First Anniversary - Proposals?

Good catch! At minimum, I suggest we draft an announcement on the wiki, with some stats etc., and commit to spread it through channels available to us. What's the date of the anniversary?

I'd stick with the day we registered the domain, as that marked the actual "first step" towards the cooperative's existence. The domain was registered a few weeks after my actual proposal on the P2PF facebook page, but I believe we can agree on the date in the whois domain registration data, ie. the 24th of April. Any thoughts around this?

Keep in mind the whois date will be a few weeks after the step was actually taken, as I had to deal with some bureaucracy with the TLD, they wanted us to prove we were already a coop in order to register the domain, I ended up using a workaround when @enric2 from FairCoop accepted to register it for us (they already had an approved account for the TLD).

Right, we had that problem, now I recall. Should we consider the date you first applied for the domain name?

Looking back on Loomio, April 14th was our first call, and April 16 I set up our initial member signup form.

April 14th works for me!

Cool :) FYI the date I first registered the domain was April 6.

Here's a first draft, please hack away at it:
https://wiki.social.coop/Social.coop,_a_social_network_owned_by_its_users,_celebrates_its_first_year
Can we enable file uploads on the wiki so we can add some media?

Sorry I somehow missed this entirely! Thank you very much for adding the entry, it's a great starting point. Crazy idea: how about turning this into a manifesto, something that will express all our values in a series of impactful, well written points?

That could be fun :-). Perhaps closer to the date (April 14) we can prod folks via Loomio to write up little mini-testimonials: What brought you here / what are you getting out of being here? And include them in the announcement.

Just added a bit to it, and edited a bit of wording.

Image embedding is enabled, you should be able to just paste in the URL to an image and it will show up.

I'm thinking we pick an hour to have an ole-fashinned "toot-up," where we pick an hour on the 14th and as many people post or respond to at least one toot during that hour that includes a 🎂. I will start a poll!

I like the "toot up" idea -- and, to promote social.coop and Mastodon more broadly, what about choosing a day for posts on other social media sites about Mastodon and social.coop? Ideally with a cute graphic to share...

Great idea. How about some sort of "leaflet" we can share as a png or pdf file?

As a new person here I'm wondering if any thought has gone into trying to get a more diverse membership at social.coop? Maybe I'm mistaken, but just watching the local timeline leas me to believe it is mostly white & male? It is quite possible that I'm completely mistaken about this. But if I'm not maybe we could try to have this as one of the themes in the toot up?

Hi Ed, thanks for bringing this up. We do have a diversity problem, but that seems to be more linked to some form of "natural selection bias" (ie. those applying for membership turn out to be mostly white males) rather that to us not being friendly or welcoming to everyone. Why those applying are mostly white males, is beyond my understanding though (white men being the dominant demographic in STEM and tech? White men being the only ones with extra disposable income to spare? White men being more intersted in cooperatives than other demographics? I have no idea)...

If there are steps you can suggest we take to solve this problem, feel free to share them with us!

Yes, I didn't mean to imply that there was exclusionary forces at work! It does seem to just be a function of the space that Mastodon is operating in. I'm not exactly sure what a solution is, or even if there is a way of "fixing" the problem. But perhaps we could try to do outreach with specific communities? I'm thinking of the work that the Wikimedia Foundation did after they realized that they had a deep seated diversity problem: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Diversity

New here too, and I totally agree with you Ed. Perhaps a census or survey would be in order to get a more solid picture of the makeup of the instance? I don't have suggestions to solve the problem(s) we have with representation but it would be good to be able to define them clearly.

Also, not completely unrelated, how many (active) members actually are there? https://social.coop/about/more says we're home to 833 users, but the Loomio group looks to only have 120 members. And the most recent poll had eleven participants.

Yes, there is a mismatch between users active on the instance and those active on Loomio, and between those subscribed to Loomio and those who actually engage in decisions and voting. This seems to be in part related to the difficulty of "blending in" for new users (Loomio can be overwhelming) and in part to the fact some people are naturally less inclined than others to participate to collective work...

"Most of the applicants are white men" might be a selection bias, but it's one that is usually caused by something, it's not "natural", incidental, or unconnected with the way that social.coop is presenting itself to the outside world. Mastodon as a platform has enough appeal outside that demographic that it really can't explain it alone, and most of the time when you have an extremely heavy applicant bias like that it means that you have failed to make your message appealing to other groups.

Off the top of my head, I can say that these are major, immediately visible turnoffs for bringing in more diverse members:

1. No code of conduct (this is an absolute dealbreaker for many)
2. No obvious moderation policy

I don't think that's it alone though -- the local timeline is also really very very narrowly focused on advertising co-op movement stuff. The overall impression is one of an instance where people are sort of broadcasting their pet cause in isolation with no real defined sense of culture or community.

