The Weekly Meeting is a foundational praxis of ANANSI. It serves as a consistent space for coordination, mutual care, and strategic alignment. While it has no formal name, it is often referred to simply as "the weekly meeting."
Purpose[edit]
The weekly meeting is both practical and relational. It is the space where we:
- Share updates across the collective
- Check in with the emotional and mental health of members of the collective
- Have necessary strategic conversations
- Have live conversations about large decisions being made
More than a planning session, this meeting is a weekly practice of staying in touch with each other — intellectually, emotionally, and organizationally.
Structure[edit]
The current flow of the meeting includes:
Role Assignment and Attendance: Facilitator, timekeeper, and scribe are assigned at the top of the call and roll-call is taken and archived.
Check-In:
- How is everybody doing today?
- What’s on your mind that may keep you from being fully present?
- What art have you enjoyed recently?
Discussion:
- Project and council updates
- Strategic review when needed
- Open items for team-wide decisions
- Assignment of action items
Meetings are usually budgeted for 2 hours but we aim to wrap within 1 hour if possible.
Culture & Ritual[edit]
We start every meeting with check-ins, regardless of how full the agenda is. This sets a tone of care and presence. We’re also developing norms around assigning roles before the meeting begins, to reduce logistical friction.
Scribes are encouraged to post meeting notes to Loomio for asynchronous engagement and archival.
Platforms & Tools[edit]
- Gather (default) — for video meetings in a creative, lighter-weight space
- Jitsi — used when attendance exceeds 10 people
- Notion — used for templates, agendas, note-taking, and tracking participation. A Notion template ensures consistency and helps track who’s facilitated, kept time, and taken notes — encouraging shared responsibility.
- Loomio — for post-meeting updates, extended discussions, and agenda building
Relation to Other Praxes[edit]
This weekly gathering is the beating heart of the collective. All Councils report into this space, and it serves as the connective tissue that keeps distributed members grounded in shared rhythm.
It complements more expansive events like the Mazigizaga, offering a rhythm of consistent, low-stakes engagement that helps the collective stay coherent between larger strategic gatherings.
Impact[edit]
Members frequently cite the weekly meeting as one of the primary reasons they remain engaged. It provides grounding structure, space to be heard, and a countermodel to hierarchical or extractive work cultures. The consistency of this meeting gives form to the collective’s distributed yet intimate governance.