Membership of Meet.coop

Organization circle Decisions
1

Meet.coop, The Online Meeting Co-operative, is a meeting and conferencing platform powered by BigBlueButton, stewarded by co-operatives across the world.

We have two types of memberships–Operational Members and User Members. One may apply to each membership type as an individual or as an organization. In the below text, the word “you” imply the individual or a member of the organization.

Operational Members steward all operational aspects of Meet.coop.

  • To apply, you must commit a minimum of 500 in Euros, equivalent resources, or 40 hours of voluntary labour in work areas defined by the Co-operative.

  • In turn, you may participate in the Co-operative’s Circles and are eligible to apply for waged roles defined by the Co-operative. You may also resell our BigBlueButton server capacity via a set of Greenlight containers, under your administration, that correspond to the Service Levels defined by the Co-operative.

  • To maintain active membership, you must be contributor to at least one Circle and participate in at least 50% of our All Hands Meetings. If you are reselling Meet.coop services, you commit to pay a portion of your resale revenue, set by the Co-operative, to the Co-operative for covering its operation costs. You must also maintain a reasonable level of service to the User Members using Meet.coop services through your Greenlight containers, and provide best-effort oversight in compliance with the Co-operative’s Fair Use Agreement.

User Members use Meet.coop services and are prohibited from reselling its services.

  • To apply, you must commit a minimum contribution corresponding to your selected Service Level.

  • In turn, you will receive services corresponding to your selected Service Level. You may also voluntarily participate in the Co-operative’s Circles.

  • To maintain active membership, you must maintain good standing with membership fees and comply with the Terms of Use, which includes a Fair Use Agreement.

All membership starts with an application to an Operational Member that resells Meet.coop services.

Upon approval, in addition to the responsibilities and rights for the type of membership, the new member may also participate in the Assembly, Forum, and other member spaces. All memberships come with rights to participate in the Co-operative’s decision-making process that correspond to the membership type and level of participation.

  • Agree
  • Abstain
  • Block

0 voters

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2

Hey, thanks for working on this. Comments below…

Is 500 euros a one-time payment or recurring? I am concerned that this will exclude a lot of little cooperatives. 40 hours voluntary labour is a LOT of hours and that is without pay? Is that per month or? From my perspective, I’ve already put in 30+ hours unpaid labour to bootstrap meet.coop and I don’t think Autonomic can afford 500 euros entry fee - we’d still like to be an operational member.

So this looks fine, the one bit I don’t understand is who is giving these user members access? Are those details to be determined? That is basically the sign-up process, right? Like, if I sign up as a user member but all operational members are over capacity, can I still get to use meet.coop services?

Not sure I understand why this is here? IIUC, that will be confusing for user members?

3

This is one time. You, on behalf of Autonomic, already put in 30 of the 40 hours, there is no expectation of another 500 euros. Some groups gave money, some servers, some labour, they are all just to indicate we’re serious about this and its one time.

I understand 40 hours is a lot, but that is all kind of what we all put in without pay. It can be spread over many members and over time.

There is no “annual membership fee” but active participation is asked. I don’t expect All Hands to be as frequent after this initial phase. More small group / async work, hopefully eventually all paid.

That’s described here in the notes What services can we offer from 1st July 2020? - #10 by benhylau (as a proposal at the moment). Basically resellers handle relationships with Small, Medium, Large (e.g. we talked about how @wouter can service users in Catalan and Spanish, or Hypha can accept CAD payments, etc.) so there is advantage in “decentralizing” this.

Under that proposal, Small, Medium, Large are offered only through Operational Members. So if everyone is overcapacity… no you have nowhere to sign up, but we hope that never happens.

On the other hand, Organization and Custom accounts are managed by Meet.coop directly (as they require custom Greenlight and BBB deployments), as well as Event server access. So in general, we have to charge enough that makes it worthwhile for us to commit enough capacity.

This is to address earlier concerns about us wanting to be selective of clients. It may sound intimidating but it can be simple as a sign-up form to the reselling Operational Member to register a Small, Medium, Large account, or to the Meet.coop for the Free, Organization, Custom accounts, but the member reserves the right to say no to the applicant. We do not want members who are not aligned with our core values, and at the moment we can entrust Operational Members to make that decision. (e.g. Hypha will definitely reject any fascist organization from using our platform even if they pay the fees).

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4

Great proposal - thanks @benhylau

500 in Euros, equivalent resources, or 40 hours of voluntary labour

presumably this could also be a mix of hours and euros?
In which case, we need to define openly how much we will value any contributors hours at…
i.e. it could avoid a mess later when someone claims they charge €500/hour and have contributed one hour so are therefore a fully paid up Operational Member

5

Hmmm, yeah, it is a bit messy here as we informally agreed a rate for this work and I was expecting to be paid at some point. I guess we’ll have to sort it out on a case by case basis but yeah, makes sense.

6

mix of hours and euros
put in 30 of the 40 hours, there is no expectation of another 500 euro
etc . .

This is where a framework of ‘contribution accounting’ is an early priority for the Work Organisation circle.

7

Some potential future amendments raised in July 9:

  • The mix of “500 in Euros, equivalent resources, or 40 hours of voluntary labour”
  • Eventually make 1000 in Euros as entry to applying for Operational Members
  • Make sure Operational Members who are also User Members are not “prohibited from reselling its services”
  • All Operational Members are entitled to an account

In same meeting voted to adopt this as is:

1 Like
8

morning, given that our wiki is not much in synch with our forum & meeting discussions, I copied the Membership proposal here into the wiki:Membership and reorganised a bit the “How can you become a member” section there. That needs more work & agreement though. Also I don’t know which other Operational members want to be listed there?

Then, after that edit I re-edited the page to reflect the amendments suggested yesterday. These:

How do you like it like this?

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9

Thanks for copying over the text, I agree they need to stay in sync. However, I disagree with the changes without any review process. For example, we never approved “1000 in Euros” being the figure, some raised concern over “1000/40 = 25” and I raised that we need to state membership after a certain date is where these apply.

This is simply removed, and instead I think we need to make clear that User Members are prohibited from resale unless they are also Operational Members.

My takeaway from the meeting was, these items need more discussion, and this is why we approved the proposal as-is without the amendments.

In general I disagree with the approach of altering small parts of text without another round of approval (not necessarily by everyone but at least by the responsible Circle), especially on platforms that do not have a “pull request diff” for review.

1 Like
10

We’re still in boostrapping mode, so IMHO we need to strike a balance between good ideas (and running code) being put in practice with incremental improvements and having formal consensus but without anything working yet. Having said that, I agree that we need to quickly mature with increasing formal decisions, that mature our governance and thus thrust in the collective initiative.

I am reading the All Hands Meeting notes from yesterday and it surprises me that the formal inclusion of an operational member has “just” been voted in that meeting without a vote in the forum. I would have expected a vote in the forum (in the “Permanent Assembly” where all members could vote. I’m completely favourable of ColloCall joining, but procedurally I’d prefer such decisions to occur in the Permanent Assembly, in the future.

I’m confident that slowly but steadily we will make our processes and procedures more solid as we go :slight_smile:

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