Minutes:Mastodon Seed Council Initial Meeting

The purpose of this meeting is to determine the minimal decisions and structures that need to be in place for us to open registration.

Pre Meeting

Respond to the when2meet poll: https://www.when2meet.com/?17869628-SrHto
Edit the agenda together :)

Attendance

Introduction

5m

Neuromatch overview
Neuromatch mission statement

Discussions

Discussions are agenda items without a defined proposal to vote on. This meeting will be mostly discussions since we are still feeling out most of these things and will likely defer firm decisions to after launch.

Purpose

10m

Basic questions:

Who is this instance for? (#Membership)

What is the shared focus/vision?

For "Neuroscientists"

All neuroscientists?

Existing Neuromatch community?

Neuroscientists who share the goal of self-governance and collectivity?

Shared Vision. Do we intend to be an instance for...

Research or

General communication

Membership

5m?

Who is allowed to join? What will be our registration policy?

Jonny: I'm going to suggest that we have registration be open without credentialing, at least at the start, and then we can move towards a more structured process if we want to. Coops need some form of "good standing" which typically includes being paid up in fees and caught up on any shared labor, but since both of those are so minimal on a masto instance in my experience this can be pretty lax.

Governance

15m

How do we want to run this instance?
We don't need to decide on a fully realized governance system right now, but we should make some decisions about the high-level structure that will inform its development.
Some barebone options:

Cooperative Governance
Everyone gets an equal say, everyone contributes something back to the instance

Consensus-like decisionmaking: Rather than majoritarian votes, refine and adjust decisions until they meet the needs of all present members.

Decisions made collectively as an instance as well as within smaller working groups that are given a defined scope within which they can exercise discretion, but all members have means of making proposals with and through working groups and the whole organization.

Board-like Governance
Members have some means of submitting requests/complaints, but all decisions ultimately rest with the "board." Board can call votes and typically majority wins.

Republic-ish decisionmaking: Members can elect people to the board who then make the decisions.

Board, committee members, and general members have distinct roles, and their having those roles is what allows them to make decisions.

Moderation

20m

Code of Conduct: what will be allowed and importantly what will not be tolerated at any cost? #moderation #code-of-conduct

Inter-instance

De/federation
Daily moderation

Intra-instance

Conflict Resolution

Division of Labor

Since this is the major sink of labor for an instance, how will be divide this among the members?

Maintenance

5m

I feel like these can be deferred to a Mastodon/Tech WG meeting after opening, but at least touching on it... (-jonny)

How will we keep the server running?

How can users report issues/bugs to us?

How will we handle opening issues on the repo fork?

Finances

10m

How do we make this instance self-sustaining? #finance #budget

Shared costs with NM as fiscal sponsor?
Using OpenCollective, we might be able to designate NM as our fiscal sponsor...

Expenses transparent, allow donations, (ie. neuromatch could be one donor...), use remaining expenses to guide a very gentle 'pay what you can' sliding scale recommendation.

Would NM be able to donate to the OC as well? help nonprofit law oh no

or... ?

Proposals

Proposals are agenda items with a defined outcome that the meeting attendees vote on.

They have a

Sponsor
Time
Specific text of outcome
(Optionally) Cost

Communications Mediums

Sponsor: Jonny, 5m

Multiple communication mediums are needed to run an instance! Having many mediums is only really a problem when their use is not considered from a place of filling need as part of a governance system and instead they just get strapped on without organization. From my experience in digital/meatspace coops, I've seen the need for the following kinds of communication:

Chat-like: Linear-ish conversations that are relatively short and organized into a handful of channels. This is necessary for moment-to-moment discussion, question asking/answering, etc. while work is happening, but also necessary for building a sense of identity and cohesion in a group

Forum-like: For governance, discussions need to be organized into topic-driven threads (rather than serial threads in most chat-like interfaces) that can be longer, are more stable, and more discoverable. The separation between the "business-like" forum and the "social" chatroom helps both keep out of each other's way, keeping the joy of cooperation in the chatroom without getting bogged down in business while giving shitposts their place away from the forum.

Wiki-like: Long-term (yet plastic) document systems for collective memory. This is where your bylaws and policies get stored. Rather than using a strictly document-oriented system like google docs, a wiki lets you have a densely interlinked system of information where everything has a defined place (the document title is the URL), but also can be found through any number of different avenues. Wikis are good for collective sensemaking because they don't suffer from the same permissions nightmares that documents do. I could go on but I will spare u all my wiki sermons.

So from that I propose that we adopt the following mediums to run the instance:

Discord - This could also be slack if there are strong feelings, but Discord not requiring you to pay some absolutely preposterous amount to have a large chatroom that can see further than 90 days in the past is the main reason here. Ideally we would move to Matrix eventually, but for getting started, it's very easy to send every member a link to a discord to join.

Loomio - Loomio is a forumlike medium with great support for voting and decisionmaking. It's built by co-opers for co-opers and we use it and love it over at social.coop. An alternative here might be Discourse but it doesn't have the same kind of support for decisionmaking in my experience, particularly when this is intended to be the governance board (rather than a general chat space).

Wiki - Here! This! Use this for the governing documents!

Each new member would be asked to make accounts on all three of these during onboarding :)

Bootstrapping Process

Sponsor: Jonny (and whoever else wants to edit this. Time: 10m

Sketch out and divide tasks for the work that needs to be done to open registration, and what happens between opening registration and proposing and affirming "Governance Structure v1.0"

In order to open registration
Import blocklists

Divide up first month mod duty

Create discord & loomio

In order to approve governance
Encourage proposals!

Find a time to have first all-instance meeting

Decide on governance structure v1.0

Action Items

Assigned responsibilities to carry on the decisions made in the meeting :)

Future Discussions

Dev Instance - making evolving the medium part of basic instance operation