commons.hour invitation

This is an invitation to participate in commons.hour

This version: 2021 09 07

This is to invite you to participate in meet.coop commons.hour. It's a monthly series of collaborative sessions, to share, learn and build a long term foundation for meet.coop in provisioning digital infrastructure under multistakeholder governance. We intent to weave commons and cooperative traditions together in a way that can be inspirational and transformative, and we seek to design an approach that can be reused and tweaked by others

At the core of this practice is an evolving documentation base - a handbook. We intend this to be an open-source resource also for other coops and commons-building organisations, particularly those involved like us in the digital landscape, and seeking a multistakeholder practice across diverse communities of contributors, rather than the more familiar approach: a workers’ coop of tech folks.

Why we’re doing this

For more than a year, as a coop with more than a hundred members spanning nine time zones, we have been running a platform for online meetings, powered by renewables and running on open source free-libre software, with a commitment to privacy. However running a platform coop of this kind requires to overcome practical challenges where familiar precedents (like P2P free-libre software, traditional coops, ‘political’ movement organisations, ‘sectoral’ interest groups, etc) don’t necessarily provide the necessary resolutions.

commons.hour is the open design space we are setting up, where we intend to engage these challenges. For example:

• How to envision and govern a complex weave of contributions, paid and unpaid, across user members and operational members?

• How to decide what can be in an open cultural commons, what spaces should be open to coop members only, and what the relationship should be between the ‘toolstack’ we provide for user-members (most of whom are also organisations) and the operational toolstack that we use ourselves ‘in the back office’?

• Which services to run, what costs to bear by whom, and what privileges and obligations to attach to the various spaces that we provision: platform spaces (eg BigBlueButton), media spaces (eg the Forum), venue spaces (eg commons.hour)?

• What communication tools, channels and protocols should we provision and deploy, to facilitate participation and contribution across our membership, and capability in the wider, progressive, activist communities that our members are at work in?

• How to be a viable platform coop (and escape 'sweat equity') while also being a movement organisation, making the transformative coop-commons economy?

Why participate?

This is what contributors may gain from participating in the series:

• A collaborative review of practice in multistakeholder governance

• Reviewing skills and principles of distributed organising in the mutual sector, via digital means

• Reviewing the political economy of livelihood and contribution, in practice, in the mutual sector: voluntary and paid work, care work, sustainability, fair wage, federated provision

• Cultivating practices of mutuality across sectors of our activist community which sometimes can fall into silos:

• the coop tradition, and other pivotal orientations including . .

  • commons transition

  • decolonial, de-capitalist, de-patriarchal, intersectional organising, global-North/global-South

  • post-extractive economy (feminist economics, doughnut economics, solidarity economy)

  • free-libre software and peer-to-peer networks of provisioning

  • design justice, digital safety.

And at the end of the project there will be documentation for you to mobilise, open source:

• A model of a multistakeholder constitution, and the design rationale that underpins it.

• A practice handbook for a multistakeholder, contribution-oriented, non-consumerist, infrastructure-providing coop.

• Methodology of a project to design a distributed mutual-sector organisation, under principles of design justice.

The sessions

We aim to put what we learn, design and decide into a handbook: so we need a ‘filing system’. We’re using a frame from the sphere of commoning:

• Political economy - the provisioning of a stack of digital-mediated spaces, as commons

• Plural community - an intersection of diverse mutual-sector organisations and actors, participating in the coop in different ways; and

• Assemblies and deliberations - the ‘machinery’ of stewarding a digital infrastructure.

Our member community is highly diverse and experienced, mostly comprising mutual-sector and coop-sector organisations. To mobilise this know-how, we’ll open each commons.hour with a handful of highlights from one of them. On one hand this brings their particular ’sectoral' experience and vision into the room, and on the other, it frames one specific area where we need to flesh out the protocols and principles of the coop, concretely, for purposes of governance. We plan this as a collaborative design process - a practice of design justice - spanning a series of twelve-or-so gatherings, one-a-month.

The full list of sessions is here: Running list of sessions

Our session-starters include May First Movement Technology (Mexico-USA), Supermarkt (Berlin), femProcomuns (Barcelona) and Remix the Commons. We hope you will join us and them in building and sharing this wealth of insight and capability.

Note it in your diary: commons.hour - fourth Monday, every month, 18:00h UTC / 19:00h CET. Here: https://de.meet.coop/b/mik-pov-htz-fvi

The first session is September 27th. It will establish the project frame and enable participants to get to know who’s involved. You can sign up in the meet.coop forum: register an account, and sign up through the link below.

Essential links

Please do sign up if you hope to participate in a session, it helps us plan for facilitation.

• Forum sign up for session #1 xxx

• Discussion threads: commons.hour space in the Discourse forum at meet.coop

• Handbook landing page for commons.hour