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

Christoph Maier cm.hardware.software.elsewhere at gmail.com
Mon Oct 5 17:29:43 UTC 2009


On Mon, 2009-10-05 at 09:01 -0700, Shannon Lee wrote:
[...]
> * 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).

... and, conversely, can very effectively prevent valid input from
newcomers that questions the social standing of old hands 
(or, as Sarah Palin would put it, it "splits the cheechakos from the
sourdoughs").

I've seen the argument used repeatedly in a Professional environment, 
namely, in the forms:

"Using reliable IC design libraries is not the way we do things here"

and:

"Writing multi-threaded DSP code 
triggered by asynchronous interrupts 
without using global variables that prevent compilation with the
optimizer enabled, 
or using a strange tool called 'profiler', 
is not the way we do things here", 

and take it as a clear indication that an organization has reached the
point where conservation of its internal hierarchy is more important
than getting things done. 

> * 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.

Makes me wonder if such discussions, as long and as bad signal to noise
ratio as they may be, should be recorded as a matter of routine ...
memory is cheap these days.

> * 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.

where "comfortable" is pretty much synonymous to "recognized as an Old
Boy [or Girl]"

> * 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.  

You may remember that I had some weird ideas about (physically) movable
walls, when you (i.e. Shannon, Jason, and Crutcher) had a heated
discussion about the physical layout of the space, some time in July.

Anyhow, I wonder if there is any way how [C. Northcote] Parkinson's
Disease can be avoided as an organization grows beyond a certain size.

> 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?

Remains to be seen ... but it's the most interesting and important
problem that noisebridge could provide a solution for. 
Compared to that, any and all technical questions are irrelevant
trivialities.

Just my €0.02 ...

Christoph





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