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’?