2023-10-17 meeting
Attendance: @jane.losare-lusby (facilitator), @nicksellen, @nathalie.szycher, @john.l.clark (secretary)
Report:
- Nick: “we did it!”
- Policy: Membership policy - Governance - Karrot Community
- Member list: Karrot Community | People
- Ran into some conflict, Nathalie helped bring people back to the process
- Nathalie: good summary of what happened; could review it in more detail
- This policy focuses on the core team, doesn’t address broader categories of participation, but have certainly gained clarity around governance
- Could do a debrief on this process? A: yes
What are reactions on this as a collaborative work between the Karrot team and the FOSC Circle? What feedback do we have? (E.g. what went well, and what went poorly?)
- John: review period? Enjoyed the framing of a formation of a temporary organization, making progress, innovating and learning in ways
- Nick: made a note in the thread about review period; also enjoyed working towards clarity around what we were all wanting from coming together in these meetings; glad for structure and space for being heard: wanting that in more spaces
- Membership policy seemed like a manageable stepping stone to work on
- Also have thoughts about how the Karrot-specific meetings happened; discussions there can be free and rambling, which is both pleasurable and sometimes challenging to effectiveness
- Nathalie: collaboration encouraged both teams to “do their homework” with more energy; glad for additional support around intentionally looking at governance; sees FOSC as providing a space of support for governance enthusiasts
- Jane: pleasantly surprised at the progress that we’re seeing in the Karrot community; meetings seemed to get progressively more focused; curious about where we want to go from here; interested in participating or hearing a summary around the review of this policy
What’s next?
- Nick: possible next steps:
- write up our experience, hopefully in an interactive space
- visioning exercise with the existing members
- look at some of the groups that use Karrot and explore their governance needs
- something that would particularly benefit or interest SoFA folks?
- Nathalie: thinking a bit more short term, still interested in the membership policy; do FOSC folks want to consider feedback on that policy?
- Explore ways for Karrot to embrace more tools from sociocracy? Maybe have Karrot take the sociocracy evaluation? Also happy to take a break and come back as needed.
- Jane: excited about write up idea and sharing outcomes from our work; unsure of how much FOSC can contribute to the visioning work; also unsure of the direction for engaging with Karrot users; excited to do another round of feedback on the membership policy; wanting to make sure our FOSC work can scale to work with other groups
- John: interested in hearing more about Karrot’s process around the membership process; curious about what Karrot might be wanting; feeling the tension around perhaps artificial limitations in FOSC, as we might be happy to talk with software folks and also organizations who are users are software (and even others)
- Nick: the write-up could include an extended exploration of the internal Karrot processes; interested in exploring how to nudge users of these software tools towards beneficial governance tools (e.g. sociocracy); dialogue between the governance of the developers and governance encouraged in users; “add buttons in a way that is well-informed”
- Nathalie: could see this going to the FOSC backlog: “sociocracy in the software”; wondering about hand-offs to other resources that SoFA has available
- Jane: could see us doing another meeting around shaping strategies around sharing practices with users of our projects
- John: happy for another meeting to continue work from this meeting
Next meeting: 10-31, agenda to plan the write-up, explore ideas around encouraging best practices, Jane will send out a specific invitation
2023-09-05 meeting
Attendance: @jane.losare-lusby (facilitator), Vas, Nick, Bruno, @nathalie.szycher , @john.l.clark (secretary)
Report on last meeting:
- Karrot team decided to do some work on a membership policy
Nick: made a lot of progress on a membership policy in recent meetings; still a draft
Agenda for today
Nathalie: could provide feedback on current proposal draft; different scopes of threads could come out of talking about this proposal draft
Discussing the current draft
Jane: seeing open questions, possibly other feedback?
Bruno: second section is slightly outside the scope of the particular membership in Karrot; interested in placing this work in a larger scope; focus is on the first section
Jane: what is blocking this proposal?
Nick:
- Membership and bank account? Maybe not with the current bank account set up
- Section for members on the forum
- Tilmann as a member? Just ask him?
- When do we introduce additional circles?
- Shift from Q&A format to more declarative format
- Mention the existence of the larger contextual material, but perhaps not include them directly in this document
Vas: largely agree with Nick; do we need to have another bank account?
Noting the process listed here for excluding someone if necessary.
Nathalie: maybe not include the current members in the policy; would be good to include other governance elements in a broader governance agreement
John: are meetings exclusive to members? if not, remove as power. agree w/ nathalie about building towards a more complete governance document. Vision/Values/Mission/Goals/Domains/etc
bruno: this is one piece of the larger puzzle which includes vision, values, decision-making process, other circles and modes of contribution; want to emphasize that this is connected to additional ongoing work
Jane: noting no answer for the last question in the first section (relation of membership to governance); this relates to points others have made earlier; reminder that no decision is final, can always make updates with feedback
Next steps
- listing members clearly on the forum (and removing them from the policy)
- following up with Tilmann
- separate out the question of additional circles (Jane mentioned a SoFA article on this)
- sort out bank account issues
- clearly define member removal process (also linked with broader governance work)
- processes for removing members may need to be a separate conversation
- Jane: is this blocking the policy overall?
- Bruno: not for me
- Vas: have had membership related issues, would be happy to have this ready for this policy; we’ve postponed working on it before
- Nathalie: would appreciate having clear statements around decision-making
Proposal (Jane): rewrite the document in a declarative format, remove member list, remove bank access statement, establish a space to list members, follow up with Tilmann; clarify a process for both decision-making and removing members
- Nathalie to lead the text around decision-making
- Bruno to update format of docment and to lead the text around member removal
- Nick to set up web/forum space for member list
Nathalie: would be enough to clearly state the power; doesn’t need to state the mechanism yet
Jane: are you willing to resolve that concern?
Nathalie: yes
Vas: excluding someone from Karrot is very much a decision-making process; happy to draft the exclusion text, but wanting more discussion about it
Nathalie: current draft seems to indicate a process already
Jane: in sociocracy, this would be another consent process, but without empowering the member in question with the ability to object
Next meeting
Maybe 4 to 6 months from now? Jane: maybe 2 months?
Meeting creates a nice deadline to work towards.
Proposal: 10-17 at the same time? ← no objections