Spring 2022 Strategy Session

DRAFT AGENDA for 4/23 Strategy Session

https://socialcoop.meet.coop/mat-tof-czj-liv

• quick introductions

• agenda and time check

• quick look at the dashboard:

  • SC membership

  • operations: Finance, Tech, Community

  • Meet.Coop membership/use

• rose, bud, thorn

  • what is making social.coop valuable to you at this point?

  • what potential do you see in social.coop? what kinds of things could we do, or do more of?

  • what makes social.coop uncomfortable or less useful to you?

• concerns that have been raised in Matrix and Mastodon:

  • are the operations that keep SC going transparent enough?

  • are there barriers to participation in governance/operations?

  • are our moderation policies and procedures satisfactory?

  • [other]

• Next steps for each of us.

• Quick Evaluation of the session.

Notes from the strategy session:

Quick Introductions:

·     Matt N: Colorado (Ops team member, responsible for bad weather in Winnipeg)

·     Allain: Brussels (would like to see if there are opportunities to help)

·     Matt C: Vermont (Finance WG)

·     Laurie: OFN in US (here to be supportive and learn, plug in)

·     Stuart: Winnipeg (new to SC, interested in co-ops in general)

·     Mica: NYC (Ops team member)

·     Neil: UK (hoping to join tech WG)

·     Will: (wants to see what's going on)

·     Giacomo: Florence (I like coops because I like collective ownership and democratic administration of means of production of wealth)

Agenda

Quick overview of Social.Coop

• SC membership: 

  • Mastodon: 1,360 (around 150 weekly users)

  • Loomio: 158

  • Meet: 37

  • OpenCollective: 408

  • Matrix: usually used for tech issues

• Operations (Working Groups): more descriptions on loomio

  • Finance: undergoing some changes at the moment- expense filed to open collective, triggers notification to finance WG, vote on loomio, approves expense 

    • have a decent reserve, currently hosted through fiscal sponser on Open Collective 

    • current balance £6,778.77

    • total raised £23,338.34

    • annual budget £3,411.67

• Tech: responsible for:

  • domain registration

  • SSL certificate

  • mastodon updates

  • managing tech part registration process

  • currently onboarding new members to the team

  • members get a stipend

• Community: main tasks are process new registrations, moderation of the instance,  Code of Conduct, registration on loomio and meet.coop,  build community, happy hours, 

  • members get a stipend for being on call and meetings

• Question: what is the best way for a new member to get involved and participate more meaningfully? 

  • active on mastodon instance, get a sense of the culture, posting, responding and building connections

  • loomio is not always active (until there is an issue)

  • CWG Ops team: authorized 5 'seats' - each year there is a poll/ call for new members 

  • It's intimidating joining mastodon, CWGOT has been talking about an onboarding video, that might be helpful

  • Stuart interested in writing down mastodon questions as a new user 

Rose, bud, thorn 

• Rose: what is making social.coop valuable to you at this point?

  • find allies and interesting content

  • conversations and better answers related  to co-op dev. (ex: multistakeholder co-ops) 

  • on a systems level: experiment of how do we do this together (resilience)

  • SNS that puts me in a good mood :)

  • talk to other cooperators 

  • facilitated transition from co-op curious to co-op owner-member

  • happy with the crowd, regular user of meet.coop (min 3 meetings/week)

  • community, interesting stuff you see, entrance to fediverse, makes sense

  • less toxic than other SNS

  • serves as an AMA (ask me anything) co-op space 

  • cooperative structure

  • owning our own tools, alternative to big tech platforms

  • making connections with likeminded people

  • learning experience to see different conversations 

  • functioning of a cooperative from the inside, inspiration

  • deep engagement, connections are stronger and translate to outside of the instance

  • experience of the individual timelines are different, gain different perspectives

• Bud: what potential do you see in social.coop? what kinds of things could we do, or do more of?

  • collaborate to offer cooperative run software? (similar to meet.coop example)

  • ex: find co-op run nextcloud, may first, framasoft, disroot

  • two components: run + host

  • running a platform on our own seems daunting but SC could be a great place for people to bring projects, buzzy place for new co-ops to test ideas, attract more co-ops to use SC to get started and get started

  • document our example to inspire other groups to run their own instances - instead of scaling up, we can help scale out (community, tech, finance) : https://documentation.divio.com

  • the idea of co-ownership and shared responsibility is revolutionary and inspiring - helping people consider moving from consumers to participants

• Question: do we want to grow membership?  

