New members must contact a member of the Community and Admin Action Squad before being approved for membership.

To become a member of the cooperative, new members must pay a monthly or annual contribution on the cooperative's Open Collective page.

Existing members can fail to pay for a combined total of 3 months over the previous 12 months before having their voting powers frozen.

Members of Action Squads are exempt from paying a contribution fee as they contribute labour hours to the cooperative.

Membership of the cooperative is not required to use the cooperative's web services, unless otherwise specified in this governance document for specific services.

The following voting format was altered on 21 November 2022 to adopt Autonomic's decision-making process instead. Several (minor) issues need to be addressed with the adopted process, which requires maintaining a record of this prior voting method for the moment.

For voting & decision-making proposals, please review the SBC Decision-Making Process Guide. Please note that Medium & Large decisions must be posted to Proposals and the results can be found on Decisions.

All members can create a proposal for the general membership to approve or refuse. Proposals are made on the cooperative's Loomio instance. Proposal votes are to be counted against the number of voting participants, rather than the total number of members eligible for voting in the cooperative. All proposals are subject to a minimum of receiving more Agree votes than Disagree votes, unless otherwise stipulated here in the governance document. Before creating a proposal, all members must open a new thread on Loomio regarding the subject of the proposal and notify all other members of the cooperative. After the thread has been open for 4 days, a proposal may be made, and must be open for a minimum of 3 days. Following the results of the initial proposal, follow-up proposals regarding the same subject may be made in order to address any changes of circumstances, and must be open for a minimum of 3 days. Failing to comply to these standards may result in the proposal being closed.

Approving new members into the cooperative and maintaining the list of active members.

Approving reimbursement for expenses related to the daily running of the cooperative.

Applying the community Code of Conduct on the cooperatives' web services and facilitating the communication and decision-making of the cooperative.

Maintaining the list of blacklisted/whitelisted domains and instances.

Setting up and maintaining the software necessary for the web services run by the cooperative.

Communication between members within Action Squad regarding the cooperative must be kept in open channels available to all members of the cooperative to review.

Action Squads must keep a log of any activity which must be kept in an open format for review by all members of the cooperative.

Any decision made by an Action Squad can be overruled vote by cooperative members.

The existence of Action Squads is subject to the “implied consent” of the general membership, which is subject to immediate recall.

Potential members may join an Action Squad if they have unanimous, active consent, from all of the current members. Failing this, members may be elected by a proposal to the general membership that passes with twice as many Agrees to Disagrees.

Action Squad members can be immediately recalled from the Squad, subject to a vote requiring twice as many Agree votes than Disagree votes by the general membership.

Action Squads can be abolished at any time a vote requiring twice as many Agree votes than Disagree votes.

Any proposals that affect the membership or existence of new or established Action Squads must contain “[ACTION SQUAD]” or “[AS]” in their titles on Loomio.

In this instance, tasks handled by the Action Group must be delegated to other Action Groups as part of the vote proposal.

A new Action Squad can be set up with a proposal requiring twice as many Agree votes than Disagree votes from the general membership.

Any tasks handled by the new Action Squad must be specified as part of the proposal.

Any tasks which are handled by already-existing Action Squads will be transferred over to the new Action Squad, if the proposal is approved.

Action squads will be subject to a biannual review by the general membership.

Any changes to this Governance Document must be subject to a proposal requiring at least 4 times as many Agree votes to Disagree votes.