Add to that the fact that most non-white-men are also already doing a lot more "second shift" domestic and community-building work than white men are, I think the benefits of needing to pay to join a community that has not obviously prioritized your needs or interests just to take on even more of that labor are really unclear to somebody who isn't already sold on the concept of a platform coop and even then, it isn't obvious whether participation will be worthwhile.

I joined in spite of a lot of reservations, myself, and it really remains to be seen whether this is someplace I'd be willing to recommend to other people like myself (a lot is riding on the ongoing code of conduct and moderation work and a few other discussions I'm paying attention to)

I've found Loomio a little bewildering, as social.coop's is the only Loomio group I've had experience with. The Working Group subgroup structure used here (and the opt-in process) seems a bit confusing too, but I can see it might be necessary if the group was bigger. I've only just discovered this thread which is I guess technically where this discussion should be taking place.

To me the Local timeline feels very meta/techy at times, so I made a bit of an effort to find and follow some accounts on other instances posting different kinds of content.

Is social.coop a platform ran by and for cooperativists & cooperativism, or is it a cooperatively ran platform for all?

Thanks for pointing that out @meltheadorable! While I noticed that a code of conduct was mentioned in the bylaws https://social.coop/bylaws it slipped past me that it doesn't actually exist yet. I can definitely see that as a barrier. Even though the bylaws have some language about diversity it would be good to have something more concrete about what it means in practice.

To @jakebeamish's question of "Is social.coop a platform ran by and for cooperativists & cooperativism, or is it a cooperatively ran platform for all?"

For the moment, my sense is that our core is co-operators vs. aiming to be a general-purpose instance. Part of that was an outgrowth of the shared affinity of many early members to the #buytwitter campaign, but also I think has been influence by Mastodon's architecture, which, as a federated platform, is designed to scale horizontally via more affinity-based instances vs. vertically through the emergence of a monopoly instance. An additional feature of the more narrow "common bond" (which is quite loosely enforced via the questionnaire when people sign up) has been that we have a critical mass of folks who already generally get the co-op model, so the educational on-ramp is selectively shortened.

Whether we maintain that more narrow "space for co-op enthusiasts" core affinity going forward or, as we tighten up our processes, broaden our vision to be a "cooperatively run platform for all" is a really interesting and important strategic question that probably deserves its own thread, and perhaps a formal process...

Hi @meltheadorable thanks for your feedback! We sure need this kind of discussion to happen internally, as we are a steadily growing community and we sure don't want to be (or appear) unwelcoming to any demographic. As @matthewcropp already said, our scope might seem narrow but it's only loosely enforced: being co-op enthusiasts is, in my opinion, a shared value more than a core topic we need to stick to.

As for the lack of a clear code of conduct, that's true. We've been dancing around this for a while and somehow never managed to get it done... We can do better.

Speaking of which: there's a code of conduct call scheduled for the 17th of March, if anyone wants to attend, you're more than welcome.

Ed,

Thanks for bringing this up. I raised the same issue in the
membership working group and made some suggestions but we have not
taken any collective action.

One way to deal with it that I use on FB is not to add another
white male friend until I have added a couple of non-whitemales.
Or to invite people to do more than join the existing group --
maybe organize a joint toot up with instances where most people
are POC and use that to build up some shared discussion?

It take conscious effort to reverse the internalized logarithms
of recruitment.

-Matt

Yes, I really like the pragmatism of this approach. I think it can also apply to resharing/amplifying content. It might be nice if our outreach efforts around the 1st anniversary highlighted the diversity that already exists, and listed some practical techniques like this for building on it, rather than simply pointing out the lack of diversity, which can sometimes lead to inaction.

Another concrete step: divide up the list of people who are inactive among those who are active and contact them directly to check in -- how are they feeling about social.coop? Do they know about Loomio? Any concerns or things they'd like to do?

Concrete stuff sounds good to me – how do we get the lists, and what's the procedure before going ahead and doing things?

I'll have a bit of free time this week, I could start drawing up a list / making a survey-type poll / contacting people. I just want to confirm the due process – do we need to be deciding on actions like this communally? Which working group does this fit into? I want to be able to help here but I am completely unfamiliar with the bureaucracy. Not firing questions just at @mattnoyes ( 😀 ), but any of you people who know the drill.

Hmm, I think we'd need @mayel's help on this, if he's back from his Cuba internet fast yet? How hard would it be to get a list of "inactives", Mayel?

I also recently started a thread around what sort of data we would like to aggregate in the Tech/Infrastructure Working group, if any of you want in on that conversation?

How about a specific hashtag? Something like "#CoopVersary" or some other silly yet funny thing?