[Proposal] Discuss the assembly topics in the forum

[elopio]

Problem

Telegram is not the right tool to discuss the important topics brought to the assemblies.

• It requires everybody to be present at the same time:
  • we are distributed, which means that there is no date that will be good for everybody.
  • if somebody can't attend, their opinions will not be taken into account.
  • if somebody is present but is busy, stressed or distracted by real life, their participation will not be productive.

• It's very easy to get distracted and discuss things not relevant to the topic:

  • we all care about this project too much, and want to share our knowledge and experience which usually is a lot wider than what's being discussed.
  • in a chat there is no room to open subtopics, side topics, or things to discuss later.
  • we are all personally involved, which is awesome but also causes constant conflict between pairs of people that need to be mediated by a facilitator, and the common chat in the middle of an assembly is not a good place to solve those conflicts.

• The history of what was discussed will be lost:

  • there is a lot of noise on the chats and telegram is not easy to search.
  • the discussions are not threaded, so many different topics are discussed on the same single thread.
  • the same topics are discussed over and over again, because people miss the agreements or the opportunity to leave their opinion when it's relevant.

Proposal

Discuss the assembly topics on this FairCoop Forum before the assembly. Leave the assembly only to make the decision whether a proposal should be implemented or not.
[To be proposed in the general assembly in october]

Implementation

Before the following assembly (ideally, one month before), the facilitator of that assembly will post a topic on the forum announcing the dates and making a call for topics.

If somebody wants to propose a topic for the assembly, they will reply the call with a link to a post on the forum where the topic is introduced and people are invited to discuss it.

Notes

If there is no agreement on the forum about the content of the proposed topic, the assembly can decide to continue the discussion for another month,

If there is a personal conflict between two people happening on the thread of a proposal, we should all help those two people to resolve it in a space that's adequate. They should agree on a date, and somebody from the community should meet with them to mediate and help them express their feelings and reach a compromise or strategies to deal with their disagreements.

[zeh]

I agree with the diagnosis and would like to add that participation in Faircoop's assemblies should possible for everyone, including people that:
. do not agree to the terms of service of telegram (a private company that collects user data)
. do not want to give their phone number to telegram and other users
. do not want to run closed and proprietary software on their machines
I am not sure that using the Forum would be the best option, maybe there are other possibilities, but the fact that it enables asynchronous communication is a great advantage. Also, people can use it in mailing list mode (use email to participate in the discussions). Another option that could be helpful is Loomio, which tries to support the decision making process. I'd support moving the assemblies to the Forum immediately, though.

[guyj]

I think the forum is good for longer-term discussions like this one, but I don't think it's suitable for assemblies, it is too slow for a conversation with a lot of people taking part.

We could try something like https://openmeetings.apache.org/ which has chat, whiteboard, screen sharing, moderation, plus video and audio conferencing, maybe not for every assembly but for GAs it might work well.

[elopio]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts @zeh and @guyj!

Just note that this is not a replacement for the live assemblies. I do think we still need (a short) real-time discussion before making the agreements official, be it on telegram or somewhere better.

This is just to open the participation to more people in a way that leads to improved and better discussed proposals, before attempting consensus.

[eloyesp]

I think your diagnosis is correct, assemblies are a problem as they are now, because of the problem you describe. I'm quite active in the community but could attend to just one assembly.

On the other hand, I do not think that the solution could be using forums, because, while they are a great place to gather ideas and discuss about them is not a great place to reach consensus or "build" solutions.

I think that we should try the procedure used by other distributed projects, namely Bitcoin Improvements Proposals, or Internet RFC, and there are more examples of those.

Anyway, I think that most of those ideas do not need agreement before implementing that, you are already discussing the idea on the forum, implementing that idea, if there is consensus your example will be copied by others.