Governance Model

Organization circle
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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.
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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 :slight_smile:

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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 :slight_smile:

  • 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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Consensus: Membership

I have integrated all the feedback and setup a vote. Since we have not decided on formal voting mechanisms yet, or even membership, I am just allowing everyone on this forum to vote.

If you are not familiar with this type of voting, Agree means you like the plan, Abstain means whatever y’all decide I’m fine with, and Block means I am unhappy with it and we need to discuss more. This is consensus-based language and is not a majority-win vote, so if you are Blocking please write a message underneath as to why and how we can make you happy with it. Thanks!

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My hunches are . .

  • meeting with different groups interested in Meet.coop (aka. sales / community relations) . . ‘sales’ = part of the 4 Front office circle (stuff to do with accounts, recruitment of new accounts, explaining service levels and fair-use, etc). But ongoing relations with established user orgs who are becoming active contributors in the back office would be part of the activity of either 2 Rooms (where the focus is on rooms’ functionality, UI, etc) or 1 Economy (where focus is on evolving expertise of how-to do distributed organising in the real world using the capabilities of the meet.coop platform)
  • plan a new software project would be 2 Rooms if related to useability and functionality in the BBB UI (or other tools running on the users’ device) eg enhanced presentation tools, or 4 Front office if related to account administration, Greenlight containers, etc.
  • I don’t think building features (ie hacking code) is a job of any of the circles, as outlined. I kinda see it as a function that continues to be carried out within preexisting operational sysadmin/devops networks (relationships around git repos, the Riot/IRC chat collaboration, etc) in P2P collaborations between Hypha/Webarch/etc, as organisarional members that provide day-to-day operational capability. But maybe it should be a circle? In which case, it’s circle 8 Code and protocols. While coding is geeky, protocols is less so. Thus, while most user members would have little to contribute to decisions about coding (as distinct from defining outomes and interactions for software development projects, as above) they would have a legitimate contribution to make regarding protocols that might determine the future trajectory of the user front end, UI/UX/devices and general operability and characteristics of the server/device infrastructure in a world of webapps, web3/Dweb, linked data, hashchains, ‘platformless’ fully distributed P2P networks, mesh networks, phone-based networks in the global South, etc etc. This is pretty geeky and futuristic (?) but something non-geeks need to develop a strategic awareness of, and may become real if meet.coop sticks around that long (long live meet.coop).
  • likewise, stewarding existing servers and writing ansibles is something that I see living within the tech-based operations-contributing member coops, and their pre-existing collaborative networks. This is a hard line to draw, and although I think that in principle everything should be accessible to the understanding of non-tech user members, some stuff - like hacking rails, or ansibles, or whatever - should continue to be done as it has been done pre-meet.coop, in time-honoured FLOSS manner.
  • once the other circles are operating - especially 3 Contribution accounting and 4 Front office, which I think are urgent - I think that what will be left from the existing tuesday “governance call” meeting will belong in 5 Work organisation. And maybe, some will be 0 Stewards. Some of the weekly “all hands” meeting may gravitate to 0 Stewards too?

How’s that sounding? Not simple. But what we’re trying to do isn’t simple. I feel the ecology of eight (or nine) circles kinda covers the ground and differentiates responsibilities and skillsets, without being too elaborate. A circle is not a specialist functional department, but rather, a zone where different interests and perspectives and skills need to be combined in coproduction, to handle some real aspect of the world of meet.coop. Eight (nine) circles = ‘requisite variety’?

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Thinking further . . I’m still uncertain that circle 8 Code and protocols is required. This circle is where the multi-discipline community of meet.coop users and workers might interface with specialist work that involves git.coop, code repositories, software solutions, script-authoring, app ecosystems, protocols, cross-protocol bridges, etc. At some point down the line, tool development is certainly going to be needed by meet.coop users - for example in Greenlight to facilitate room-bundle management (which for a room-occupant is ‘back end’ not front end) or, let’s say, in the presentation interface within BBB (which has some real UX shortcomings). The UI could do with some tweaking too.

