I wanted to share some resources now that our housing coop in MA is incorporated and actually owns some property!
Our bylaws, which set us up as a group equity cooperative with resident and community membership, governed by sociocracy. Here are some bylaws we used as inspiration as well. If you are looking for help filing in MA as a cooperative, we worked with attorney Kyle Sosebee to help us put these together and would recommend him. We also got help from Jerry Koch-Gonzalez at Sociocracy For All around the governance pieces.
We use sociocracy and have a membership based composed of residents, community members, and investors/lenders. All members may join any circle meetings and view the notes, but all governance is held in those circles. We hope to transition our mission circle to have some spaces elected by all members, but currently, that is not the case.
We are deeply appreciative of all the resources from SoFA, particularly Ted and Jerrys support (especially since they live nearby).
We “restarted” our group governance-wise after meeting for a couple of years, by using Who Decides Who Decides as precisely as possible. We started with 12 people in our GC and by the time we split it into child circles, we had around 6 members. Now we are growing again, with new community members joining our circles.
I think that shift from GC power to working circle power was the big emotional/organizational shift… Allowing us to move more nimbly and also be a lot clearer who was involved. It changed governance membership from something like “hey I’m curious about this and want to have a say” into “i care enough to actually do work and show up to particular meetings, not just have a veto on any decision”. Getting there took a ton of trust building, which was only possible through the support of sociocracy.
We also had some governance shifts as we acquired our first property this summer. In the couple months after we made the offer to get to closing, our circles sort of fell apart. Or more precisely, we had a meeting where we decided to make the offer and proceed, and from there it was ad hoc decision making by a few people to get us over the finish lane. It required making on the fly decisions on things like bylaws/financing/etc outside of our usual circle structure, just because we needed to do things quickly and in collaboration with other organizations.
After that, it took some time to recover our circle structure and distributed power. We did some reflection, and decided that next time if we were to do that, we should just be more explicit about it. Like switching to war-time decision making. Like “we consent for all decision to be made by ? and ? people for the next ?? time until or until ?? happens” to make it really clear what power the group is giving up temporarily and to whom.
Now that we are back in a stage of growth and stabilization, we are busy working on getting all of our processes set up and adding new members!
Happy to answer any questions that folks have on the legal or governance sides of things. (and feel free to become a community member if you like for $5/month for a chance to attend any circle meetings and view all our notes 
)
We also use discourse for all note taking and backlog keeping, but it’s private to members.