[Noisebridge-discuss] Consensus and the "old ways".

[Brian Molnar]

I tend to think the length of discussion is mostly a function of how many
people are involved. I was in a fraternity with 15 or so other guys and even
though decisions were voted upon and we followed (loosely) Robert's Rules of
Order, it wasn't uncommon for weekly meetings to take 2+ hours.

The discussion is what really does it. Lots of people have lots of ideas,
and no matter how the policy is determined at the end of the day, it takes a
while for people to discuss issues and decide for themselves how they feel
about an issue. But that active discussion is equally as important as, if
not more than, the actual method of enacting the policies, since it allows
people to gauge their own ideas against everyone else's, and get a sense of
what the general consensus is.

- Brian


On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Al Billings <albill at openbuddha.com> wrote:

>
> On Oct 2, 2009, at 8:15 AM, quinn wrote:
>
> > honest to god, no trolling, pure quinn-confusion: why did you join
> > noisebridge? why did you join a consensus anarchist social
> > experiment if
> > you didn't want to do that? i feel like that's like me joining the
> > republicans and saying 'Ok, this group is great and all, but let's
> > drop the
> > conservative nonsense, ok? That's just a game, right? Guys? Guys?'
>
> Because some of us were involved *before* there was a Noisebridge
> (more than the last year) and when we formed Noisebridge, it wasn't
> clear that the consensus process was going to be the painful albatross
> that it has turned out to be. Jake and a number of others argued so
> strongly for it, it was like "Why not? It should work." Having never
> spent a lot of time in a large, consensus based organization, I didn't
> know it would translate into four+ hour long meetings when important
> decisions need to get made and deadlock on decisions due to arguing
> and blocking.
>
> The kinds of large organizations that I have been part of (lodges and
> non-profit groups) followed the ol' American standard of member
> voting. At the end of the day, a majority vote settled an issue and we
> moved on. In retrospect, that was LESS divisive and LESS time consuming.
>
>  People want to be a member of a cool hackerspace. They don't
> necessarily want to be a member of an anarchist decision making social
> experiment. Those two aren't linked except in the minds of certain
> members.
>
> Now comes the part where my point of view is dismissed because I don't
> hang out in the space all the time even though I've been involved for
> more than 1 1/2 years in proto-Noisebridge and Noisebridge.
>
>  Al
>
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