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

TBD :)