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

[Shannon Lee]

As Jason mentioned in his mail below, he and I, and others, had extensive
conversations on Friday night and subsequently, and he and others have
brought up some very valid concerns that should probably be dealt with, even
if only to re-affirm that this is the way we do things.
Here, as I understand it, are the specific concerns that we've seen
expressed; I'm going to try to allow each concern to be voiced with a bias
toward itself, regardless of my feelings on the matter.

* Consensus is an expensive system.  Getting a single decision from the
group requires a lot more cost, in time and emotional energy, than it ought
to, and this means both that less people participate than would otherwise,
and that old decisions don't get revisited because people are scared of the
cost involved in the process.  Voting is cheaper.

* We don't have a system of Rules and Bylaws, so much of what gets decided
by our process takes the form of Custom, and then is expressed in the form:
 "That's just the way we do things," or "That's not the way we do things
here."  This can make it very hard for a newcomer to grasp how things work,
especially in a group that works in a weird way (we do, yes, work in a weird
way).

* Many of the decisions about what Noisebridge is and how we do things were
made either in coffee shops or in a series of infamous October and November
meetings at 83c; the membership is now three or four times what it was then,
and many people didn't participate in those consensus discussions.

* Consensus is a high-social-skill process, and we are not a
high-social-skill group -- it requires patience, empathy and social deftness
in order to make consensus work.  This specifically means that the less
comfortable someone is, socially, the more likely they are to feel
disenfranchised by the consensus process.

* We're approaching one of those Size Increments where the nature of a group
changes; groups of 75-200 people are qualitatively Different than groups of
25-50 people, largely due to  the number of social connections most people
can maintain; we're about to be a group with lots of subgroups, rather than
a single group, if that hasn't already happened.  Can consensus scale to
meet the needs of this size of group -- and can it scale to higher
increments?  How big can we get and still be consensus governed?

Now, having enumerated these issues (and there may be others I missed), I'd
like to say that I think that they can be overcome without a total system
overhaul; but they are issues that ought to be addressed.  I think we can
manage it without rancor and venom, too, if we really try, and none of these
things are pressing issues that need to be addressed *right now*, so let's
take our time and be thoughtful about it.

Most likely each of these topics at least deserves its own thread, if not
its on Sub Working Committee Team thing.

And remember, if we can't settle it on the mailing list, it'll come up one
Tuesday :)

--S

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 2:17 PM, Jason Dusek <jason.dusek at gmail.com> wrote:

>  When we have disagreement, do we have consensus? If something
>  was consensed to by some members some time ago, do we have
>  consensus on it now even in the face of vehement disagreement?
>
>  I've understood the consensus process to be about not riding
>  roughshod over people in the community; but one side effect of
>  it is to allow early decisions to remain unchallenged without
>  incredible effort and coordination. Naturally, we can expect a
>  bad fit of past rules to present circumstances now and again;
>  we've followed consensus in a way that makes adjustment far
>  more difficult than it needs to be.
>
> --
> Jason Dusek
> _______________________________________________
> Noisebridge-discuss mailing list
> Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> https://www.noisebridge.net/mailman/listinfo/noisebridge-discuss
>



-- 
Shannon Lee
(503) 539-3700

"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science."
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