• Date: Monday March 15th
• Time: 16:30 CET
• Place: Community programme home room

Dozens of collectives are using meet.coop as a cooperative online meeting service. And that's at least one part of what it is. But meet.coop is also a collaborative project to strengthen the coop-commons economy. This aim is being taken up in the meet.coop Community Programme.

The first pilot in the programme is a session around shared spaces for learning. We all learn continuously, including inside the online space of meet.coop: how to conduct good meetings in digital space, what others are working on, the insights and challenges they share with us; about our own approaches too, and how they compare and connect.

Learning in a meet.coop room is synchronous. In a meeting room or a class - a physical or an online meeting - learning is occurring in a synchronous process of interaction.

Asynchronous processes are a different-but-related part of the mix of communication. Rather than being ‘live’, they’re mediated through durable media of some kind: a document, a recording, a blog, a wiki, an email thread. Asynchronous communication can thus occur before, after or in-between episodes of real time interaction.

For example, you’re reading this text in a different moment than the community circle has been writing it. Or you could view a video or read an article before you join an online meeting. You could publish post-meeting notes in the cloud or in a wiki and discuss them in an online forum or an email thread. Etc.

For learning to be really enriching and meet people’s needs - for example, international collaboration across timezones - some mix of synchronous and asynchronous means is called for.

Many members in the meet.coop ecosystem have needs and experiences of this kind. But at the same time, working all this out in practice has now become a quite complex arena of skill and judgement, and not everybody feels fully equipped to handle this environment. There are so many channels and apps available, all the way from good-old email and wiki, to the video meetings and live-chats that enormous numbers of people have leapt into during this past year.

So . . we’re organising this session to share insights, experiences and needs between us, and begin to evolve a shared approach to shared capability in shared learning space. And hopefully, to move towards well-informed choices in the ‘toolstack’ that we use in our various communities . . skilfully building shared spaces for communicating, organising and learning. One consequence could be in the digital infrastructure that meet.coop provides to users. But a broader consequence is how we all mobilise and assemble all the many kinds of digital tools and media now available to us, with more confidence, success and ease.

We’ve put together a session with people from Synergia to explain about their MOOC, Towards cooperative common wealth (now in the 4th iteration), Ulex on their activists’ training programme Regenerative Activism, and Agaric on the way they’ve been using CanvasLMS in combination with BBB, in Boston schools.

You are invited to join this first session:

• March 15th, at 16:30 CET Let us know if you are joining, via the forum link below.

Session details are here, in the announcement in the forum.