Q&A 2024-12-09
- Round of intros (and maybe we could mention what coop we’re from
- 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”