[Noisebridge-discuss] articles of incorporation submitted today

[Noah Balmer]

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 3:14 PM, David Molnar <dmolnar at eecs.berkeley.edu>wrote:

> grey wrote:
>
>> Rachel, with all due respect, neither you nor Noah are the sole lease
>> signer or board members, yet you are the only two who have taken issue
>> with the consensus reached on Tuesday.
>>
>
> For what it's worth, Noah's position seems to be that he does not feel
> consensus was reached on Tuesday. I do remember him raising concerns, then I
> remember a lot of discussion. After the discussion, I thought, and I wrote
> down, that we reached consensus about the keys. That does not match Noah's
> feeling and recollection. (Noah, let me know if this is accurate or not.)

What I recall I this:  at the time we signed the lease we said "let's get
keys to the people on the lease, and figure out who gets keys once we figure
out membership".  I the time my understanding was that we'd have
incorporation almost immediately (it's, once again, taking longer than we
thought), figure out who our members were (most of us) and then figure out
keys.  Key's weren't on the wiki agenda for tuesday's meeting, I didn't find
out about that we'd been talking about them until immediately before the
meeting.  In the meeting, the idea of giving keys to everyone immediately
came up, and I said several times that I wasn't comfortable with that.
someone said "who actually wants keys?" some hands went up, we all stopped
talking and looked around.  It seemed like a small group and for what it's
worth I had no particular objection to any person in it, though they weren't
all people I know.  Then everyone started talking again in a bunch of
fragmented groups, then got shouted down and we moved on.  I was pretty sure
that a number of people, including David, had heard me object (as he says
above, "I do remember him raising concerns"), and had seen that my objection
hadn't been addressed, so I thought we were just punting on the issue until
we could talk about it in a smaller group, perhaps in the subset of  people
who wanted keys.  I must not have been listening to the right
sub-conversations because the next morning I was really surprised to see
"everyone who wants a key gets it" in the notes.  I had objected, we never
addresses that objection, and while that policy is fine with me in a
post-incorporation, defined membership context I don't like it until then.
I could have done things better, I could have anticipated that other people
would interpret what happened differently from how I do, and I could have
been more assertive.  I think this is primarily a failure of process
though.  the suggestions I've been hearing about to make every decision more
deliberate (as we did for several other things on Tuesday), to put things on
the agenda beforehand so people have time to think about them, and generally
keep things more formal, are good safeguards against these kinds of
misunderstandings.

>
>
> While I did take notes, I recognize that I'm fallible, hence the request at
> the top of the notes for corrections or different views. I recognize that
> many, many people thought we did have consensus, but I also believe Noah
> when he says he didn't think we had it. Not sure there is a lot to be gained
> by rashomoning the meeting on this point.
>
> So we need to make sure this kind of "yes it was consensus/no it wasn't"
> does not happen again. I like the suggestions I've seen from Rachel, Andy,
> and others here. We can and should follow some of them at our next meeting.
>
> -David Molnar
>
>
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