Organizing Circle

Description	Coordinates the work of working groups and ops teams, providing a space for ongoing strategic conversation and facilitating greater member participation in both operations and governance.

This page holds the general operations information for the Social.coop organizing circle including links to standing Loomio https://www.loomio.com/socialcoop/ threads, descriptions of circle operations, and links to decisions made by the group.

Agreements and policy documents

Each of these agreements should provide a brief context that motivated the decision, links to relevant Loomio threads, the exact wording of the agreement, a term for when the agreement will be revisited, and metrics for evaluation.

Organizing Circle policy

Meeting recaps

Recaps of regular meetings can be found here:

• 2024 https://www.loomio.com/d/QBtcgaOq/organizing-circle-recaps-2024-

How we work

We strive to provide synchronous and asynchronous engagement as well as document decisions as they are being made. Meetings are held every other week for 90 minutes virtually. Agendas for each meeting are posted prior the call on the Loomino group as their own thread. Live notes are taken during the meeting and a recap synthesized afterwards and copies of both are posted to the meeting's loomio thread. Relevant sections of the recap are also copied over to topic-based loomio threads and to a general recap thread.

Agendas typically follow this pattern

1. Opening (attendance, duration, past recap review, identify facilitator and notetaker, consent to agenda)
2. Check ins (how are you doing? Relationship building)
3. Updates
   • past ToDo items from members
   • working groups
   • Loomio discussions of general forum
4. Strategic and operational decisions from backlog
5. Current ToDo items (What are you doing before next call?)
6. Backlog harvesting (What should we be talking about next?)
7. Check outs (What could we improve? How are you leaving?)

We strive to have a clear path to membership in the group and a stable enough membership to effectively steward issues. Members for the Organizing circle are selected based on a sortition process from the Loomio community and appointed by the Working Groups. We strive to balance diverse view points with engaged discussions and have between 4-8 members on the circle. At large members selected by sortition have a 2 year term.

• Loomio group: https://www.loomio.com/socialcoop-organizing-circle/
• Recap thread (2024): https://www.loomio.com/d/QBtcgaOq/organizing-circle-recaps-2024-

Origin of the group

DRAFT -- In February, 2023, in consultation with the Community Working Group Operations Team, @Matt_Noyes and @Mattcropp initiated a discussion of the idea of creating an Organizing Circle. (https://www.loomio.com/d/txYOWJ4q/organizing-a-growing-social-coop-an-idea-for-a-proposal/57) The motivation included the following elements:

• Rapid growth of Social.Coop leading to stress on the existing forms of organization, "particularly the Community Working Group Ops Team, which has been taking on onboarding, moderation, education, strategic planning and other tasks."
• Working groups -- Tech, Community, and Finance (a legal working group is in the works) -- that function differently and often with little coordination.
• Discussion and operations spread across multiple platforms – Mastodon, Loomio, Matrix.
• Lack of coordination and internal communication has resulted in, among other things, a tendency to do-ocracy and a deference to members who are perceived to be leaders, either because of longevity, activity on the instance, or other qualities. This raises the risk of “tyranny of structurelessness” type dynamics, and has troublesome implications for diversity and inclusion. It also undermines accountability.
• Lack the kind of organization needed to really operate as – and achieve, if we want it, the legal status of – a cooperative.

After discussion on Loomio and in an online gathering, in July, 2023-07, @Matt_Noyes proposed the creation of an Organizing Circle (OC) in SocialCoop (SC) to:

• increase coordination, accountability, and transparency of SC as a Fediverse actor;
• incorporate members into operations and decision-making;
• lay the groundwork for bylaws that meet legal requirements in case SC becomes an officially recognized cooperative.

In order to achieve this, the OC would be a group of members consistently committed to:

• coordinating among working groups and ops teams,
• providing a space for ongoing strategic conversation and coordination and
• facilitating greater member participation in both operations and governance.

The OC has limited powers, with most operational decisions made by the Working Groups (WG) and decisions related to Social.Coop as a whole subject to member approval.

This proposal passed, with 65 (18%) of the 356 social.coop members on Loomio votes, with 61 agree, 2 disagree, and 2 abstain (see Social.Coop Organizing Circle Proposal (2023-06) >  https://www.loomio.com/p/OI8kEjVz/social-coop-organizing-circle-proposal).

After this initial step, we started to organize the next steps for this OC to work and fulfill it's mission:

• each working group choose one person to be on the Organizing Circle,
• we welcomed other members interested in helping organize the OC, + these people organized the juried sortition process for choosing the At Large members. (See Organizing the Social.Coop Organizing Circle (2023-07) > https://www.loomio.com/d/GhC8oEcK/organizing-the-social-coop-organizing-circle)

These steps were carried out and the OC started to operate in 2024-01, documenting it's meetings at the OC group in Loomio (see https://www.loomio.com/socialcoop-organizing-circle/) and putting more durable information on the wiki in https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Organizing_Circle.