Community.circle

The Community.circle is slowly but steadily building up her programme. And as we go, we should agree some arrangements with the involved people.

First @mikemh is taking the lead in that, and that should be more than just aplauded. At the current stage Mike is already investing considerable energy. As such, and as “circle lead”, I think he should become an Ops member. This is not to mean that everyone in the circle should really become an ops member, that can be discussed at a case by case basis, and other arrangements can be thought of.

Why Mike should be an Ops member? 1) his time commitment is more than just a few hours per month, 2) as Ops member he’ll have access to the Ops member level of information, on NextCloud and Forum, and as such be able to follow more in detail what happens inside the cooperative 3) he’ll be able to engage ops members and seek synergy where that is needed. And maybe a 4) Mike already was an ops member in the early months of meet.coop and should not get drowned in the overload of info, or not that easily :wink:

IMHO the Community circle should have at least a few ops members, and be complemented with other committed user members or external parties (that can easily become members if they commit to do work in the circle).

How do you think about this?

I’m happy with this. Altho I got overwhelmed in mid-2020 with the ramp-up of finance and other ops stuff (I’m not really an ‘operational’ person, in that sense) I’ve been hanging in here, waiting for the Community aspect to take off. It’s organising/mobilising the User Members as a community where I feel really interesting things begin to happen - and we move distinctly towards a multi-stakeholder coop, rather than AN Other workers’ coop. Community voice(s). Interesting stuff :wink:

Thanks to @wouter and @garyalex for picking up the pace on this before Christmas. Right now, Wouter and I would effectively be the only members of the circle (and Wouter ¿would? like to draw back in due course, to avoid overload). But it will be some time - months - before we get a sense of how many new people like the Community programme enough to offer Op-member levels of contribution.

And yes, we would like very much like to escape the global-North, white male syndrome. This is a main focus, short term, of the (informal, preliminary) Community team, I feel.

For myself, I would like to be active in shaping the new Community Circle in various ways, but as I look at the way I spend my time, I don’t think I could commit to a big enough contribution to be an operational member of Meet.coop.
I am an active user of BBB, and would like to be part of discussions on how what we offer might be tweaked in the short term, and also, in how we might combine BBB with other tools to support communities.

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