[Noisebridge-discuss] Process-hacking at NB (was Sleeping at NB, now less [drama], more tl; dr)

[Danny O'Brien]

On Mon, Dec 27, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Moxie Marlinspike
<moxie at thoughtcrime.org> wrote:
>
>
---
Attention Conservation Notice:
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Rambling ponderings about NB, mostly positive. Constructive points for tl;dr:
* Consensus and meeting procedures might not need change, but I think
could do with a refresh, as we're often unclear on our own actual
procedures. Seth is cruelly asked to help with this.

* A check-in system is proposed, for those who feel they're probably
"on point" anyway when they're in the space, so newbies can feel more
comfortable approaching them. A strawman physical solution for this is
put forward, for people to be horrified at and prompted implement a
better idea.

* Vague concerns about times when no-one is on point are broached.
Statistical ways of gathering this are gently mooted to see if people
think they are privacy-invasive.

*  An observation, backed by factual data at last, about where money
to fund Noisebridge comes from. A curious psychological link between
membership and giving money is noted, and a request made to discover
ways to break such a link. A couple of tentative proposals at
increasing non-membership donations are run up flagpoles.

* NB's status as a unique experiment is asserted, and toasts proposed
and accepted. Cheers!

---

Hey Moxie who is standing 10 feet away from me in the space!

> On 12/24/2010 02:42 PM, Danny O'Brien wrote:
>
>> * Create actual, narrow roles and delegate to them -- "prince of
>> trash-keeping", "posse of financiers', "nightwatchmen", "printer
>> monitor". Have these people report to Meeting regularly, and be
>> transparent in what they do. Allow roles to shift, but ensure that one
>> responsibility of the role is to find and train the successor.
>
> Yeah, these people are sometimes known as "bottom-liners" in
> anarchist-project parlance. The idea is that a consensus delegates
> responsibility for a specific project component, chore, or idea to
> someone for coordination.  That person has no authority, and isn't "in
> charge" so much as they're "on the hook."  In practice this person
> shouldn't be taking out the trash, but instead actively coordinating
> volunteers to take out the trash.  But if they can't find anyone for
> whatever reason, they're on the hook as the one who's there dragging a
> trashbag across the space.
>

Yep, that seems right. Of course, one of the interesting aspects of
herding a selection of slightly introverted people (who might for
instance, reply on a mailing list instead of talking) is that getting
someone else to do stuff is can be more of a burden than doing it
itself. I think what that means is that we need to be more explicit
about "if you just do this yourself, you will burn out, so you need to
think about passing on your knowledge and responsibilities to others",
both short-term or long-term.

>> * Change to near unanimity consensus at Meeting --
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making#Near-unanimous_consensus
>
> Despite the fact that you'd never get consensus to switch to
> not-consensus, I don't actually know that this change would be very
> effective.  It's true that the consensus process at NB meetings feels
> somewhat difficult, but I'm not sure that this change is actually in the
> right direction.  Normally consensus draws people towards compromise,
> but by contrast I've most often seen people lead with some really
> ridiculous out-of-the-question positions at the NB meetings I've been
> to.  It's like people might not really "get" the concept, and instead
> treat it as some kind of extreme super-majority version of voting, such
> that you have to exacerbate the polarity of everything you say and argue
> even more strenuously than normal in order to try and convince everyone
> of your rightness.  Sometimes the facilitator will even say "alright now
> we're going to vote" when they're talking about consensus.  There are
> also things that don't make any sense at all -- I've even heard "I'm
> blocking your block."

First, you correctly spotted that the consensus-1 suggestion was just
the thing I threw in to provoke discussion rather than something I
felt was a good idea.

Yeah, the few meetings I've been to, the consensus process seems to
have become some strange Arcane Thing that nobody quite understands
(or have slightly differing understandings about). I think maybe the
answer to that may be allied to Kelly's gentle complaint that the
vital processes that the Meeting, like informing the treasurer of new
members, have become a bit confused over time.

Seth, you have been around at more meetings and for longer than most.
Would you be interested in a mini-project to explicitly document what
we do (or are supposed to be doing) when we do the meeting thing,
including the steps of a consensus process? I think the people who
variously lead the meeting would benefit from that a lot. Just knowing
that there is somebody to call on to check these things would make
people more comfortable, I think.

>
> I think I've heard someone say the word "block" like ten times in ten
> years of consensus meetings outside of NB, but it's not uncommon to hear
> it that many times at each individual NB meeting I've been to.
>
> So yeah, maybe it makes sense to switch to a more voting-oriented model
> of decision making if that's what's happening anyway, but it might also
> be worth trying consensus before giving up on consensus.  =)
>
> Or to be utterly practical, consensing on not-consensus is going to be
> impossible, so it's probably most effective to really work on refining
> and smoothing the consensus process itself.  Seems like there's a lot of
> room there.
>
>> * [More contentious] We need an explicit process for challenging those
>> who challenge the ideas of noisebridge. Some feel that involves
>> calling the police, I feel that's a failure of our system. Jake says,
>> and many agree with him, that we just need to go talk to people. But
>> we don't, or if we do, we rarely report back. We need to actually have
>> a process to do this, and commandeer some brave soul  to do it and
>> report back to meeting.
>
> To bring up your "bizzaro world coming to geek culture" reference, the
> anarchist infoshop scene has parallels to noisebridge.  A place like the
> long haul infoshop in the east bay is somewhat similar to noisebridge
> (without the technology).  It's part collective, part public space, is
> open for anyone to walk in, and also has regularly scheduled events. But
> the really big difference in how it's run is that it's staffed by a
> collective member during all open hours.
>
> For better or worse, I've never seen an infoshop that was just... open.
>  There's always someone in the space or sitting by the door who is doing
> a shift, mostly working on whatever they want, but also answering
> questions for new people who come in and keeping an eye on the space.
> If there's nobody staffing, the space is closed to non-collective
> members.  The hacker dojo has something like this as well, with a little
> LCD screen showing photos of the members who are staffing at the moment.
>  This also has the nice side effect of getting collective members in the
> space more often than just the 1-hour weekly meeting, as well as really
> clearly drawing the line between collectively-run project and public space.
>

