[Noisebridge-discuss] meet tomorrow?

[Noah Balmer]

I'd be fine with going to Mission Creek again, though they'll probably close
before we're done.  My house is an option too, it's a block east of Rachel's
place, at 3353 cesar chavez, next door to Chicken John's.  Three couches and
a projector.

There are a couple things I'd like to have on the agenda tonight.

I met yesterday with Julia Love, the associate director the Volunteer
Center.  We talked about the relative advantages of different organizational
structures and she gave me a bunch of reading material.  She does free
quarterly training in how to be a good director on a non-profit board.  She
offered to do a special session of that class just for us in a couple weeks.

She took a look at our site and the current state of our bylaws, and made a
pretty compelling case to (oh dammit I worked hard on that section) not have
voting members.  I know, I know. We've already been around the block on this
one, and want to move on,  but she works with non-profits all over the bay
area, and knows a bit about what makes an organization healthy, so I'm
inclined to learn from her experience here.  She effectively said that the
voting members thing is possible and might work if there aren't many members
and they all agree with each other, but, as new people get involved and
cliques start to form, it encourages power struggles that end up taking up
all the organization's time and eventually swamping the whole venture.  She
suggests term limits, a clear mission statement, and a "mission first" job
description for the directors as better ways to avoid abuse of power.

After our meeting, I played out a few scenarios in my head, and completely
came around to Julia's way of thinking on this.  In most of the "bad
director" situations I could think of, her approach led me to a better
outcome.  Maybe we should just go back to the no-members bylaws, make sure
the directors are term-limited and have well-defined jobs, and call it done.


We can talk about all this at the meeting, but I'm putting it in email here
so everyone has a chance to think about it beforehand.


On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 4:58 AM, David Molnar <dmolnar at eecs.berkeley.edu>
wrote:

> Jacob Appelbaum wrote:
>
>> Noah Balmer wrote:
>>
>>> anyone up for meeting tomorrow?
>>>
>>>
>> Sure. I'm down to hack on stuff. Bylaws or otherwise. Perhaps we can
>> switch things up and meet somewhere other than Rachel's house?
>>
>> I'm a fan of a coffee shop with wifi.
>>
>
> Agree with all above.
>
> Would suggest Peoples Cafe in Berkeley (phone 510-666-0666 !), but it's not
> SF. The place we ended up at last time was pretty decent, if we can get that
> back room again.
>
> I took another look just now and we're close...
>
> -David Molnar
>
>
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