Background
Over the past quarter it’s become apparent that meet. coop is struggling to develop as a sustainable and coherent organisation, and that things now are critical. The platform operates well and the Tech circle at the core is able to maintain operations. In 2022 good steps were taken to define a strategy for growing the membership (and hence, income) and achieve sustainability. But it now is clear that capacity is drastically limited, for maintaining and cultivating the necessary depth and richness of working relationship and ‘conversation’ across the coop’s membership. This includes relationship both individually and as groups, both inside the coop (across Ops members) and outside (with User members and the wider community).
Sustainability discussion 2022 https://forum.meet.coop/t/sustainability-discussion/970
‘Slim’ core roles strategy July 2022 https://forum.meet.coop/t/core-team-wages-finance-update/1210
In July 2022 a ‘slim’ regime of core operations was agreed, working paid hours at a modest wage, but since October this has not been met and in January it became clear that basic challenges in internal practice exist which cannot be met under this ‘slim’ regime. A pivotal element in this emergent situation is a failure to fill the position of Product circle lead which was defined in September.
Business planning https://forum.meet.coop/t/business-plan/1031
Marketing (Product circle) lead role The Online Meeting Cooperative – Vacancy: Marketing Lead (8 hours/week)
A woman with excellent experience and capabilities was recruited for this role, began work (under a ‘slim’ allocation of hours: one day per week) in November, and decided to resign in December. They found the operating regime inadequate to support them (in ‘learnable’, communicable, coherent operating protocols) and uniclusive or uncomfortable (insufficient capacity for personal care work, day to day).
On February 2nd a special meeting of All-hands (ops members) and the Board of Stewards reached a conclusion that bootstrapping the coop is not viable, and that the BigBlueButton platform and the coop’s User membership should be migrated to another multistakeholder coop, to be identified. Meeting notes are here Nextcloud, summary of decisions is below. The aim is to find a coop home within three months (mid April), and to complete a migration in six-to-eight months (mid September, latest). If a coop able to take up the platform operation isn’t found, the fallback will be to direct members to appropriate alternatives: either community-oriented multistakeholder coops offering similar free-software tools (but not BBB), or hosting services operated by workers’ coops that provide a BBB platform.