<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><div>Beautiful post Praveen, thanks a lot for it!</div><div><br></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 13.3333px; font-family: HelveticaNeue,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;">After several years of travelling I can just confirm that Noisebridge is truly unique in its openess and lack of hierarchy. It is major inspiration for many people around the world and I hope it will stay that way, several founding members voiced recently their support and desire to keep the founding principles of Noisebridge which the openess to people interested in coming and equality definitely are.</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 13.3333px; font-family: HelveticaNeue,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida
Grande,sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;"><br></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 13.3333px; font-family: HelveticaNeue,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;">Sincerely from Warpzone, Munster,</div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 13.3333px; font-family: HelveticaNeue,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;"><br></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 13.3333px; font-family: HelveticaNeue,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;">Frantisek<br></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 13.3333px; font-family: HelveticaNeue,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;"><br></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size:
13.3333px; font-family: HelveticaNeue,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;">Email from Praveen:<br></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 13.3333px; font-family: HelveticaNeue,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;"><br></div><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-size: 13.3333px; font-family: HelveticaNeue,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Lucida Grande,sans-serif; background-color: transparent; font-style: normal;">I know I'm pretty late to this thread but here's my unsolicitated opinions.<br><br>*tldr: voting sucks, nb is unique and awesome, we should try other things<br>besides voting, we should be doing community surveys, I'm hella blocking a<br>move to voting model*<br><br>1) *Voting is what they gave you to make you think you have democracy*<br>I guess in this case, I'm the one actually have a
conservative opinion.<br> But I feel it's worth repeating. Voting sucks. Majority rule sucks. We<br>aren't a corporation, we don't have to turn a profit, we don't have to be<br>particularly efficient about any decision. We don't have to agree and have<br>one solution. Participation in a political process is always dominated by<br>trolls and politicians -- this is true in a voting system as well. We were<br>very concious in the early days of noisebridge to avoid voting for a number<br>of reasons. Over the years we've iterated on our consensus process. I<br>think there is much more to iterate on, but I see voting as fundamentally<br>having people lose their voice.<br><br>2) *If they aren't making fun of you, you aren't trying*<br>I personally think we should hang the image of "at least we aren't<br>noisebridge" high above our door. I've heard many people at noisebridge be<br>ashamed of nb. I've
heard of people outside of nb make fun of nb.<br><br>The other night, I had a group of visitors from Kochim, Kerala visit<br>noisebridge. They were on a tour to start their own startup village in<br>Kochim (and I've seen similar visitors as far as Mozambique). When they<br>come, I tell them that noisebridge welcomes everyone -- regardless of their<br>income or their education level or whether they have a house. I tell them<br>that people living on the street and people who have been in solitary<br>confinement come here and work side by side with executives from tech<br>startups to work on projects and solder. I tell them that we have an open<br>space which is truly community driven without government or corporate<br>sponsors. I tell them that at Noisebridge I've seen the future being made<br>right in front of my eyes both technologically AND socially in completely<br>unexpected ways. I tell them that we are contentious, and
I've even seen a<br>fist fight almost break out at consensus, but it's because we are doing<br>things that matter on a far deeper level than we give credit for.<br><br>I've been around the world to other hackerspaces. Some of them I couldn't<br>even get into because I came at the wrong time. But largely, what I've<br>seen is that a lot of spaces working off more closed models are glorified<br>garage shops.<br><br>No other space has to deal with the problems noisebridge has. No other<br>space has people living in the walls or has opened itself up to the city as<br>much as we have. They make fun of us because we *live* the idea of fail<br>fast. It's a feature, not a bug. Where do people go from around the world<br>when they want to see a quintessential, glorious, chaotic, hip hackerspace?<br> Noisebridge. I don't know how they work in Atlanta, but here in the left<br>coast we roll with people power.<br><br>*3) We
should fail even faster and harder*<br>You bring up a lot of great an interesting points which I think we should<br>experiment with. It sucks that someone got blocked membership. It sucks<br>that our process can cause people to self censor and reduce overall<br>participation.<br><br>I'm in favor of trying further experiments -- maybe having multiple<br>blocking? Maybe having anonymous collaborative decision making? We should<br>be innovating and failing and not falling back into broken systems of<br>yester-century.<br><br>*4) I'd just ignore the rules anyway, and so would other people*<br>I'm still handing out keys to people. I don't need to sleep at<br>noisebridge, but I don't care if other people do.<br><br>*5) We really should be data driven about this whole thing*<br>At the end of day, we all have bunch of conflicting opinions, and we can<br>all assert our models of reality and claim that it "works" for some value<br>of
"works".<br><br>I'm getting more to the opinion that this process doesn't go very far. If<br>we are going to collectively solve our problems, we should be getting a<br>better sense of what everyone thinks our problems really are. Danny<br>O'Brien started this process with nb surveys last year... But I think this<br>process should be taken further. I think we need to be collecting in-depth<br>community surveys and interviews to really get a deep feel for what we<br>need. This issue is only going to get more urgent as our lease comes up<br>and we as a community stare down the barrel of being gentrified out of the<br>mission later in the year....<br><br>Love and Happy New Year,<br>Praveen<br></div><div> </div><div>Frantisek Algoldor Apfelbeck</div><div><br><br></div><div>biotechnologist&kvasir and hacker</div><br><div><br></div><div>http://www.frantisekapfelbeck.org</div><div><br><br></div><div>"There is no way to
peace, peace is the way." Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi<br></div></div></body></html>