Loomio
Sun 2 Sep 2018 2:07AM

The Purpose of Social.Coop?

MC Matthew Cropp Public Seen by 64

I’ve been listening, discussing both privately and publicly, and reflecting a great deal as the controversies of the past week have roiled Social.Coop. There are many elements and dynamics that could be dissected ad nauseum, but I want to focus here on one thing that I think it’s essential that we clarify if we are to pick up the pieces in one way or another and move forward: our purpose.

In the beginning of the instance, the implicit purpose was broad but sufficient: an experiment in building and operating a user-self-governed co-op instance to challenge the hegemony of surveillance capitalist social media. In ways that, in retrospect, mirror some of my experiences with the Occupy movement in ‘11-’12, this broad, ambiguous purpose allowed people with diverse, and perhaps contradictory, goals to see space for them within the project, and our community began to grow.

This worked for a time when stakes were low and the level of trust was supplemented by the many relationships that people brought with them from the co-op and platform co-op movements, from which the lion’s share of early members were drawn. However, as the stakes grew as new members joined and established significant Fediverse networks from their social.coop accounts, tensions between un- or semi-articulated understandings of social.coop’s purpose began to rise, and the recent controversies have surfaced a number of them into clear view.

The three that have become apparent to me are outlined below, and I’m sure that there are others. My strategic question is whether these purposes can continue to exist under a singular umbrella, or if it would be healthy/necessary to fork into more than one co-op instance, with existing members welcome to choose the one that suits their needs best (or to join more than one)?

Collective v. Representative Governance
This question of whether a strongly participatory and flat form of governance is core to the project has come up off and on since the project began. A few months back I started this thread in the Governance/Legal working group expressing my sense of the need for a board-like body to handle our scaling. It was greeted by a mixed reaction, with Mayel expressing that if such a thing were adopted he would view the project as having failed. As such, I tabled the issue and focused my efforts on getting the Community Working Group moving towards a functional operations team.

Early in the present controversy, I decided to take a straw-poll on the question, and the results revealed a cleavage in our community. Of the 47 respondents, 46.8% were for a board or board-like entity, 38.3% were against, and 14.89% were neutral. This clearly is an issue around which there is no strong unified “sense of the co-op”; rather, there are significant blocs of members who support each approach.

Subject-Specific “Common Bond” v. General Membership
The question of whether the target membership of social.coop is co-op practitioners or a more general population was explored a bit in this thread about 6 months ago, and Leo recently lauched this poll asking about the desirability of more co-op-related content.

Talking to folks who recently joined (and some who subsequently left), a common reason for joining because the idea of a cooperative instance appealed to them, but their primary purpose for being here was not co-op shop-talk.

Whether we exist for the former or the latter both has a big influence on how much scale we need to plan for (a few thousand v. potentially tens or hundreds of thousands of users), as well as how much community norms can be expected to influence member behavior.

Relational v. Rule-Based/Administrative Moderation
In the code of conduct development process, there was definitely some tension between the desire to create a set of clear, enforceable rules, and spelling out what has been referred to as “soft” conflict resolution strategies. Upon reflection, I think this seems to have come from a desire on the part of some members for social.coop to be an “intentional community” of sorts, in which, beyond agreeing to abide by a set of standards, members consent to relate to each other in ways thought or hoped to be more deeply transformational.

One way that this tension seemed to come to a head in the recent controversies was around the perception that including such language places potentially onerous expectations on marginalized people who desire a clearly articulated plan for keeping them safe, not a more ambiguous framework for a form of deep/transformative participation/communication.

While we’ve not had a poll to explore this particular question, it does appear to be an issue where some members would prefer to trust a form of administrative justice as a primary tool of the co-op, while others desire a more intentional community approach where such tools are used as a last resort.

Two Possible Ways Forward (among others):
- Reform Social Co-op: Looks pretty much like what Michele has proposed in his recent open letter. A body with strong, intentional diversity is s/elected to steward the re-launch, and one of its roles is to define the ‘why’ of social.coop in light of the above tensions and other factors before re-opening the instance to new members.
- Fork Social Co-op: The most obvious “successor co-ops” I can conceive of would be a Collective, Subject-Specific, Relational instance, and a Representative, Rules-Based, General Membership instance. However, the reality would almost certainly be more complex, so rather than defining the potential successor instances, if a fork is the desired path, we would need a process by which teams could propose their forks, and through which the financial resources of social.coop could be divided up among those proposals that garner a critical mass of support.

I’m still processing all that’s happened, and want to emphasize that the above list(s) are in no way exhaustive. I’m very interested to hear others thoughts.

I do feel strongly, though, that unless we can define a clear answer to the why? of social.coop, it’ll be difficult to chart a viable path from here.

