[Noisebridge-discuss] membership rosta

[Danny O'Brien]

On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 3:09 PM, Rubin Abdi <rubin at starset.net> wrote:
> Personally I think this is not that beneficial of an idea. Creating a list
> would just give people more of a foot hold to act pertinacious about being a
> member. A few hack spaces I've been to really had this line drawn between
> the first class citizens of membership and second class guests. It sort of
> gives this self entitled right to things over others (when really members
> aren't much different from anyone else here at Noisebridge), simply because
> there's a list exclusively containing the names of a certain type of person.
>
> I like walking into Noisebridge and not seeing people doing fun and exciting
> things in the space as either a "member" or not. I like just having a
> default label for everyone as excellent hacker.

I think this is a good description of one of the arguments against it.
I wanted someone to spell this out a bit more clearly, because it's
useful to eke out these things.

Actually, about the only reason I can think of for doing it, is a
small weirdness that I've only recently noticed, which is while we
*say* that consensed members have only one power to block, they've
also these days been considered the only people who can sponsor
somebody for membership, and it can be tricky to discover who might
sponsor you. Maybe just something on the form that says (if you'd like
to find suggestions for who to sponsor you, mail noisebridge-discuss
might do it).

Thanks for replying!

d.



>
> I'm not saying don't do it, but if I was not on hiatus and felt like digging
> my fingers back into the politics of the space beyond writing something a
> simple as listing out my thoughts in email while barting to Hater Faire, I
> would point out that this is an extremely drastic change from our initially
> consented on policy of keeping the member list private and only accessible
> through pinging someone on the board, treasurer or secretary as to the
> status of membership for a particular name, and thusly would require another
> round of discussion and consensus before being changed to what you're
> proposing. I would most likely block based off of what I stated above.
>
> There's also this added logistical problem of maintaining the list and also
> potentially spilling the beans on the number of anonymous members.
>
> Now if you just created a public wiki page and said on discuss "HEY IF YOU
> THINK YOU'RE A MEMBER AND FEEL LIKE PUTTING YOUR NAME ON THIS LIST, FUCKING
> GO FOR IT" but following what was agreed on within the walls of 83c, no
> verification goes into that list, I think that would work without the need
> for consensus. I would totally put my name on that list even though I'm not
> currently a member in good standing. Why? Because I'm a fucking legend and
> have on a number of occasions used the line, "I'm a founding member of
> Noisebridge" to shut opinionated-new-people-to-the-space up. Yes I'm a bad
> person.
>
> --
> Rubin
> rubin at starset.net