Social.Coop - Reading Group

Purpose: To facilitate social.coop members reading and discussing texts of varying genres that communicate a positive or cooperative vision of society, offer practical solutions for cooperative practitioners and organizers, and/or examine the successes and failures of cooperative movements of the past and present. Infrastructure: The reading group will be organized and governed on a sub-group of the social.coop Loomio project, and will be open to all interested social.coop members. Members will be encouraged to post a short statement of interest and any questions they might have to the sub-group upon joining. Reading Selection Process: - All members may add as many books as they want whose subjects align with the group’s purpose to a shared spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZvZ_MLq1dAVBCY7-e9Iylg-qxWYqkcptjvOnkyOTeTA/edit?usp=sharing). Entries include name, author, pub date, pages, a description lifted from the publisher’s website or similar source, and the submitter's name. - At the conclusion of each meeting, a random number generator is used to select 8 books from the list. - Club members rank-choice vote the 8 options with the default 6 day voting period. The winner is the text to be read for the meeting after the subsequent one, thus allowing for approximately two months lead time for reading. Meetings and Discussions: - The person who suggested the winning text agrees to be the "host" for a given month. Don't suggest texts if you're not prepared to host. :-) - Hosting means promoting asynchronous and synchronous conversation about the text, as well as ensuring that the vote for the next text happens. - Asynchronous conversations may include posts on social.coop and in the Loomio subgroup. - Synchronous conversations may include the use of the social.coop chat-room, as well as scheduled calls. - Scheduling: Create a schedule poll with between four and eight possible times the host is available for the call to take approximately a month after the next scheduled call. - Call Logistics: The host is responsible for choosing the platform on which the call is to take place, and disseminating instructions for accessing the call platform via an RSVP “Check Poll” in the Loomio subgroup. - The reading group encourages experimentation with a range of meeting and discussion formats that work for the participating members.

Nicky Case: Seeing Whole Systems - The Long Now