Circle Call 2021-06-30

Notes

Appols: decentral1se (Autonomic Co-op, he/him), Chris Croome

Present: Calum (Code-Operative), Oliver (Cetis LLP), Calix (Autonomic)

Actions

• Calix - open a proposal about the work for Matrix - Hubl - Slack bridge
• Calum - take the conversation forward about website maintenance and the potential for hiring someone out of the fund to do this
• Calum - organise a call for the people interested for the Propaganda Working Group
• Calix - put a forum post out for next month's social call

Facilitator & the fund

• Discussed the values of having someone to facilitate activity in the network, and in onboarding people into the network (e.g. ensuring that people see the onboarding presentation)
• Information on the fund, who contributes, budgets as of 2021 https://community.coops.tech/t/financial-update/2560
• We _believe_ that the only expenses of the CoTech fund are the Newcastle gathering, the newsletter

Hubl, Matrix, Slack

• What is Hubl? https://hubl.world. A French co-operative created originally by members of Happy Dev, Hubl provides methods to share work, and to communicate on a decentralised network of servers - i.e. to federate between co-operatives and share XMPP group chats
• Usage of Hubl is low amongst CoTech, four or five messages a month in the CoTech group chat
• Hubl has work opportunities on it, might be of interest to some co-ops
• There's no maintenance costs for CoTech for the server, discontinuing it seems counter-intuitive if there are some benefits and no costs
• Discussed the vision of federating CoTech, Happy Dev and FACCTIC. Viewed as positive
• Other channels: CoTech Slack, CoTech Matrix and CoTech Hubl. Not much overlap between the three in terms of users. Some discussion about building a bridge, Calix going to lead the proposal for the work on this
• Joining the Matrix chat (https://matrix.to/#/#cooptech:autonomic.zone?via=autonomic.zone&via=matrix.org&via=1312.media)
• Joining CoTech Hubl: contact calum (at) startinblox.com :)

Onboarding

• There's a good presentation (updated September 2020) that we're not really using (https://office.coops.tech/apps/onlyoffice/s/Dj6g7okxXRZ6HbB)
• Oliver said that the presentation was helpful for them
• Michael Wagnill was going to draft an onboarding email template

CoTech Propaganda WG

• Lots of enthusiastic discussion about what we could do. Summary here: https://community.coops.tech/t/cotech-propanganda-wg/2800/4
• Discussed how to get consent from the rest of the network on actions
• Decided that the most practical thing would be to get people together to discuss the first steps

CoTech Membership

• May have some use for a membership management tool - Calum mentioned an associated Startin'Blox project
• Membership is mostly kept track of on the forum, website, Loomio and on a contact spreadsheet and it can become out-of-date
• Discussed whether this could fall under the responsibilities of a network facilitator

Attendance to the calls

• Felt it was productive even with three of us
• Obviously not practical for making decisions
• Discussed the objective of the calls - keeping people in the loop who go (even without quorum) is a useful function, but bigger turnout would be better for decision making
• Suggestion to have a fallback activity - when the calls aren't populous enough for decision making or for aspects of the agenda, have something fun and social to do

Location

Online at https://ca.meet.coop/b/chr-lna-sxq — 4pm 30th June 2021.

Agenda

• Agree facilitator, agenda & note-taker for the meeting
• Actions from the last quorate call (which was in March 2021, the last two calls didn't have a quorum, Circle Call 2021-05-26 and Circle Call 2021-04-28, would we get a better attendance if we switch to quarterly rather then monthly calls and have the next one in September? What is the quorum?)
• CoTech fund update:
  • How many co-ops are paying in? How much money is in the account?
  • CoTech video, proposal, notes of last discussion
  • Do we want to buy the cotech.coop domain name? See the thread on Discourse
• Hubl Update:
  • Are we using it? If not what can we do to promote it? If it is not being used should we abandon it?
• CoTech onboarding, see the Discourse thread
• CoTech Website:
  • Outstanding Git issues
  • Outlandish changes designed in 2020
  • Linking the newsletter on the website
  • Visual content & graphics for co-operatives
  • Interactive/alternative content
  • Possibility of a service connecting clients to the co-ops that provide for their needs
  • Suggestion to budget for a larger-scale revamp
• CoTech Propaganda Work Group discussions taken from discussion starting here
  • Recurring discussions about paying someone to co-ordinate the network
  • Co-operatives, software, unions, class war
  • Semantic Web tools (Solid, Linked Data, ActivityPub, Wobbly)
  • Newsletter, target audience and scale of audience
• CoTech membership:
  • Are they all co-ops?
  • Seven appear to be missing from the website? (See the CoTech Page column on the Members wiki page.)
  • Do we need an audit / register of members?
• Next CoTech face-to-face gathering, is it too soon to start thinking about this?
• AOB