meeting today.

• EM: have pending setting up a kanban board.

  • Question for tech: do we have something that we could use for such purpose?

  • Mayfirst has a Kanban, should we use that? (it's called Deck)

  • Flan: we don't have something with Kanban support already self-hosted, using Mayfirst's Nextcloud would make sense and be consistent with our policy so far. But if we want to self-host, it shouldn't be too hard to set up.

  • EM: kanboard has a recipe in coop cloud FYI.

  • F: we will review, but for the time being, let's go with mayfirst's nextcloud.

  • AM: (recap of how we want to set this up)

  • A: https://share.mayfirst.org/apps/deck/ is the link for Mayfirst's nextcloud kanban. (Melissa can help with the sharing).

• M: reviewing Andrew's points on Meet.Coop; maybe we should run a poll?

• A: we've already paid, but there's a cost of ~1k GBP a year.

• A: on other budget questions; please bring these back to your respective working groups.

• A: intent is to separate 'core expenses' (the minimum needed) from the rest.

Discussion within the Finance Working Group about "base operations" and "core budgets" (July 2025):  https://www.loomio.com/d/ivI2Wswc/determining-a-base-operations-budget-policy

Strategic questions can be developed. For example: Do we want to do Community Contributions in this budget year and, if so, do we use the same method/practices to make it happen or change them up?  For example: What would it cost to integrate Meet.Coop with some other function (e.g. single sign-on) for usability?

C: thank you for putting these together and taking initiative on it. We have space to consider it because there isn't any (financial) urgency/emergency. Now we've gotten to the point, we can actually see our core expenses in a usable format!

• We have findings that we have not acted on yet. For example: There is the fees question (monthly vs yearly), and the possibility of nudging members to contribute.

• The idea is that the OC will still approve a budget for 2025.

A: to clarify, what was asked of the FWG is to set up a core budget. He sees stipends as core currently.

• Examples of community contributions: IFTAS, for example. These contributions are NOT "strategic" or part of the "core" budget.

F: appreciates transparency. He would appreciate "nudges" to contribute, because, like others, he doesn't remember if or when he last contributed.

• What expenses are strategic? ... example: A goal to improve Mastodon or the Fediverse, then a contribution to one of them could be strategic if it's in line with our overarching goals/values.

• TWG point of view on Meet.Coop: he sees "trade-offs": to save 1,000 GBP on our payment to Meet.Coop, then what would we do instead? We could e.g. self-host, or run Jitsi instead, or use free Jitsi instances, but then we wouldn't contribute to another coop.

- EM. +1 on nudges being good. Good nudges could also include suggested ranges of contributions based on criteria (like e.g. socioeconomic status, country of residence, level of use of services, etc.)

• How to encourage good member behavior.

- A: FWG will take this “nudges” idea up and see what we can do with/in Open Collective so as to not add more tooling. Maybe we can use OC to send reminders on what 1. each member’s yearly level of contribution was and 2. how each individual member’s contribution compares to other members’ contributions and 3. how are we spending this money.

- C to A: where would you like my support for these FWG tasks right now?

A: looking for two things.

- From each working group: confirmation that yes, this amount is the right level of stipend for us this year. Is there an organization that this working group would like to contribute to?- Caitlin: can help getting these answered by each WG. 

- E: I'm hearing that we would be going from having each member vote on contributions to having working groups deciding on how we allocate some of these contributions?

- A: yes, it could be a different way to approach what we did last year, when all members were able to nominate organizations for contributions. This year the OC has the ability to set a budget itself; and we would like to see community contributions take place, so we're exploring all possible ways.

- EM: we try to encourage participation from the community at large; it makes sense to give some weight to working group members of the community. Unsure about the OC deciding certain things versus e.g. organizing work or coordinating.

- Possibly, each working group can create a proposal that then is discussed/voted by the rest of the community.

- A: +1, this is why we've been trying to 'decentralize' from the FWG setting budgets and moving towards each WG making proposals.

- C: We can do Community Contributions at the same level n the 2025 budget as in the 2024 budget ... 2024: budget vs. actual https://www.loomio.com/d/PLKdG5TJ/budget-2024-budget-vs-actual

Check outs

• EM: happy to see you all, including Andrew!

• A: thank you for having me!

• Who will post these notes? :) <3

• C: I will do it!

• C: always good to meet and move things forward!

• M: would like to talk to A about stipends…. C and A and M discussed.

• F: …

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DONT FORGET: general coop meeting this Sunday 1600 UTC @ https://socialcoop.meet.coop/mel-0x5-gmg-8wr