I ended up changing it at the top, replacing last week’s event. I hope I didn’t screw anything up 
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thanks, @benhylau! By changing the event we lost last week’s event. Maybe for next time we could open a new topic with the event?
I will see you in a few hours then, looking forward.
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I just started drafting a proposal for that “one-pager” (or two pages if needs be ;-)) on a pad. It’s co-creation, please jump in, or if you consider we’d better do it different, go ahead. During the meeting we can tweak and afterwards we can move it into the wiki.
https://pad.femprocomuns.cat/meetcoop-model
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After 24 hours gestation I feel that although we had a good meeting yesterday 
: and clarified some dimensions, we haven’t yet nailed the complex relationships between
- membership classes and service-user accounts
- worker contributions and consumer/beneficiary obligations
- circle-organisation of workers, and the mechanisms of autonomy/executive action
- governance mechanisms for both passive and active coop members (forum/circle/assembly)
- administration of arrangements for service-supply, from operational coops (Hypha, Koumbit, WebArch plus a front-desk coop tba) to room account holders (‘beneficiaries’)
- relationship between accounts admin (payments, reception desk, creating container accounts on servers, etc) and admin of rooms-per-member organisation, by an organisation’s ‘room admin’ person
I feel what matters most is how things look from the user end - the account-holding organisation’s admin role. But we spend so much time - for understandable reasons - focusing on server admin and software tool behaviour on the server, rather than account admin and platform-facilitated capability out there in the world of non-geek cooperators (= ‘use cases’).
I feel we need to develop a well-matched three-way focus on
- the front office . . . accounts, reception desk, server ops, financial transactions with account holders (who mostly will be passive consumers), legal obligations and limitations of service-providing coops, statutory stuff (GDPR, data security, etc); and
- the back office . . . agile multi-stakeholder circles of enthusiastic paid and unpaid worker-contributors doing executive work, internal work organisation/agile division of labour across circles, cultivation of the evolving multi-discipline community of coproducers (ie folks collaborating at least weekly), ‘permanent assembly’ in Discourse (as an agile, circle-support function); and
- formal governance in terms of voting in whole-coop (annual?) assemblies - weighted according to contribution, as distinct from shareholding and simple, generic membership classes (where financial contribution by account-holders is just one kind of important - minority - contribution).
Some gloss on all of this will be needed to make a convincing marketing pitch to early-adopter account-holder members in the alpha phase - bcos its the whole vision and long-term intention (and ability to contribute to this) that will attract the kinds of collaborating/coproducing participants that we need in the medium and long term (ie for beta relaunch). We would need to be able, for example, to have a discussion around this with MayFirst, or social.coop. Or the (UK) Coop University. All, significant potential users of meet.coop accounts, all quite large and complex, all wanting more than just a room or two occasionally.
The front-office stuff is about ensuring reliable service delivery according to fair-use service-level agreements, for paying account holders: so that when they turn the tap on, water comes out. Even among committed ‘new economy’ activists, this is what account holders mostly will want - they said this at Open2020. They might be willing to pay premium, crowdfunder rates for services. This is basically ‘consumer coop’ stuff.
The back-office stuff is about nitty-gritty worker coop coproduction, teamwork and capability to nail operational problems, evolve better working arrangements, and meet actual user needs thro multi-stakeholder co-design of non–geek oriented digital tool bundles. In familiar coop terms this is basically worker-coop culture - this makes meet.coop mutli-stakeholder, with heavy worker loading.
The assembly stuff is about stewarding commons of digital infrastructure, and their strategic contribution to an evolving commons-cooperative economy . . which is all a new kind of practice (beyond typical coop scope), and needs puzzling out.
All of this is basic launch pitch? The practice will take years to evolve 
but the picture is short-term urgent, to bring in the early-adopter visionary-contributors, to become development partners (back-office coproducers) for the long haul?
