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. |
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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.
Meeting recaps
Recaps of regular meetings can be found here:
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
- Opening (attendance, duration, past recap review, identify facilitator and notetaker, consent to agenda)
- Check ins (how are you doing? Relationship building)
- Updates
- past ToDo items from members
- working groups
- Loomio discussions of general forum
- Strategic and operational decisions from backlog
- Current ToDo items (What are you doing before next call?)
- Backlog harvesting (What should we be talking about next?)
- 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-
History of the group
2024 Recap
Broadly our activities over 2024 broke down into three categories: how we do things in Organizing Circle, coordination activities across working groups with Social.coop and started broad discussions on various topics. We 1) held regular meetings every other week, 2) developed a sense of team, and 3) decided to operate Organizing Circle mostly following Sociocracy patterns with formal agendas, facilitation, note taking, and documented our discussions/decisions on the wiki and in loomio threads. We facilitated coordination between working groups (Tech, Finance, and Community) by exchanging regular updates in our meetings and setting up meetings between Organizing Circle and each working group during the fall. We improved and updated documentation on wikipedia. Finally we started several important discussions on a range of topics including social.coop decision making structures, compensation, and onboarding, as well as collaboration with the external cooperative movement.
We are particularly proud of how we operate as a circle, although there are places to improve. We created a safe/brave space where each member is heard by the rest of the group and created good C-factor in the group (reference from Luis Razeto Migliaro) https://geo.coop/articles/how-create-solidarity-enterprise. Each member has something valuable to offer the group and is missed when someone doesn't attend. Clear agendas (with topics, timings, and durations) make it easier to know how and where to contribute as a member. We are able to hold each other accountable with our todo and update agenda items. Finally this group provided a space for an overview discussion spanning social.coop as an organization.
There are some things that have not worked well over the last year. We have started several conversations around big topics that are unresolved and not clear how they would be. Relatedly there is a backlog of discussion topics that we were unable to clear. The role of Organizing Circle in the broader governance of social.coop is still unclear. We are reliant on 1-2 members of the circle for meeting facilitation and administration duties. How to develop and maintain policy documents still feels tenuous. There is a general feeling of under-engagement of our membership and capacities. While we have tremendous volunteers, we don't know who is donating what time and worry about burnout. Finally there is a feeling that we are not leveraging lessons learned from other organizations and have under-developed our volunteer training.
Set up
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.