Re: Having someone on point. I've wondered about this too -- I think
the biggest impediment to new people is often that they turn up and
have no idea who to ask for advice on how to operate this noisebridge
machine. The current answer is "ask anybody", but that is hard and
scary to divine, because everybody looks busy; perhaps the perfect
answer is "somebody will come up to you and ask *you* if you need
help", but we don't always do that. Certainly it's nobody's explicit
job to do that.

One of the first things I learned at Noisebridge (and I notice other
people learning it too) is the subtle art of discerning who is
"actually" in charge. Often you can work it out when they start
climbing on top of something to fix something else, or are standing up
and talking to two people simultaneously, while pointing. It would be
nice to encourage that to be semi-official, a la Hacker Dojo. I
temporarily, at 1AM, like the idea of giving all the members a little
wooden, machine-readable widget they can slot into the front desk
machine when they feel like being on-point.

This also makes me wonder how often the space is not explicitly looked
after by anyone (ie its just full of people who are new, or don't
identify with being responsible for NB). I honestly have no idea about
how often this is -- obviously it's a state that doesn't have many
reporting witnesses.

When I spoke to him tonight (yes, we did actually talk in the end),
Moxie noted that when he first turned up at Noisebridge, it was during
Burning Man, and was consequently almost completely empty. I've been
in the space where there's just three or four of us there, and none of
us are being particularly hackery. I think there's definitely a
different "geography" in these states. People feel excited to be here,
even if they are newbies, when there's twenty or more people working
on stuff. Also, nobody cares if two or three of those people are just
hanging around playing video games. If there's only five people in the
space, and they're all in different bits, the ambience is very
different, and the attitude of a few people can dominate.

I think the solution to this is to attempt to fill Noisebridge more
often. It was awesomely exciting tonight, and even Shannon (EVEN
SHANNON) had to admit that it was a fine fine Noisebridge night. I
took a head count at one point, and there were thirty people in the
space, working on everything from sewing, to shop-work, to
electronics, to robotics. There were some people just hanging out, but
that was ok too.

I'd really really like to collect some stats on NB use; in particular
I'd really like to know when the place is empty, and when one or two
people are there. I think collecting these stats automatically might
prove useful in the whole sleep drama too.

I'm sensitive, though, that doing this without offending NB's
privacy-sensitive culture may be tricky. I would like to see what
people think might be privacy-protective ways to do this. We don't
need CCTVs and a facial recognition database -- A combination of
motion-sensor and door opening counters might do it.

> I've also been surprised by how lightly the membership process is taken
> at NB.  If anyone who wants to can become a member at noisebridge, it's
> likely to have a normalizing effect that will make NB difficult to
> differentiate from any other public space.  Presumably Noisebridge was
> started with a purpose in mind, if even generally speaking.  Every
> member of the Noisebridge collective is essentially a curator of its
> "geography."  Right now nothing happens through the collective, and so
> it's open for anyone to curate however they'd like, with sometimes
> interesting and sometimes off-putting effects.
>

I think some of this is Noisebridge's unique culture: the central idea
of the do-ocracy.

Re: Membership. When the money problems hit, my first instinct was to
relax the membership constraints, and I think in fact people are
already doing this, which is what you're seeing -- anyone who is up
for membership is accepted, without much time spent in discussion,
because, hell, we need the money.

I think now that this is the wrong approach. What needs to be relaxed
is the culturally-established idea that you *should* be a member
before giving money. In fact, when I look back at the Annual Report
for 2009 (https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/File:Noisebridge_2009_Annual_Report.pdf),
over a third of our money came from donations that were not membership
dues.

A lot of people don't want to be a member because it's a hassle to do,
and they're not really interested in the dull politics of a
hackerspace. I think these people would nonetheless appreciate a way
that they could acknowledge their use of the space through giving
money, but they don't have an obvious route to doing this. (I know
there are plenty of ways that they *can*, but we're very short on
behavioural nudges for them to do this.)

I guess what I am saying here is that a mad push for membership isn't
necessarily what we want; a mad push for regular donations is
(including larger one-off donations). I've certainly conflated the two
in my  mind, and maybe others have to.

To give a couple of potential nudges: companies like Google have a
list of permitted 501(c)3 organizations that employees can contribute
to, and Google will match their contribution. Amazingly, EFF wasn't
one of these for many years. When it was, I believe donations from
Google employees went up, even without the extra 50% added by the
company.

Another idea that I'm kicking around is a one-off campaign to get 100+
"friends of noisebridge" to pledge to donate $10 a month. My feeling
is that $10 a month is something that many very casual visitors to NB
would be content to part with, merely to guarantee that something like
NB exists in San Francisco. This group doesn't want the hassle of
becoming a member, doesn't see the point of contributing $40 *without*
being a member (even though membership benefits are extremely minimal
at NB), and relies on their own memory to contribute occasionally to
Noisebridge's welfare. I think this group plans and expects to give at
least $10 to NB every month or so, but forgets or doesn't go to NB as
much as they would like. I'd like to ensure that they get their chance
to live up to their own intentions...

d.

> - moxie
>
> --
> http://www.thoughtcrime.org
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