The Purpose of Social.Coop?
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.
Bob Haugen Tue 4 Sep 2018 5:36PM
If this leads to some lessons for how to do something like social.coop successfully, it will be very valuable. If those lessons get incorporated into a reorganized social.coop, so much the better.
I do understand it has been rough for the founders and organizers but hope the reorg will bring personal as well as co-op revitalization.
Matt Noyes Tue 4 Sep 2018 5:46PM
As Rihanna's tattoo says, "Never a failure, always a lesson." (got that from a.m. brown)
John Evans Wed 5 Sep 2018 11:09PM
Create a forking /process/, and a merging /process/ that all forks agree to. Social.coop acts as the base layer that the forks agree to sit upon. Let instances grow, or decline as they prove functional/dysfunctional and if they seem to be duplicates of each other, let two instances merge. You don't have to argue why your governing ideas are better, you can just demonstrate that they are better, by showing that your fork has a more harmonious community. Social.coop is a victim of its own success, this furore is a scaling issue - the community is too broad for one instance to be comfortable. The choice as I see it is either:
a) try to find the compromise that works for the largest number of existing users, where at least some people have to leave
Or b) create several instances, and let the different visions of cooperative social media play out, in a series of experiments
My preference is for b), because if there was a perfect set of rules that satisfied everybody in one instance, I think we would have found it by now
Danyl Strype Fri 7 Sep 2018 7:07AM
This is a creative proposal, but I'm not sure it's viable as you've laid it out, because if all the instances sit on a shared technical infrastructure, that shared infrastructure needs governance, so ultimately all the cats are still in the same sack. Also, because there is still no smooth way to move an account from one instance to another, the existing instance is the one everyone will have a reason to keep their account on; it would still be an asset to be struggled over.
How about this; the hosting side of social.coop forks off into its own worker-owned coop that provides an instance hosting service like Mastohost does. This coop makes sure the servers stay up, OS and app software get updated, and so on. But the hosting coop plays no role whatsoever in the internal politics of the instance(s) it hosts, and the instances play no role whatsoever in the internal politics of the hosting coop.
Each instance the hosting coop has on their servers has its own domain name, so the reputation of one has no effect on the reputation of its neighbours on the server. The hosting coop may have its own rules about who it does and doesn't host (eg no spammers, no neo-nazis, no Homers), agreed on by the workers in the coop, but hosted instances have no power to demand their neighbours get evicted. They can, of course, make a request, ideally with examples of how the instance they want booted off the server is breaking the hosting coop rules, which ought to be published on its website.
As for the instances, either:
* Social.coop carries on as a general instance, and if desired, new topic-specific instances are established for geeking out about coops, and so on
OR
* Social.coop carries on as topic-specific instance for geeking out about coops, and if desired, a new instance(s) is established as a general instance run as a coop
If or how such an instance fork happens is up to the existing users to come to consensus on, and make a formal, democratic decision, which the hosting coop would then action. Either way, I think separating the governance of the technical infrastructure from the governance of the social community is essential. People doing essential tech work need to be insulated from the distractions and damage to morale that can be caused by getting embroiled in ongoing moderation policy debates etc (as we say with @mayel). FWIW I would be interested in being a member of a hosting coop working along these lines.
PS another options would be to buy hosting services from an existing tech coop, eg Web Architects
Graham Fri 7 Sep 2018 7:24AM
I've been thinking along similar lines: separate the business of keeping the show on the road from the deliberations and concerns of content policy and moderation.
Bob Haugen Fri 7 Sep 2018 8:28AM
This is an interesting idea, but expect at least some of the people keeping the show on the road to join in the deliberations. Otherwise it's a just a job, which is ok too, but maybe not what everybody will want. Might not be their only motivation.
Aaron Wolf Fri 7 Sep 2018 4:13PM
if there was a perfect set of rules that satisfied everybody in one instance, I think we would have found it by now
I disagree and think that really underestimates the challenges of building consensus. I think we are on track to finding a set of rules that satisfies everyone. These things are not trivial or easy, and they involve a lot of listening and constructive coworking. And the result of all that hard work is often worth it. Giving up because we don't readily have consensus is counterproductive IMO.
Noah Fri 7 Sep 2018 4:22PM
Agree with Aaron's point about consensus and patience. Also, as someone who might credibly be involved in a hosting coop like the one proposed above, I would have the same concerns about content and moderation that I have as a member of this coop - in fact I'd likely feel even greater responsibility on that front since we might be facilitating even more posts and greater reach, if hosting many instances - so I'm not sure that would be a clean resolution of those questions anyway.
Danyl Strype Thu 13 Sep 2018 8:43AM
You seem to be saying that the tech workers who keep the lights on need to take responsibility for (which implies taking power over) everything that happens under those lights. Putting aside the ethical/ structural implications of this hierarchical technocracy, I don't see it as practical. If we force everyone who wants to do tech work to involve themselves in every moderation discussion, on every instance (of any app) their work is part of hosting, however divisive and unpleasant, how will they have the time or morale to get any tech work done? I would not work under these conditions, even if paid.
Robert Benjamin · Tue 4 Sep 2018 5:24PM
Would love to learn more about that organization and structure. My assumption is the common bond and goal is super strong. Either way very impressive. For SC and any social media endeavor they are pretty dissipated if not conflicted in general. It feels like there is some kind of sweet spot of representative/leadership based management and direct democratic participation. Maybe we're on the way there and it the price is to pay is just painful and draining.