This is a re-posting of email between @mikemh and @benhylau (permission granted) on broad intentions and purposes of meet.coop. New thread bcos ‘Governance model’ thread is currently focused on admin questions and pragmatics.
From @mikemh to @benhylau /@wouter /@osb :
Is meet.coop a response to the challenges of emancipation movements outlined in this article? I would say so. I think femProComuns and collective.tools/digidemlab would say so. I don’t know about Hypha and Koumbit.
Not quite sure when this was published (it’s the most recent issue but they give no dates) but it seems relevant to the current work we’re doing on governance mode, purposes, services provided and organisational form of meet.coop?
D’you see it that way?
Response by @benhylau to @mikemh :
Thanks for sharing this Michael.
Is Hypha supportive of participatory democracy, local decision-making, intersectionality, and many other values of the municipalist project?
Is Meet.coop a response of the article?
That depends a lot on what organizational structure and governance and service model emerge from the current process. Of course I would like for Meet.coop to express these values above, and build towards the larger movement in the article.
I think this will inform how Meet.coop expresses our approach to technology, as a practice vs. as a consumption . Are users participants or consumers ?
If we directly copy from what collocall offers to their users, then we aren’t signaling our intentions to engage users as participants. On the other hand, as in the case where "traditional leftist background found it hard to simply change their ways of practicing politics overnight”, it is hard for those who want alternatives to Zoom to all of a sudden learn about cooperative membership in order to hop on a reliable videoconference call. I’d like us to strike a balance, where we make sign-up really easy, but at the same time allow for paths for anyone to meaningfully participate in decision-making if they want .
What Luke says here seems like a good starting point: Governance Model
Lastly, I think these are important discussions, and perhaps we can move this thread to the forum?
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. . is one of the questions engaged by looking at four models of governance (FLOSS, coop, movement organisation, commons) in the rough hack on governance matters
how our multistakeholder group makes decisions, shares work and profits [Posted here by @benhylau ]
. . also are themes in the rough-cut: the meet.coop ‘assembly’ (=meet.thing?) and its membership, contributions and contribution-accounting, ‘circles’ of operational work and care work (drawing on the DisCO model of governance in distributed coops), multi-stakeholder participation. Etc.
I was just doing my homework for “Platform Coop Course” and this session we are doing this week is particularly helpful. I think what we are urged to question deeply first is what is discussed here.
I am so encouraged to see the discussions that have been taking place. I don’t have the level of literacy to understand literatures and theories to completely understand what they authors have intended to communicate but I appreciate the deep thinking people have undertaken.
So for meet.coop for Japan, I followed exercise in the video and came up with this:
People (part of the triangle)
- video conference users who have a stake in the coop and want to participate in shaping the service
- guardians of participatory environment?
- video conference infrastructure maintainers
Solutions (part of the triangle)
- platform cooperativism
- multi-stakeholder
- if p2p solutions (jitsi?) suffice, no need for server.
- BigBlueButtton (stand-alone / clustered)
- Other solutions?
Problems (part of the triangle)
being content with zoom represents huge opportunity cost:
* lack of participation in decision making
* scale issue of going it alone
* customization needs
* innovation
* as a basis of other infrastructure
* privacy
* education?
* anti-democracy
Problem Statement
Our customer in Japanese non-capitalist sectors (municipal govts, coops, voluntary organizations) have the problem that:
they need to use the capitalist platforms like Zoom
when they need to meet online
while completely missing the opportunity to create participatory IT infrastructure
why1 out of imagination
why2 or only vague ideas
why3 skepticism
why4 never been done before
why5 lack of capital
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