Future Reading Group

General Discussions
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Creating a new thread for interest and ideas for a future reading group. Moving over some posts from Reading group for the "Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers" Report

Potential Future readings

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I got to the event yesterday. It was really rich and rewarding.

If there’s appetite for doing another reading group, I’d really love a chance to dig into “Governable Spaces”.

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Started reading this and is certainly has some interesting ideas.

  • invitation to design
  • tools for conviviality
  • lacking of effective voices
  • governance designs sensitive to economies of attention
    It would be interesting to explore these in the context of cosocial.ca
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I’ve got a conflict tonight. Please post notes!

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Q&A 2024-12-09

  • Round of intros (and maybe we could mention what coop we’re from :slight_smile:
  • Erin: If you’d like to say a few words at the top about this report, your intent in conducting this research, findings that stood out to you

Who

  • Erin
  • Austin
  • Hollie
  • Melissa
  • Gene

Notes

  • We did a round of intros
  • Erin spoke about background for the project, what led to this work
  • OCF dissolution impacted grant-making insitution and their timelines

Question

  • What was most surprising about the findings? Was there something you didn’t expect?
  • How has the report been recieved (so far)? Has it had the impact you were hoping for? Are there sections you wish had more discussion?
  • Not as much burnout and stress as feared (perhaps because intentionally spoke with people doing governance and people who had time to speak with us)
  • Found a correlation: stable and doable server maintenance experiences for the people who are doing the practices as they were laid out in the report
  • Hard to tell much about the reception (no tracking, no analytics) but mostly good and positive comments
  • People are asking deep questions and engaging with it
  • Hard to tell where it is going (outside of the academic citational circuit)

Question

  • How did people talk about growth?
  • No specific questions about that, came up in the discussions, lots of different answers
  • Some hoping for growth, making room for that (think all open registration)
  • Did hear concern about contraction, and a missed opportunity if instances don’t find a way to stabilize
  • Some ambivalance where instances wanted to stay small
  • Heard nothing like a corporate media experience

Question
What did people like about other governance structures than cooperatives? (Versus the magic solution of a cooperative?)

  • Did the amount of time spent coordinating in a coop come up?
  • Non formal coops wanted to move into that, EU based ones not too worried about the administrative part
  • That ladder of participation
    • how to tell if have enough power in community to move from passive arrangement to something more actively engaged
  • Cultural processes on a fedi server to get it up to speed
  • Most people had a coop background, but still not sure the best route for the tech stack / etc…
  • Dawn: TWC recent description: 5 committed people to start a chapter, (in the Acts 3 people to start a coop)
  • Erin: Is it different if online?
  • At least on EU-based one was in the process of applying for some funding

Question
Curious your thoughts now about the tension of people what wanted something more formal (e.g. to incorporate as a coop) versus the couple voices being like: “avoid it as long as possible”?
- When do you see getting formal helping versus hurting?
- How do you inherit an ability to evolve your structure?

  • Person who was clearest on formalizing drawing on personal experience
  • Other instance for an affinity group across borders, only intended for one thing, and light touch. In that case: a personal investment that absorbed some of those tasks
    • For early inklings toward participation: different answer than purely social media as a gift to community
    • Melissa & Hollie: learned more about the history of the coop from the report because that history isn’t documented anywhere.
    • Sign of health of org that not everyone game in at the same time / already has that history
    • Gene: always a small number in a coop doing to legwork, difference for digital coop, Nathan Schneider quote on “economies of attention”. Still fitting a similar pattern, but some advantage, dialogue built into ditial processes (tools)
    • Involvement of social.coop: think of them as neighbours, warm to have them along

Question
Social.coop and on-server community (does certain software like hometown enable that?) what have you seen?

  • In research didn’t see a whole lot of the on-server community being intentionally created
  • Frustration with the technical stack and ability to provide those elements
  • Local-only posting such an importance feature
    • The fact that [hometown] trails behind masto is a downside
  • Bonfire network of tools: also what if? slack, discord, task management? etc… https://bonfirenetworks.org/
    • now doing lots of tricky development work and develop documentation

Question

  • Fediverse diplomacy: it’s been bilateral so far (e.g. social.coop, mstdn.ca) are there other groups of fedi communities? [EP]
  • We had a conversation about solidarity as a lens for thinking about all the themes on server diplomacy you mentioned? What would that look like?
  • Fedipact as an example
  • Website league (https://websiteleague.org/) island archipelago model
  • So much room for collaborative governance, so far mostly reactive
  • Haven’t seen: coalition work because share enough values in common
  • Have seen: Informal list sharing: Hachyderm doing lots of that
  • Interesting: diplomacy has been informal and opaque, makes sense if community defense
  • Question to ask yourselves:
    • what are the groups of support? Identify and support other servers, experienced server teams showing up for people
  • IFTAS, perhaps: not neutral, but provider of helpful tools for a pro-social part of fediverse
    • focus: class 1 T&S topics
    • maybe not a broker of relationships or coalition
  • Quote: “Drama scaled is politics”

Question
Libraries and information freedom?

  • Libraries had a lot on their plate, are such important spaces and social infrastructures
  • [We said nice things about libraries and I forgot to take notes]
  • Asked if people had plans post election. Almost no one had plans as of the report
  • Now: Hachyderm has analysis

Question
What’s next?

  • Erin working on documentation how people can select good homes for the fediverse. Always available, please don’t hesitate to reach out!
  • Erin: Would love to see a resource on how we set it up, here is how you could set up a coop. Specifically an invitation to the cooperative model “you can do it to”