[Noisebridge-discuss] Sleeping in the Space AND Death and Taxes

[Danny O'Brien]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 9:02 AM, Al Jigen Billings
<albill at openbuddha.com> wrote:
> You know, the 25+ message thread of BS in the last 12 hours or so, once AGAIN, about people sleeping in the space may actually have something to do with the Death and Taxes thread and why NB cannot seem to get people to reliably give money to the space. Why give money to an organization that, even when it consenses on how it wants to be, where people will simply, in the name of anarchist principles, do whatever the hell they want to do in spite of consensus?
>
> Jake, some people don't want to talk to every person sleeping in order to find out *why* they are doing so. They simply want them not to do it, class distinctions or not. I find it amazingly stupid that y'all spent a month of arguing at great length about this recently and yet here it is again. Is it a hackerspace or a hippie crashpad, people?

I am very interested in whether this is true or not. It's
understandable to assume that this particular [drama] (or [drama] in
general) and the [no money] are causally connected, because they
happened simultaneously. I sort of assumed this myself (but was also
sceptical, because Noisebridge The Place does not equal NB-discuss,
NB-IRC or any other self-selecting subset of users. To test the
hypothesis is partly what the poll is about (though right now I am
just testing to see whether it is even true of NB-discuss).

http://j.mp/noisepoll <-- click on the poll! DOOOO ITTTTT

I can't speak to the poll results yet, but a casual look at the
membership stats would indicate that the theory is more tentative than
you'd think: as I said, the churn rate for members abdicating their
membership is <5% p.a. over the three year life of NB, and that's
really not that bad. This may go up as we track down more people who
we have no records for payment, but right now the dominate
explanations for non-payment are not "It's too full of people sleeping
on sofas" and far more "I'm sorry, times are hard, can I go on
hiatus?" and "What? I thought I *was* paying you guys! WTF?".

Of course, people may also be being polite, or be slowly devaluing NB
*because* they don't go there so often because of the atmospherics,
which is indeed part of the reason why I started the poll, to see if I
could tease out any subtler problems (and opportunities).

We're all outliers to an extent, which is I think a feature of NB's
desire for diversity and openness (and one of the reasons why, as
Moxie says, it  feels less like a community
and more like a public resource used by a bunch of communities). I
think there's definitely a community of people who are worried about
the knock-on effect of sleepers and the whole hippy crashpad thing.
There's also a community of people who feel that the anarchic stance
of NB makes up for these free-riding problems, and there's definitely
a community of people who think that the anarchic principles can be
applied to solving whatever the "sleeping people" problem is.  Many of
us are in one of these groups, but that doesn't spell out what the
wider proportions are.


d.




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