Working Group and Organizing Circle Governance Processes

Context

Clarifying the relationship between Working Groups, Organizing Circle, and the Social.coop membership.

In order to document current practices and establish expectations about communication, decision making, and regular reporting of progress and priorities, the Organizing Circle would like to make more explicit the ongoing processes that support Social.coop’s collective operation.

Most recently in March 2024, we stated (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Governance#Decision-making):

Decisions in Social.coop break into strategic and operational.

• Strategic decisions guide operational decisions and are currently made via a staged proposal process.

• Operational decisions are taken on via working groups and key role holders, loosely by domain but often modified by capacity.

And the bylaws further explain

Working groups are encouraged to make proposals among themselves to determine consensus and operate within their scope of responsibility, but only proposals passed by the full group may be considered binding for Social.coop. Any member may make a proposal to the full group, though it is encouraged to first discuss matters within the appropriate working group.

The wiki has details on our thought process for making proposals in Loomio: https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Make_a_proposal

Working Groups as of Sept 2026

• Organizing Circle (OC)

• Community Working Group (CWG)

• Tech Working Group (TWG)

• Finance Working Group (FWG)

• Legal Working Group (LWG)

Working Group Governance Processes

Working Group Membership

• Any Social.coop members are invited to volunteer to participate in Working Groups that suit their skills and interest in sharing Social.coop’s collective operational effort.

• Working Groups should make a proposal in Loomio to add new members, letting the full cooperative membership recognize and affirm an individual’s participation in the responsibilities of that working group.

• Working Groups should regularly evaluate their current workload and collective capacity and make requests on Loomio for additional member volunteers as needed.

The Organizing Circle comprises delegates from each of the active Working Groups, as well as 2 or more at-large members on a rotating term, currently 2 years, selected by sortition from volunteers.

For Working Groups and the Organizing Circle, it is expected that:

• Members establish and maintain a regular cadence for meeting.

• The list of current group members is maintained on the wiki.

• A list of working priorities is maintained, documented on the wiki and posted to the loomio subgroup when updated, and revisited at least annually.

• Roles for meeting facilitation, note-taking and communication, and delegate to OC should be equitably shared and rotated as appropriate

• Meeting notes are kept in a shared folder in Mayfirst Nextcloud.

• Members participate in asynchronous discussion on Loomio, and as appropriate, Mastodon, Zulip and Matrix.

• Privileges and permissions to Social.coop services are kept updated as members are added or leave, as relevant to the Working Group’s scope and shared resources.

• An active member of the group is designated, as specified in the bylaws, to represent the Working Group at Organizing Circle meetings and provide status updates, communicate challenges and coordination needs, and share successes. It would be ideal to have two people -delegate and coordinator- from each Working Group to the OC as schedules permit.

• A quarterly summary of meeting notes and operational efforts is posted to the appropriate Loomio subgroup.

• Working groups receive a stipend from the annual budget to distribute among members as decided by the Working Group. Additional budget requests shall be made as proposals in Loomio.

Following any discussion, we will document this on the wiki and continue to hold ourselves accountable to these expectations for documentation and communication.