M

Melody Sun 2 Sep 2018 4:03AM

I'd just like to comment, mostly on this "relational vs rule-based" thing because I think it conflates a lot of issues that have also been at the core of the disastrous CoC and Reporting Guide processes.

I'd like to start by saying here is that it's beyond critical that we distinguish between conflict and abuse/harassment. They are not the same and treating them like they are tends to exacerbate problems. There are a lot of kinds of healthy conflict, and resolving conflict can be generative, but conflict is not abuse. The code of conduct and reporting system are for responding to abuse.

The second thing I'd like to say is that transformative justice process have to be consensual -- the rest of the fediverse did not consent to this, and we can't expect them to want to. At a minimum, we need to be able to prevent our users from disturbing everyone else, regardless of what we're doing internally. That means having, at a minimum, a process that can in some way keep somebody who is dumping harmful or problematic content outside our walls from continuing to do that. I think further than that, though, this implication that a transformative justice process doesn't involve protecting people's safety as the first and foremost priority (there seems to be some dichotomy set up here between a clearly articulated plan for keeping people safe and transformative justice, but that can only work from a place of ongoing consent and safety, these are not contradictory ideas) is silly. There's no justice in transformative justice if you're forcing a person in acute distress to sit through a week or more of that without acting, out of a misapplied sense of ideological purity. The harm must stop immediately.

In general, I actually think that most of these dichotomies are false -- we can have collective governance and have selective points where there are smaller groups empowered to represent us in certain matters (almost every coop makes many day to day decisions without voting on all of them, the work has to get done at some point, what's important is understanding which decisions require constant group attention and which can be left to people who are expected to be able to represent the general interest and take care of them when the time comes). You can have rules, expectations, and a rapid response to abuse and handle outcomes through a transformative process rather than solely through punitive processes. You can have an instance made up primarily or entirely of cooperators without all or most conversation being coop shop talk.

The problem isn't that we didn't pick between these false dilemmas, it's that people are using the ability to argue about these things to stall progress on critical priorities. The fact is that absolutely none of the arguments against developing functioning abuse reporting processes were radical, revolutionary, or transformative -- they were the same old shit that it always is when you put a load of white men together in a room who are refusing to listen to marginalized people's needs: stalling, waffling on whether it's really okay to have rules, endless whining about "censorship", making excuses and increasingly esoteric justifications for bad behavior in order to absolve them of responsibility, and occasionally paying lip service to our concerns without ever really acknowledging the need for rapid and immediate harm prevention. For every post I've seen on here arguing against common sense moderation policies in the recent threads I could find you fifteen men on reddit who might have written an identical post, absolutely none of it was novel, radical, or interesting. It's hard to describe the utter banality of all this hand-wringing and stalling and braying about free speech and censorship if you haven't lived through decades of watching it all play out the same way, but there's absolutely no room for it in a healthy or functioning accountability system. The system doesn't necessarily have to be punitive, but it can't be nonexistent, non-consensual, or a vehicle for abuse and further harm. By tolerating that kind of behavior, this coop chose, and I do mean chose to further alienate and marginalize the people who those policies may have otherwise protected, in favor of making this space comfortable for young white men who did not want to see processes put in place which might hold them accountable for their behavior.

The tensions identified here are, mostly, a mirage -- these are not tensions it's impossible to resolve, but a lot of these have been straw-manned and treated as anti-cooperative and anti-radical specifically to de-legitimize the concerns of marginalized people, but the absurdity here is that we aren't the ones that are asking for the status quo -- permissive, hands-off moderation and "sort it out between yourselves" is literally the dominant moderation policy for the entire rest of the internet. Protecting marginalized people from harm is radical, letting white men say whatever they want without ever being held to account because they hold too much power, are less invested, and have more time to play word games and engage in "rational debate" is not.

AW

Aaron Wolf Sun 2 Sep 2018 5:13AM

I agree, not just in general but with most of the nuanced points here.

Having systems and policies to block abuse (and also to block/censor/hide harmful posts that aren't quite abuse) is top priority. Everything else can be more easily dealt with after that is in place fully.

Still, the rest of restorative justice / conflict resolution is also important and should be used where appropriate. We needed and need that especially right now in working through our own internal tensions themselves.

And these are compatible. We can have both.

Matt is still right that we need these visions and values clear so we aren't confused what it is we're even talking about. Though there's no conflict between blocking abuse and having restorative justice / conflict resolution, they are different. Conflating the two was a primary source of most misunderstandings that came up in previous discussions.

Similar goes for the other contrasted points.

DP

Dan Phiffer Sun 2 Sep 2018 1:53PM

Thanks for writing this Melody, and thanks for your posts on the riot chats.

TB

Thomas Beckett Tue 4 Sep 2018 1:49PM

These are among the wisest words posted here this week.

