[Noisebridge-discuss] Sleeping at NB

[jim]

excellent take on consensus and process! thanks! 

   i like the idea of narrow roles assigned either 
per volunteer or, lacking a volunteer, by random 
assignment. 


On Mon, 2010-12-27 at 17:53 -0500, Moxie Marlinspike wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
> > * 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."
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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.
> 
> - moxie
>