[Noisebridge-discuss] better tech for making decisions (other hackerspaces encouraged to comment!)

Naomi Most pnaomi at gmail.com
Wed Apr 2 17:22:03 UTC 2014


One strong discussion topic that came up at the meeting tonight was
the idea of finding a better technology for discussion and
decision-making than the one we have now.

The technology we use now is meeting up at one specific time and
place, with very little discussed beforehand.  The limitations of this
technology:

* strongly advantages the viewpoints of people who have more free time.

* has demonstrably disenfranchised those who have wanted to use
"proxy" methods to voice their views.


So rather than talk about a new voting method, which would entail the
same above problems, we talked about ways to get greater participation
before a meeting, where all interested parties could participate in
the discussion topics that interest them.  Such a technology would
have the following features:

* Internal to Noisebridge (so, NOT the nb-discuss list).

* Secure (reasonably protected from surveillance by unwanted parties)

* Conducive to discussion -- bonus points for enabling
compartmentalized discussions (e.g. using collaboration software like
Github, Slack, others...)

* Accessible via as many forms of technology as possible (that's a
tough one... maybe we compromise at "you can participate via consoles
at the NB space")


Ideas surfaced such as:

* setting up a separate mailing list specifically for discussions
between members / associate members /
whatever-we-call-people-these-days, with approval needed to join the
list and very "active moderation"

* building a technology to our needs.

* finding some other technology that already embodies the structure
and accessibility we want.

I know some hackerspaces have their own bespoke tech for
decisionmaking, and I'd like to see it profiled in this thread -- its
advantages, limitations, and how well it's been working so far.


Cheers,
Naomi


-- 
Naomi Theora Most
naomi at nthmost.com
+1-415-728-7490

skype: nthmost

http://twitter.com/nthmost



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