However, I still feel that Circle #2 Rooms is where the latter could/should be handled, and Circle #4 Front office the former. I can imagine that somewhere down the line, friendly negotiations will be needed with one or other of the BBB committers and the BBB open-source community generally (regarding the Nextcloud bridge, for example). But I’d hope that this interaction can be ‘translated’ into English in a user-facing circle in meet.coop, rather than needing to be conducted entirely in geek-speak, in the depths of git-land, where mere mortals have no idea of the difference between a ruby on some rails and a green light :wink:

meet.coop, as a service organisation supplying tools, needs to organise in a way that enables its development and operation to be use-led as distinct from code-led?

Of course code development is specialist and complicated, and it needs specialist language and threads. But members of that community already have these in place, and maybe meet.coop doesn’t need to add anything to that? What meet.coop needs to create is new ‘spaces’ (the circles) where new players can engage with what’s new about the service, and new challenges of operations management and the strategic steering of a distributed infrastructure?

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These initial proposals are now in the wiki, where they are easier to read and a bit clearer.

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Hi,

Thank you so much for the amazing work that is taking place here!!

I just wanted to let you know that my collaborator and I are contemplating on repackaging BBB so it is much easier to administer and we understand exactly how it works

I wonder which circle this kind of activity belongs…

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I would say, 4 Front office, if the development is aimed at room admin/account admin (basically Greenlight issues). If it were oriented to UI/UX in live use of rooms, it would be 2 Rooms.

And for sure, lots of Sign in · GitLab devs/freenode interaction in the background - but that’s another community? The free code commons? Not everything crosses borders!

much easier to administer and we understand exactly how it works

:+1:

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thanks Ben, I think this is a good basis. Tomorrow we’ll go through further details on the decision making.

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Hi folks,
Is there a governance call tomorrow? I believe I have been invited to give a brief overview of sociocracy as part of the process of establishing a 1.0 governance. I have a simple presentation I can give if that would be useful…
I have meetings pretty much throughout the morning but free after 2.30pm BST.
Cheers,
Aaron

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Based on meeting notes, it looks like 2 pm CEST is the gov meeting, followed by a 3 pm CEST service levels meeting. I missed the last part of the meeting last week, so not sure if this was final.

Since @aaronhirtenstein is only free after 3:30 pm CEST, I propose we keep the service levels meeting time, but move the governance one to after that, starting at 4 pm CEST. Like this:

Service Levels: 3 pm CEST
Governance: 4 pm CEST

What do @wouter @mikemh @chris @osb think?

@aaronhirtenstein yes I’d appreciate a short presentation on sociocracy.

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Those are good for me thanks @benhylau. Yes @aaronhirtenstein something on sociocracy would be good to have.

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Ok thanks both, that works for me. I appreciate the flexibility.

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For discussion, I’ve put a draft on governance practice into the wiki. It refers to the circles (as ‘workers’ coop’ hands-on governance), a general assembly (which embraces ‘consumer coop’ governance), and the ‘permanent assembly’ of the forum.

It includes some notions of voting in a general assembly, but these are extremely tentative. They are based on contributions, rather than on shareholdings, as in a conventional coop.

[Edit] Also, includes a reference to sociocracy - as a placeholder. Makes references to the DisCO governance model, with a link.

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hi there. I can make it to the new times for Service Levels, but to governance only to the first part. At 16:30 I’ll need to leave. That’s the best we can get for today I guess, so see you then, in the Main Meetcoop room, right?

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Okay see you all here in the main room https://ca.meet.coop/b/wou-cyy-wpt

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Just read this. I wonder if there is a minimum number of participants to have this many circles. If active contributors are 10 people, how does this work? Wouldn’t everyone need to be in like 4 circles?

Basically, how do we go from what we have today, into a structure like this? Esp since no one is full time on Meet.coop. I do like many of the ideas in there, but concerned about implementation due to capacity.

Hopefully @aaronhirtenstein can have a chance to read this as well and draw parallels from his org.

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