Hi,
I have just joined MayFirst.coop - they offer various hosting services to its members and seem to overlap with meet.coop. Do you think we should discuss with them and join forces if possible?
Cheers,
Yasu
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Hi Yasuaki,
That’d be great, if you can contact them and explain the project to them. Possibly they want to be part of it and/or communicate our existence.
Best,
Wouter
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@wouter Jamie from MayFirst emailed the contact@meet.coop address and I think you answered him a week or so ago?
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thanks for reminding me, apparently I wasn’t totally awake yet!
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Incidently I understand that MayFirst are using Jitsi at the moment.
May First has an open audio-only instance and it was down the one time I tried to use it (seems to be a Jitsi problem that Hypha also encounters occasionally).
One of the orgs I was involved with (Ournetworks.ca) is a member and we use their Nextcloud (they use OnlyOffice but we don’t use it) and mailing list services. Very happen with those 
I love their organizational mission and would be happy to collaborate with / support May First where we can!
I’ve been a member of MayFirst fror some months. They’re an interesting case, not like any community I’ve met in Europe . .
- Very solid on roots community action, strong on gender equality, operate bilingually in American and Mexican Spanish, militant anti-capitalist.
- Agnostic or sceptical of the value of video communication, quite prepared to major on audio conferencing (using Mumble), very efficient at organising 50-person meetings run with breakouts and translation, within 60 mins, boom boom boom.Seems like their core team works well together.
- their tech feels kinda old, and some of the UI is terrible. Might be low on funds? Run on all-volunteer labour?
- it feels like they used to be quite centralist (committee led) and still may be, but they may be evolving a more participatory, distributed form of practice
Yes, Jaimie is one of the main figures. Good to talk to.
Hello all, i’ve been a member of May First for eleven years or so, but mikemh covered most things.
May First has been working pretty hard at upgrading and keeping their Jitsi instance running: https://meet.mayfirst.org/
May First has been a democratic membership organization for longer than i’ve been a member, but is new to identifying as and legally being a cooperative.
May First sees itself as a movement organization first and provider of tech services second. They run lean but any doubts i had about sustainability went away after that first decade! More of their infrastructure is home-rolled than i would advocate, but, don’t fix what’s not broken. It’s really notable that the organization was born out of a merger of organizations (May First / People Link), worked with the Mexican coop since 2011, and formalized that when the US side converted to a coop last year.
Micky Metts, a worker-owner at Agaric technology cooperative with me is also on their board of directors. And her talking about Big Blue Button and this cooperative may be a reason Jamie reached out!
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In short: Agaric would like to join Meet.coop, but it definitely looks like it would make sense (geographically, at least) to do so through May First Movement Technology multi-stakeholder cooperative, rather than as our worker-owned cooperative or through any of y’alls fantastic cooperatives (though we’ve been following some of you for quite some time).
As members we could take some of the tech initiative. (We also, just as of the other day, have a small contract to set up BigBlueButton for Boston Public Schools, embedded within Canvas, so we’re being thrown into the tech side anyway.)
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That all sounds great, will someone from Agaric and / or Mayfirst be able to join the call today?
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Seems to me, having May First in the collective could be important for working out the governance (including membership principles) of meet.coop. They have a particular mode, as a movement organisation, which I think differs from the more 15M-ish orientations of some of the European roots (I’m guessing here - correct me?). Seems to me, the move that meet.coop is making needs to somehow bridge or hybridise a number of governance traditions?
Or stewarding of commons, as I would want to picture it. Which is not exactly the same thing either. Anyway, some kind of pretty new hybrid may be called for?
Hello @chris hello @mikemh! Just saw these messages; somehow Discourse never seemed to see fit even to throw them in the summary it sends. I’ll adjust my notification settings. [EDIT: I cannot find an option for Discourse to e-mail me with updates to Tracked posts, and i don’t want to enable mailing list mode, and there’s no option to get e-mails for keywords, so please be sure to @-mention me!] I see it’s Thursday again but i also see i’d have to have been on the ball a couple hours before i saw this.
Is there a good place to get up to speed on current thoughts on membership organizations and individual people/co-ops joining? And i’ll try to catch up with May First and make the next meeting!
[Second edit: oooh, found https://wiki.meet.coop/wiki/Co-op_of_co-ops yeah that’s what i’m talking about!]
Since I drafted that it has become clear that there are organisations that we are aligned with who are not co-ops who we want to involve, the Governance model page has been written since the co-op of co-ops page and more reflects where we are currently heading.
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