If this seems like an issue in Thursday’s meeting, I’d be willing to do a presentation-for-starters that attempts to (visually) pinpoint these things, and with others here, to co-host a 90min discussion session (maybe Sunday/Monday?). If this seems too ‘future’ oriented rather than ‘now’ . . I’ll shut up and stop striving for design-thro-protocols (to enable organisation-hacking in the medium term) as distinct from a short-term ‘alpha stack-hack’ to get some users on the servers and money in the kitty.
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I consolidated what we discussed so far, and from yesterday’s meeting, into this that I hope to receive feedback on Thursday. If we can get this sorted, we can move on to drafting what our Circles are and decision-making and voting in the next Governance meeting.
Proposed one pager
Meet.coop, The Online Meeting Co-operative, is a meeting and conferencing platform powered by BigBlueButton, stewarded by co-operatives across the world.
We have two types of memberships–Operational Members and Beneficiary Members. One may apply to one or both membership types as an organization or as an individual.
Operational Members steward all operational aspects of Meet.coop.
- To apply, you must commit a minimum of 500 in Euros, equivalent resources, or 40 hours of voluntary labour in work areas defined by the Co-operative.
- In turn, you may participate in the Co-operative’s working Circles and are eligible to apply for waged positions defined by the Co-operative. An Operational Member may also self-elect to become a Beneficiary Member as well, without an application process or paying annual membership fees as long as they remain an active Operational member.
- To maintain active membership, you must be contributor to at least one Circle and participate in at least 50% of our All Hands meetings.
Beneficiary Members use the Meet.coop platform for internal meetings or resell Greenlight accounts.
- To apply, you must commit a minimum of 200 in Euros per year.
- In turn, you will get a set of Greenlight containers as according to our defined Service Levels, which you can manage for reselling our BigBlueButton server capacity. You may also participate in the Co-operative’s working Circles.
- To maintain active membership, you must maintain good standing with annual membership fees and from your resale revenue, pay a percentage set by the Co-operative to Meet.coop to cover its operation costs, and provide best-effort oversight to your Greenlight accounts in compliance with the Co-operative’s Fair Use Agreement.
All membership starts with an application to contact@meet.coop. Upon approval, in addition to the responsibilities and rights for the type of membership, the new member may also participate in the Assembly, Forum, and other member spaces. All memberships carry voting rights with voting strengths as according to membership type and level of participation.
Current membership as according to above
Currently, the following organizations and individuals meet the application criteria above based on Contributions page:
Operational Members
- Autonomic Cooperative (40h from Luke)
- Collective.tools (50-100€/month for renting servers + hours from Petter)
- Digital Life Collective (2x E5440 @ 2.83GHz (8 core) 16GiB ram 2TB machine at 198.204.235.226/29)
- femProcomuns (40h from Wouter, David)
- FOSSHOST.org (VPS dev.meet.coop + TURN/STUN turn.fosshost.coop)
- Hypha (40h from Ben, Yurko, Elon)
- Webarchitects (40h from Chris)
- Mike Hales (individual) (€120 + hours)
Beneficiary Members
- Animorph Co-op (€500)
- Free Knowledge Institute (€500)
- May First Movement Technology (£225)
The following organizations and individuals are unclear:
- Agile collective
- Koumbit (our main server is with Koumbit and Sébastien has spent time on Meet.coop)
- Melissa (individual)
- Remix the Commons
- Yasu (individual)
Sébastien, Melissa, and Yasu are all involved, it’s just unclear from the Contributions page whether they intend to commit to the threshold of being an Operational Member.
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really liking this
not sure if u missed The Open Co-op or left it out for some reason?
Think we need to define what a All Hands meeting is…?
Not sure about the € levels or where these came from / what they are based on…?
I was not assuming that an individual Beneficiary member got anything other than a room to make video calls… i.e. they might just pay €10/month as per What services can we offer from 1st July 2020? (not needing to commit to €200 / year - this is too much it will put individuals off ) - plus they don’t need reseller abilities… etc
I am basing most data on Contributions page on wiki. That’s why The Open Co-op isn’t in there, we can easily clear that up. The orgs are for example, as I imagine contributors like Melissa would also qualify, just not evident based on the wiki page’s info.
