Fedi Governance Report Reading Group - Featuring a Q&A with Erin Kissane!

## Fedi Governance Report Reading Group - Featuring a Q&A with Erin Kissane! ### 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 --- >- 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) > - 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 > What did people like about other governance structures than cooperatives? (Versus the magic solution of a cooperative?) **[EP]** > - 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 > **Dawn**: 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 Melissa and Hollie: think of them as neighbours, warm to have them along > **Melissa**: social.coop and on-server community (does certain software like hometown enable that?) what have you seen? - We didn´t see a whole lot of it - Frustration with the technical stack and ability to provide those elements - local-only posting such an importance features - the fact that it 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 > - 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 archipeligo - So much room for collaborative governance, so far mostly reactive - Haven't seen: coalition work because share enough values in common - Informal list sharing: Hachyderm doing lots of that - Interesting: diplomacy has been informal and opaque, makes sense if community defense - Question: - 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 - "Drama scaled is politics" > Libraries and information freedom - Libraries had a lot on their plate > Erin: a resource on how we set it up, here is how you could set up a coop. Specicially an invitation to the cooperative model "you can do it to" - Asked if people had plans post election. Almost no one had plans as of the report - Now: Hachyderm has analysis - What's next: Erinw working on documentation how people can select good homes for the fediverse. Always available, please don't hesitate to reach out! --- ## Possible Questions: - Fediverse diplomacy: it's been bilateral so far (e.g. social.coop, mstdn.ca) are there other groups of fedi communities? **[EP]** - How does IFTAS fit in? - 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? - Big question about like, where the tooling could and should live: on Mastodon software versus 3rd party. Would love you to unpack that a bit and share if you have any preferences? - Do you think affinity groups do better or worse than the wide open mstn.ca or like mastodon.social? - How moderation (and appeals processes) can be made compatible with the processes we might have in the coop? - Where do you see coops fit in these paths to explore? - mapping people-people to tech-people - benefits of having institutions join - pathways for participation in self-governance - How does the coop work at the variety of levels of "cooperation" in a cooperative? What are the values that support that? --- ## December 2 Call ### THEMES WE PICKED UP ON IN EARLIER CALLS - Thinking about how governance happens: - What things needs to be affordances and interfaces? - What things need to be known in a stance (maybe guided by specific values)? - What things need to be written out processes? - practical discussion moderation - dicussion of risks and if or how they are accounted for (the legal liability requirements) - threads and meta and the divergent responses across the fediverse - how do we encourage more membership to be active - what's missing from the conversation that is true to coops - many people want to be more democratic but don’t have the resources ### Actionable Items to take away What are the actionable items we'd like to take away from this report? - Austin: concrete software tools, OAuth, moderation tools - Austin: Leader in helping people set up other federated social media - Melissa: Nice to have validation of same challenges - Dawn: how do we support tooling (but not take on building it ourselves) - Dawn: solidarity as a mode of doing server diplomacy - Melissa: Hachyderm moderations + 1 documentation reporting interface - Gene: involvement with Melissa and Holli has been important - The other coop: https://data.coop/en/services/mastodon/ - https://social.data.coop - maybe a member education collab workshop? - #todo: bcca follow-up (Dawn) - Is there another reading group possibility? ### Future readings - Governable spaces https://nathanschneider.info/books/governable-spaces/ - Commit: Online Groups with Participation Commitments https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23267 - Freedom is an endless meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements Francesca Polletta (Academic) https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3682810.html - Something from a metagov seminar: https://metagov.org/seminar - Simon pek: Sortition in coops - https://theconversation.com/democratic-organizations-struggle-with-democracy-too-heres-what-they-can-do-about-it-220529 - Reconceptualizing and Improving Member Participation in Large Cooperatives: Insights from Deliberative Democracy and Deliberative Mini-Publics https://shs.cairn.info/revue-management-2023-4-page-68?tab=texte-integral - New_ Public Research Reports https://newpublic.org/research