LM

Liam Murphy Sun 2 Sep 2018 6:26AM

People do not have time to read so many words. Another fault of capitalism. The project will not gain traction without leadership. Ownership can be shared, leadership can’t. I want an alternative to Facebook. So do more and more people. Copy Facebook and reproduce it for the masses. Stay the right side of IP laws - or - ‘tokenise the enterprise’. Campaign to make Facebook public so it can be co-owned and governed (as it should be).

Superficially, the ‘internet’ for most people, looks like Facebook. Either take it off them or copy it.... it’s just what works.

LM

M

muninn Mon 3 Sep 2018 12:07AM

How many members of coop groceries, or credit unions, or whatever, participate in the governing process? There may be some useful data in the answer to that. There are likely a great number of users here who joined because they wanted to try an instance that's cooperatively managed, and that's it, and don't care to have every decision, or even a majority of decisions, end up in their email as a loomio vote. And that's FINE.

I am one of those people. I'm here trying to use a social network, not have a deep and agonizing soul search over my relation to capital every few months. Representative decision making is almost mandatory for me, because I don't have the time, energy, or interest to participate in the minutia, and I don't want to see dozens of Loomio messages per day in my email inbox. I suspect there are a lot of other people for whom this is true, and I suspect those people are probably going to make up a huge majority on any general-interest instance.

It appears to be time to really decide whether social.coop is a topical coop-focused instance, or a general interest instance that is cooperatively owned and governed. I think a lot of people have joined with the latter expectation, myself included, and that a lot of them will leave if that expectation is altered, myself included.

I am comfortable with having a vote on policy (AFTER working groups have something well enough put together for general voting), and on the constitution of teams/working groups and the board, (edit: and instance-level blocks/unblocks), and that's it. Representative government, hopefully by people who I get to know and trust a bit over time by occasionally participating in the process, is good enough for me. And I would also caution that once you get more users than the Dunbar Number, hierarchy of some sort rapidly becomes necessary.

ST

Sam Toland Tue 4 Sep 2018 12:42PM

I think this says it all - it's really coming up to decision time.

I am definitely in the same category as Muninn when it comes to engagement with this co-op.

I am not able to participate all the time, value being able to drop in and I am totally ready to delegate my vote either through a board and/or proxy voting.

I would personally remain a member of social.coop whichever route we take, though i am coming around to the idea that a co-op focused instance might be simpler to scale at the minute.

I think if we are going to continue as a general-interest instance we in effect need to formalise IMHO with a semi-professional core team who are leading this project (with a plan to scale to a point where subscriptions cover operationing costs + small surplus). A fluid, volunteer system with very limited accountability cannot hold such a disparate group together (and develop and maintain all the myriad policies and procedures to mediate between such a large and less close knit group).

G

Graham Tue 4 Sep 2018 1:20PM

I think I'm with @muninn and @samtoland largely. I got involved in social.coop because I saw it as an interesting and potentially important experiment to see if a cooperative model for a social media platform could work. I believe that it is still exactly that, an experiment, and as far as I can see it seems to be working OK. Of course with any experiment there are going to be issues - disagreements, outages, and so on - and it looks like we've had a fair amount of all those. That's only to be expected. For me it feels a bit like people are rushing to try to fix things that aren't necessarily broken, or solve problems before we're actually clear about the causes, or indeed whether they are problems at all or just the latest ripples in the ongoing experiment.

On balance I think I would encourage everyone to slow down a bit, relax, and take a step back. I see this platform being operated on a voluntary, no-warranty, sold-as-seen basis. I expect there to be little or no policing, although I'm happy to be involved where I can in a conversation about what sort of conduct might be appropriate, and work towards some approaches that might mitigate against bad actors and miscreants whilst respecting ideas of freedom of speech. I appreciate that others might take a different view, and I understand that there are facilities within the technology so that we don't have to see opinions and ideas that might offend us.

It's disappointing that we can't always play nicely, but that's life. Please let us not rush to judgement, and make decisions that we might come to regret later. I've no idea how many people have active accounts on this platform, but it feels like we have some way to go before scale becomes a major issue.

This is a small experimental group with limited resources. Let's be realistic about what we can and cannot do, and acknowledge that we can't please all the people all the time.

ELP

Edward L Platt Tue 4 Sep 2018 2:12PM

I would love to see this become a largely member-run organization, but agree with the above posts that it is very difficult to make that scale. I'm glad that we're closing new registrations for the time being, for that reason.

That said, I do think it is possible. I helped start and run the i3 Detroit hackerspace for many years, and it is now at about 200 members, with an annual budget on the order of US$100,000 and entirely run by volunteer members.

As well as my own experience, I've learned a lot about self-managed organizations from this book: http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/

MN

Matt Noyes Tue 4 Sep 2018 2:21PM

I want to see us continue exploring this space -- organizing horizontally -- instead of falling back on the familiar centralized structures/practices. I think we have actually made a lot of progress.

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