  • registration process is limiting our visibility for new people joining mastodon

  • if we want to grow and be a 'one stop shop' for co-op services, it might be a good idea to expand our reach

  • what would we want to include in the 'commons'?  

  • development working group?

• Thorn: what makes social.coop uncomfortable or less useful to you?

  • Just getting acquainted/onboarding - there's a big first step into this world

  • automated re-tweeting: different cultures

  • moderation (fediblock?)

  • new members/ members not involved in WG feel like they dont' understand how social.coop operates

  • information being spread over different platforms is challenging (time consuming)

  • always feel like you might be missing something

  • would be nice to have a way to centralize information

  • guppe.groups, shares and re-boosts posts that are related to a certain topic (hashtags would work within social.coop), most useful across different servers, 

  • trying to link loomio to mastodon, RSS feeds, web bots, surface automatically the governance that is taking place

  • who are the members? registration on different accounts (loomio, mastodon, matrix, open collective) --> how to integrate these?

  • how to facilitate deep engagement when microblogging doesn't naturally allow for this (social.coop as a coordination tool) 

    • karrot platform (model for engaged community action oriented)

    • framasoft (mobilizon)

• Note: concerns that have been raised in Matrix and Mastodon:

  • are the operations that keep SC going transparent enough?

  • are there barriers to participation in governance/operations?

  • are our moderation policies and procedures satisfactory?

Action Steps

• happy hour sessions (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17rPIaGBEt660k2Os6G3tCZRnvPhe-lB30KkSYBt3vRw/edit#gid=0)

  • organization map making, onboarding q's

  • facilitating deeper engagement 

  • multiple services for co-ops 

• For the money (income), we can register social.coop as a Brave creator. Wikipedia and some parts of the Fediverse already do that

• linking loomio and mastodon

• documentation, open up the wiki, investigate ways for documenting: : https://documentation.divio.com

• re-start reading group (subgroup on loomio already exists)

• possibility of a social.coop dashboard? 

  • profile with different aliases across platforms

Quick Evaluation of the session (chat) 

Will (datatitian) 9:27 AM Thumbs up! So glad I came

Mica (she/her) 9:27 AM I feel good about it! I liked being able to hear from newer members

Emi 9:28 AM Need a different method for discussing issues that have come up (moderation etc.) but love the energy of these sessions!

Neil 9:28 AM Session was great, was nice to see fellow members faces again, I really like the rose, bud, thorn framing, good energy and lots of ideas

alto 9:28 AM It was a great moment. Really instructive and nice. Thank you

Stuart Croall 9:29 AM I enjoyed this and found it very useful. Looking forward to more opportunities to continue discussions

Great to see this lively discussion reaching down into principles and strategy. Sorry I was unable to join, things are busy in meet.coop (launching a Board of stewards, doing strategy, getting serious on raising membership level aka revenue) .

Would certainly be good if the world of mastodon became easier to enter, more transparent. Likewise, the world of social coop!

If you do like meet.coop please do boost us w friends and collaborators. We need the money! To pay for core work & essential improvement. Love & solidarity mike

Now that it's snowing here again, and water has stopped infiltrating our basement, I've had a look at the "documentation system" link, and some related videos, and am having another look at wiki.social.coop, and am left with some questions and ideas. I'm curious about how the wiki/documentation is maintained at this point. Is there a specific group that is tasked with working on this? What system is used?

I remember when I first came across Social Coop it was a bit...opaque. It wasn't that it didn't seem friendly or welcoming, but it presented as a bit confusing, and it wasn't clear what its status was. The blog link leads to a committee report from 2019, which left me wondering how active or successful it was.

Anyway, I have lots of ideas running through my head right now, which I'll try to capture and sort through. But that leads to the question: Where is the best place to start working through ideas about documentation and the onboarding experience of new members, or the impressions created for curious visitors? Is it best to lay out some of these questions and ideas in a new Loomio thread?

Hi Stuart, the Wiki is updated when the spirit moves somebody. Much of the existing documentation was created in response to a crisis in social.coop that occurred after a big influx of people from Twitter. This question is great: "Where is the best place to start working through ideas about documentation and the onboarding experience of new members, or the impressions created for curious visitors? Is it best to lay out some of these questions and ideas in a new Loomio thread?" Loomio is the place for drawing up and discussing proposals, but it may be good to initiate conversation on the Mastodon instance, to see who would like to help out?