Governance

Social.coop is a self-governing cooperative. Our decision-making processes take place in our space on Loomio, a platform developed by a worker-owned cooperative. All Social.coop members should also have accounts there.

Core documents

Decision-making

Decisions in Social.coop break into strategic and operational.

Strategic decisions guide operational decisions and are currently made via a staged proposal process and modified consensus.
Operational decisions are taken on via working groups and key role holders, loosely by domain but often modified by capacity.

Also from 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.

Tutorials

How to Make a proposal in Loomio

Working Groups

Organizing Circle (OC)
- coordinates efforts between the working groups and catches anything that does not cleanly fall into working group domains.
Community Working Group (CWG)
- moderates our Mastodon instance, coordinates with other instances, and looks for ways to build intra-social.coop community. This group generally maintains a budget for moderator stipends.
Tech Working Group (TWG)
- maintains our instances and generally tends our tech stack. This group generally maintains a budget for tech services.
Legal Working Group (LWG)
- mitigates legal risk to our volunteers and organization. This group will maintain a budget for legal and professional consultations.
Finance Working Group (FWG)
- Finance Working Group issues reimbursements to cover expenses as well as develops annual spending and budgeting reports.

Working Group Governance Processes

Working Group Membership

Any Social.coop members are invited to volunteer to participate in Working Groups that suit their skills and interest in sharing Social.coop’s collective operational effort.
Working Groups should make a proposal in Loomio to add new members, letting the full cooperative membership recognize and affirm an individual’s participation in the responsibilities of that working group.
Working Groups should regularly evaluate their current workload and collective capacity and make requests on Loomio for additional member volunteers as needed.

The Organizing Circle comprises delegates from each of the active Working Groups, as well as 2 or more at-large members on a rotating term, currently 2 years, selected by sortition from volunteers.

For Working Groups and the Organizing Circle, it is expected that:

Members establish and maintain a regular cadence for meeting.
The list of current group members is maintained on the wiki.
A list of working priorities is maintained, documented on the wiki and posted to the loomio subgroup when updated, and revisited at least annually.
Roles for meeting facilitation, note-taking and communication, and delegate to OC should be equitably shared and rotated as appropriate
Meeting notes are kept in a shared folder in Mayfirst Nextcloud.
Members participate in asynchronous discussion on Loomio, and as appropriate, Mastodon, Zulip and Matrix.
Privileges and permissions to Social.coop services are kept updated as members are added or leave, as relevant to the Working Group’s scope and shared resources.
An active member of the group is designated, as specified in the bylaws, to represent the Working Group at Organizing Circle meetings and provide status updates, communicate challenges and coordination needs, and share successes. It would be ideal to have two people -delegate and coordinator- from each Working Group to the OC as schedules permit.

A quarterly summary of meeting notes and operational efforts is posted to the appropriate Loomio subgroup.

Working groups receive a stipend from the annual budget to distribute among members as decided by the Working Group. Additional budget requests shall be made as proposals in Loomio.

Following any discussion, we will document this on the wiki and continue to hold ourselves accountable to these expectations for documentation and communication.

Membership aspects

We identified the following types of involvement with social.coop (all engagement is voluntary and at choice):

Microblogging - via Mastodon server account. Members may be inactive (account abandoned), invisible (no content generation but reading and possibly sharing via other avenues), and visible (content generation)
- Entry: Required OpenCollective account, no mandate on monetary contributing (https://wiki.social.coop/wiki/Bylaws)
Financial contribution via OpenCollective account. Members may be non-contributing and contributing.
Strategic contribution via Loomio account. Members may be inactive, invisible, and visible.
- Entry: Required OpenCollective account, no mandate on contributing. Required social.coop Mastodon account, no mandate on activity status.
Operational contribution via working group involvement and key role holders
- Entry: social invitation, and sortition process
Social groups are non-working groups: e.g., reading groups, Matrix discussion board, regional meet-ups.
- Entry: social invitation