Meet.coop 2.0 and governance

Organization circle Governance
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As part of the broad programme of work that the new meet.coop cooperators have undertaken, a key element is how we can effectively govern the organisation into the future, and enable users of meet.coop to participate effectively in that governance.

In the early days of meet.coop things were largely organised as a ‘do-ocracy’ - whoever turned up and did the work got to participate in making key decisions about what got done and what meet.coop was all about, and that worked pretty well.

As the project stabilised and moved from an emphasis on getting the technology to work and more towards a focus on service, the users of the service, and growing the community of users, the people involved have changed. Some of the organisations that were active during the ‘build’ phase have moved on to other projects, and it became apparent that a different approach was needed.

For a good part of 2023 the focus has been on transitioning from the founding group of builders to a new group of operators. Now that we’ve largely got that transition complete, it is time to focus on the organisations and the people that use meet.coop and how we can engage with and grow this community most effectively.

We come to this task with an open mind. meet.coop is built on cooperative values and principles, so that is our foundation. But beyond that I think it’s fair to say that we are happy to be led by the community of users. We thought that as it’s been some while since there has been much meaningful engagement, that we’d start by contacting current and past users of the service, see what we can learn from that, and build from there. An idea that has been floated is to hold a regular community call where everyone involved in the project is welcome to come along and get to know each other.

We’ll be starting this process of engagement soon, and welcome input from users, past, present and future. I’ll follow up this post with some information about the model we adopted through the last year or so, but this is hopefully enough for now to get the ball rolling.

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Great to be at this stage @Graham :slight_smile: Early in 2022, in anticipation of eventually being able to have full membership elections and a General Assembly, we convened a Board of Stewards from members and movement friends, to advise and reflect on meet.coop 1.0. A subgroup has been really helpful in making the transition to meet.coop 2.0. At some point in the next couple of months we mean to reconvene that community, and see what kinds of feedback they want to give us as we move forward. So in this thread, expect to see something about that step, before too long.

Hoping to see all sorts of views and ambitions surfacing here in this thread, from members and friends. The platform and the service are at the core. But part of meet.coop has also been to discover how to do governance of digital infrastructure in the commons. That remains an important challenge?

A regular community call is a great idea :slight_smile: