At today’s membership/comms jam, we brainstormed a little on this and it will be something that needs quick turnaround if we’re going to get this going, and while I’m happy to coordinate and edit it into a whole, I think it does need to be a whole team effort because I don’t have all the answers (or even most of them).
I think that this should be a brief recap of the last couple of years and highlight that, as a coop, we are trying to have our governance in the open. Some things worth noting, perhaps–and most of these should be links to Discourse threads if they exist:
- The state of the membership (growth, renewals, etc; are we helping to meet the original vision)
- How the current vision has shifted from the initial vision (this can include things like the recent “Elbows Up” board directive to not just seek Canadian data residency, but Canadian service providers) and where we’re trying to go in the future (this could touch on our discussion on membership fees and access or the shift from a working board to a board that advises working groups who do the work).
- The services that CoSocial offers: Mastodon, Discourse, Lemmy (although it has since been sunset), Castopod, and Pixelfed (in progress).
- This could also discuss some of the internal tools / infrastructure that we use or are exploring for expanding governance and enabling working groups.
- Highlights around in-person meetings that have been held. (I haven’t been to one yet, so I can’t write about this).
- Highlights of reading / discussion groups:
- Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers Report where we had Erin Kissane (one of the report authors) join us for the final discussion.
- The upcoming reading group for Governable Spaces by Nathan Schneider.
- Our support of related organizations and initiatives, such as our donation to IFTAS and discussions that I have seen about supporting the open source developers who provide the software we use to provide our services.
- Our cross-pollination of ideas with social.coop and other groups.
It would be (IMO) good to get something from Tech Ops, Finance, and Trust and Safety, even if it’s something which perhaps promises more in a future blog post.
If we’re going to get this out sometime on or before Saturday, we need to act on this quickly and I will need some input from, well, everyone as well as paragraphs that I can lift and turn into a narrative structure. I’m thinking that if I have at least a few paragraphs on some of the topics above by ~17h Friday EDT (14h PDT), I can get it ready for proofing later that evening or early Saturday morning and publish it Saturday afternoon EDT.