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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/
  • maybe a member education collab workshop?
  • #todo: bcca follow-up (Dawn)
  • Is there another reading group possibility?

Future readings

Select a repo