The All Hands is meet.coop - The Online Meeting Cooperative but we can change the cadence later.
Operations Member €500 also from the wiki, and for Beneficiary Members I feel the barrier to entry can be low as involves a rev share. This also allows us to honour our commitment to May First.
Then they are not a member. Instead, they should register an account resold by a Beneficiary Member. Meet.coop doesn’t want to manage all these little accounts (@chris’ point all along).
This is looking really good to me @benhylau - more heroic labour 
Hope you’re logging hours on these key contributions?
This goes a long way to resolving what above I called front office issues - service levels remain the key thing to be defined there? So yes, we then can focus in on back office (circle work organisation and priorities) and assembly protocols (all-hands weekly, discourse forum, annual confluence, etc).
When we have a one-pager in each area, we can then expect to seriously recruit membership, and have proper discussions with organisations that have already become Beneficiary members (eg MayFirst) to clarify our relationship. With these early adopters, it will be important to recruit them to our medium-to long term development purposes (an economic capability project) and not just to ad-hoc room use. They will be our prime source of outcome-oriented back office volunteer workers, and medium-term steering at circle and assembly levels.
In this draft I feel only one area needs critical focus and that is reselling. I think we should not leave any door open to profit making on the back of our precious server infrastructure and back-office labour. I feel it should be dedicated for the use of movement and coop organisations in enabling federated coworking, as part of a distinctive economic project, and not seep into the gig economy or private enterprise.
I also believe reselling should be under the meet.coop brand and meet.coop governance - so reselling would be on an ‘agency basis’, I guess, as a federated arm of the meet.coop project rather than some other kind of project. Discussion with ppl like MayFirst would be important in getting this right? They would have a very firm stance on roots community support, private profit and federation, for example.
Great groundwork ben
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Yep. Cascade this down to a beneficiary member.
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Hypha members are tracking time here Time tracking with Kimai - #7 by benhylau someday I may have to import into the Meet.coop thing 
Yup! I agree. I think we can even encode this into the Fair Use Policy. e.g. never sell service to Amazon and fascists. Until we have this codified, I think we should trust Beneficiary Members, by approving only value-aligned membership applicants. Later, we can be more specific.
By yea, I agree one key discussion point is service levels and restrictions around reselling so it doesn’t become a price competition (at the moment we fix the service levels everyone must adopt, but clearly they are too restrictive) or private enterprise (how do we share the clients).
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Looking forward to cancelling my Zoom account this week, on the basis of member status now being clear. Actually, I’m an organisation/beneficiary in this context (Living Economy college network) rather than an individual worker member. Waiving a complimentary account as an operational member (committed 40 hours) with a €120 annual crowdfunding contribution to the project. (my organisational Zoom subscription).
[Edit] Were going to need some clear book keeping, straight away. The contribution accounting circle needs to kick in asap?
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On Matrix chat I asked @hng:
I wonder if this thinking around membership could work for you Governance Model - #53 by benhylau obv there’s a line between “collocall business” vs. “meet.coop business” as you have own well developed pipeline alrdy
His response was:
Yes I’ve just read it and I think this would work for us
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@mikemh do you want to take a stab at drafting out the circles here before the meeting? Like names + one sentence to describe scope of responsibilities. I feel like you have some ideas on what they would be. Maybe having this in the meeting notes will help us concretize what “Circles” are and how together they will serve all of Meet.coop operations.
Hey @benhylau, great work for drafting this text! I think things are getting much clearer now. Although I also would like to point out some aspects that I’m not confident with:
-
“beneficiary member” was proposed by @mike last Tuesday IIRC as a substitution of “consumer member”. @osb wasn’t happy with that term, so old skool, right? And I think most agreed with that, so we had the option of “User Members” reflecting the USAGE. After a night sleep or two I must say the term “beneficiary” can refer to many things that are now user related. Parties in a grant proposal are also considered “beneficiaries” and that has to do with their paid work in the contract. Rather different from “users” or those who benefit from a service.
