[Noisebridge-discuss] Reminder: Membership team meeting tonight, 6PM

[Josh Myer]

I'm going to try and make it, but will likely be late.  I just wanted
to "phone it in" a bit, in case the dayjob doesn't resolve itself.

One potential addition to the agenda: do we have a quorum for
concensus on membership decisions?  That is: if we only have 3 people
there on Tuesday, can we roll in a new member?


A few things that I would want to mention at the beginning of the
meeting, to lend it structure and generally focus things:

* What are the goals of the meeting?
* What are the non-goals of the meeting?
* When is the next meeting?

* What are the problems?
* Is the problem realistic, and do we have a "threat model" for it?
* For solutions, what are pros/cons?  Do they address the problem?


Quick strawman proposals follow, hopefully to let people prepare
better for discussion.


On Tue, Apr 07, 2009 at 10:25:41AM -0700, Rachel McConnell wrote:
> The membership team is meeting before the general meeting tonight, to
> discuss topics of Great Interest.  Specifically:
> 
> * the concept of a hiatus in membership, for people temporarily
> Elsewhere.  What would it mean?  How would it work?
> 

I don't have any real opinions here, but the natural thing is "You can
stop and start on month-aligned boundaries when you're out of the area
for the month."  Beyond that, we're designing against people gaming
the system, and that's not really our concern: it falls under being
excellent, so we can simply lean on that with the next point in hand.

> * forcible de-member-ification.  With luck we will never need it, but
> we'd better have it ready if we do.
> 

Concensus-minus-one seems popular here, but I'd love to hear from
others' experiences in similar organizations.  It seems to me that C-1
is overly conservative, in that you'll never get any but the worst
offenders de-member-ed.  (and is this conservativeness a feature or a
problem?)

This is a very important feature of our membership process, so we
probably want to do some homework before choosing one (or be willing
to change processes radically a few times; either approach gets the
right kind of result in the end).

> * how's the current induction process working?  Some people have
> suggested it's not working as well as we would like.  Do we want to
> change it?
> 

I'd love to keep the binder system, but for people to be "immediately"
up for membership, with the typical case being "Who blocks John's
membership because they don't know him?" and most of the membership
raising their hands.  This handles both the Slim case (has been
around, but not jumped through our hoops), and the G Carter Stokum
case (nobody wants him as a member, even though he's been there
forever).  It also institutionalizes the whole "Get to know a lot of
people and do cool stuff" ethos that seems to motivate our waiting
period.  People would be in the room for the check of "Don't know
them", then leave for the proper discussion.  This lets them know who
to meet, but still let them see how concensus works afterwards.

Almost, but not quite, looking forward to this meeting =)
-- 
Josh Myer   650.248.3796
  josh at joshisanerd.com