Appropriate use of Working Groups

As I understand it, working groups are like sandboxes where people interested in the issue or theme discuss ideas and sometimes produce proposals (or pre-posals!) which they then put out to the whole group for discussion, posting here and on social.coop. Robert's Ops Teams proposal aims to clarify the connection between WGs and the people who carry out the work involved. Am I missing something?

I would also add that, according to the bylaws:

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.

This strikes me as a fair balance. I personally would like to see more of this kind of specialization in governance. My aim is to spend the minimum amount of time and attention necessary governing social.coop and the maximum time enjoying the service itself. So I think having porous formations like the working groups that enable people to opt in and out of more focused discussions is a great thing, as long as anything that affects the whole group is brought to the main Loomio group.

To Nathan's point no decision is binding unless voted on by entire membership and it seems like not using a Working Group to first introduce and work through an idea/pre-proposal/issue is a bigger problem from an overall governance engagement perspective.

The Working Groups are open to all members but joining one is purposeful subscription to the emails, conversation threads, polls, and proposals that are produced.

If something is creating outside a working group however the default is for it to go out to all members. This mixes things like notifications on member wide votes with a variety of discussions with different levels of timelines, levels of development, and participation.

The net effect is it overwhelms what ever bandwidth a member might have available and they tune out to all governance related conversations and decisions which I don't think is anyones goal?

To that end I would suggest that the Working Group model be taken just a little further by adding a Initiatives Working Group for all the many splendid and varied things that members want to discuss but that don't fit within the Governance, Community, or Tech WG. This would go a long way to organizing discussions, making them more accessible, and reducing 'governance drag".

Mayel are you referring to the Board/Steering Committee discussion or the Admin Ops one, or just what area of the platform the Governance WG should be concerned with?

It seems like the discussion happening inside that group are appropriate as potential organizational changes fit the best there?

In an earlier conversation (about our role in Internet of Ownership), Nathan or Matt C suggested an "at large" category for initiatives and proposals that do not need to be in a specific working group.

A couple of open questions occurs to me, on general process for decisions (since I'm about to launch one).

• What duration to assign to a decision?
• Are there any precedents for some sort of quorum to aim for?

I picked the default 3 days for the Tech WG decision, and participation was 14 out of 49, about 30%. But I don't think the other TWG decisions fared better than this (in fact they all seem to have an even lower fraction).

I'm following @matthewcropp's suggestion here:

• Put a proposal to the Tech WG asking if folks approve of the idea of s.c getting a gitlab account, with costs, etc.
• If 1 passes, launch the proposal in the Finance working linking back to the Tech WG decision, so folks there can easily access the context and discussion of the proposal.

Except, oops, reading this now I see he mentions the finance group and I was going to do it on the main group. Is that appropriate, or should I take to the finance group instead?

One thing to check out is the by-laws, which deal with some of these process question, such as the default period for votes, which is 6 days unless labelled URGENT.

Thanks - I'll go read those.

Can the Loomio defaults be updated to reflect that? And/or this information be made more prominent for newbies like me drafting decisions?

(I do kinda think this decision is fairly urgent, but I suppose we could wait if I had to so we can get more participation.)

Hmm.

Having read the relevant parts of the bylaws now, I see what you mean. But it also says there needs to be 50% participation! I don't think any of the decisions so far get anything near that.

See also @strypey's suggestion here that proposals go to the main group first and then to subgroups. I can see the logic to this, however it seems to be the reverse of the suggestion @matthewcropp made here, which I was initially following. When I realised the finance WG needed to be involved as well as the tech and the main WGs - three groups to make proposals to - I was starting to wonder if I was doing the right thing. Starting with a narrow group and then going to the larger group makes for a lot of repetition.

So maybe this needs to be discussed more, with a view to minimising bureaucracy whilst being transparent and consistent?

Anyway, on reflection I'll probably extend the decision duration (i.e. this one in this thread), especially since there seems to be some more dissent appearing now.

The 50% requirement is not 50% of all members who can vote, it is 50% of all members who do vote in that particular decision.

Ok, then I misread it - that's entirely reasonable.