Here we outline the notion of venue spave, and its significance.
We adopt meet.coop as an illustrative example.
In meet.coop venue space was a **commons of labour power** or capability, in which all the visions, insights and capabilities across the membership - and friends who are not members - might be brought into a live, person-to-person relationship.
There's more than one venue space: some are 'back end' (like the sociocratic Circles in which operational members collaborate) and some are 'front end', notably the 'commons.hour' series of webinars. Venue spaces are needed for exploration, for relationship-making and 'look-and-feel' of collaborations, and for key decision making and perspective-forming in the coop-commons.
Generalising, for the Foundation we can say : > The venue layer is a **commons of live person-to-person interaction**, where relationships are cultivated, key choices are developed, explored and confirmed, and perspectives and capabilities are surfaced, highlighted and exchanged.
Venue spaces have become enormously important in the past decade, driven powerfully by the Covid-19 lockdowns. Online meetings are now ubiquitous - the huge majority of them in corporate spaces such as Zoom, Teams, and so on. To supplant these with digital meeting spaces on platforms that are under community governance - in coops, in the commons, inside community projects, within formal democratic processes of municipalities, etc etc - is fudndamentally important.
Some of the venue spaces are 'back-end', internal to the operations of platform-provisioning coops, for example. In meet.coop, operations were organised under four sociocratic 'circles', each of which had its own venue for working collaboration and there was also a regular 'all-hands' gathering or 'standing assembly'. There also were venues (not yet well developed) for deliberation by members of the Board of Stewards, and in time venues for an Annual General Meeting or general assembly would have developed, covering the trans-regional membership of the coop-commons.
Other venues are 'front-end'. The primary example in meet.coop is a series of 'commons.hour' gatherings, running through 2022. Participation was open - members and non-members - and the intention was to surface and explore strategic aspects of meet.coop was up to, as a pilot project for digital infastructure(ing) in the coop-commons. Gatherings were scheduled same-time, same-place (same url), which seems to be important for a venue. Meeting topics were notified in advance and meeting notes were shared afterwards, via the public threaded-text media space of the coop: an instance of Discourse.
It seems kind-of obvious . . but venue spaces are basic for democratic tech.
> Any fundable tech-layer project proposal will need to have coherent, well-defined media- and venue-layers.
See: Venue shopping list