-
Now I read your proposal of what Beneficiary membership entails and I got more confused:
In my understanding, but maybe wrongly understood, those organisational members contributing work actively, be it in DevOps or in attracting and onboarding new members, should be in the same class, what we now call “Operational members” and previously “production members”.
The User Members, or maybe Beneficiary members (but I’m not convinced about that term) is for organisations and people willing to enjoy the services and maybe participate a little but don’t take responsibility for real work to produce whatever it takes to make this project sustainable in the long run.
I’d suggest we define it like this:
User Members use the services of the Meet.coop platform
- To apply, you must commit a minimum contribution as specified for the selected service level
- Members have one vote per member and a voting strength as defined in the governance model
- Members agree to the Terms of Use and in particular to the Fair Use Policy
The aspects you describe about reselling I think should go to Operational Members willing to be resellers.
How do you feel about this? I know I’m a stubborn Dutch engineer 
But with good arguments I can adjust as well, hehe.
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I have worked on the One-Pager in the pad, adding an Intro on our sustainability model:
https://pad.femprocomuns.cat/meetcoop-model
There is still a lot to refine/reach consensus on, and especially the Reselling & Room provisioning isn’t described all too well, if anyone can contribute there, that’d be wonderful.
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First stab, seven circles . .
- 0 Stewards - supports the work of the meet.coop assembly (meet.thing?) and acts as proxy between full assemblies. Comprises a member from each of the other six circles.
- 1 Economy - addresses the ways in which meet.coop services facilitate transition to a commons cooperative economy. In due course, probably a number of sector-oriented circles (see eg Open2020 ’Tools of collaboration - Day 1 -Sectors’). Calls for strong contribution from Beneficiary members, including global North-South orientation. Modelled on pro-bono commons-transition work, in the DisCO Governance Model.
- 2 Rooms - The job is to accumulate expertise in how our federated Beneficiary organisations really need to use BBB rooms, what tools they need to have available in the browser or on the desktop in conjunction with rooms, and what the implications are for . .
- a) medium term server/cluster/Greenlight development,
- b) BBB user-education, support, and
- c) service-level/fair-use practice.
Calls for strong contribution from Beneficiary members.
- 3 Contribution accounting - handles matters related to payments to the coop and to individual coop members, accounting for hours, calculation of care-work credits, accumulations of credits, and conversions of credits into payments. Also, the rules under which these things are done, and the transparency with which these rules are applied. A significant part of this transparency is achieved through computational means - a family of digital contribution accounting tools.
- 4 Front office - includes systems operations members, reception members and account admins from service-user organisations. It addresses operational matters of digital infrastructure, administration of service-level bundles and public-facing documentation/FAQs . Calls for strong contribution from Beneficiary members.
- 5 Work organisation - organisational care work . . work redesign (eg evolving circle practices), review of organisational routines and structures (including governance), internal digital tools.
- 6 Community - community care work . . organisational culture, cycles & rhythms, habits & traditions, onboarding and ongoing learning of circle workers, meet.coop members’ handbook, wellbeing and compassionate relief of workers, rotations between circles, celebrations of peer culture and peer regard, participation of women, BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of colour), generational cohorts (young, middle, old-age) and language communities. Modelled on ‘personal care work’ in the DisCO Governance Model.
[Edit] Maybe also
- 7 Events - Custom prices, service bundles, support for large scale events.
I would also suggest to limit reselling (of individual accounts?) to operational members.
Oh and I should also add that this all looks so much clearer now than a few weeks ago, congrats and thank you all for your work
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Thanks for these comments. As we discussed in the meeting, where everyone is onboard with @wouter’s revision, and along with a couple small things others mentioned, I will adjust the text and move this into a new voting thread.
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Which Circles do the following work, just so I am clear
- stewarding existing servers and writing ansibles
- building features into the forked greenlight frontend or plan a new software project
- meeting with different groups interested in Meet.coop (aka. sales / community relations)
- existing tuesday “governance call” kinda work
I propose this as a topic for next week’s discussion.
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