Working as a community

Hey there,

I’m totally new to meet.coop, but have been working with self organizing organizations for a while. After reading some of the comments, I have some thoughts which might at least trigger some further ideas or useful rabbit holes for exploration and consideration :slight_smile:

I’ve worked with community led organizations of a variety of types, from dance communities (www.ashevillemovementcollective.org and others), to residential communities and more.

Ultimately, participation of the broader membership is often challenged by people’s various time limitations.

Also, large decision making groups can be difficult.

However, having steakholder representation (ie. people speaking for all of the voices) in the right places is key. Where are the right places, and who are the steakholders that need representation are the key elements.

There are many ways to do this via effective circle structures (which are always growing a changing!). How to include broader groups is often a puzzle, depending on your organization type. For instance, how democratic schools include parents in decision making? How does a service/business include its clients? How does a government include its citizens? and of course: how does a coop include its owners (who are not necessarily all active workers?)

There’s not a one-size fits all answer, and developing (and evlovling!) circle structures takes some time. Here’s a free little course on circle structures that might help though!

Also, while having open meetings is a great thing, and keeps the decision making group small enough to be manageable, having links with the broader group can be helpful. This is a strategy that the Asheville Movement Collective used to support the voice of the broader dancer community along side the voice of staff/worker/volunteer dancers. In that instance, there were simply participatory guest slots for any dancers from the community directly onto the Core organizing circles! (nominated by the circle and announced for self nomination, then sociocratically elected by the circle).
Another strategy AMC used is to have a more informal “dancer’s gathering” on a regular basis to keep the boarder membership informed, and develop “pathways into the organization”. Of course, there are some differences as to what it means to move “into the organization” which differ, but some elements of this strategy may be applicable.

Transparency can be helpful, but also overhwelming. Things like making the Nextcloud public are both fraught with possible security/privacy issues, and a risk of too much information not being manageable.

Other ideas I’ve heard are things like having github based organizational policy manual (where issues can be submitted by members ;P) - and of course, meeting minutes would always be public for review.

An (active) member(s oriented) newsletter can also be a useful tool, is there one?

A last note - the reality is, not all members can participate in the same ways. Some may have great value from a service they pay for, and not have much to add to governance… until they do! I’ve heard many a story from cohousing communities of the members who never come to meetings until they do! because XYZ isn’t how they wish it would be… and then they experience the joy of being able to participate and co-create their world :slight_smile: But, sometimes when things are working, there’s just not a big need to activity and that’s not always bad. (but it can be hard to tell sometimes if people aren’t participating because it’s working or because of some other reason, so of course, don’t get complacent ;P)

Anyhow - just some thoughts! :slight_smile:

  • CJ
3 Likes

Participating in the emerging community programme @ meet.coop?

Tomorrow I’m holding 'office hours’ in social.coop (who recently opened a multi-user account @ meet.coop) on the above topic.

All welcome: Sunday March 7th, 17:00 GMT 12:00 Eastern US
Meet here: mike @ meet.coop

Background documentation on the Community programme is here:

Great that you are sharing these experiences here, CJ!

Well, yes and no: we do have an announce News page at OpenCollective, that send out an email notification. It (only) goes to the members who have contributed through OC. That’s not bad, but you cannot really subscribe to it otherwise. Besides, each collective contributing to meet.coop may use one (institutional?) email address at OC but maybe several of a collective would be happy to be receiving our newsletter.

Another set of channels is through this forum. The forum is partially overlapping with the members as contributors to OC, but is much bigger in number of users. We have no single “announce page” yet where we encourage everyone to subscribe to and post news items there. Somthing that shouldn’t be too hard to do.

Another option is to set up a real newsletter distribution channel. Technically a tool such as mailtrain (the free software alternative to mailchimp) would be a very decent solution. But it is just another tool to set up, maintain. In any case, having a newsletter to subscribe to would be something that we’d want to have on our website, isn’t it?