## 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!

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## 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