[Noisebridge-discuss] Let's talk about: Noisebridge Membership

Al Sweigart asweigart at gmail.com
Thu Mar 27 21:06:12 UTC 2014


+1 Adrian.

Consensus worked fine when Noisebridge was new and small and everyone was
ideologically homogenous (or didn't mind either way). Everyone pretty much
_already_ agreed, and there wasn't a constant group of people squatting at
the space.

But now we have the multiple instances of people walking in late to
meetings and then blocking a measure that had at that same meeting passed
consensus, or people objecting that some items didn't _legitimately_ pass
consensus and that they should be able to effectively block them
retroactively.

Maybe "nuclear option" isn't a good way to describe blocking; countries
don't fire off nukes at each other nearly this often.


On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 2:00 PM, Adrian Chadd <adrian.chadd at gmail.com>wrote:

> Grah!
>
> There's no guardians of the consensus process. That's .. the whole point.
>
> The whole point of consensus is that everyone is supposed to work
> together towards a common goal. They're supposed to make compromises.
> They're supposed to act in good faith. They're supposed to make things
> take the appropriate amount of time and not rush things.
>
> But it's easily derailed by people who don't wish to bend from their
> stance.
>
> If there's no immediate threat to the status quo, there's no pressure
> to try and come to some or any agreement to move things forward. I
> think having no real pressure from things like "the cops are about to
> make things unpleasant if we don't fix the (perceived or not
> perceived) drug problem" or "someone's deciding to sue us because
> we're not meeting duty of care requirements". From my understanding
> there's no immediate threat to being unable to pay the lease and
> no-one has been stabbed recently. For the most part the issues being
> discussed can be mostly ignored by a non-insignificant group of people
> who I've met at NB because it doesn't apply to them.
>
> That's why I'm hesitant of the whole idea of consensus as being
> broadly applicable. It requires a lot more good faith than I see going
> on in many groups here. There are other groups (eg my experiences with
> Sudo) where consensus works out, but it works there because there's
> no-one I've met who seems to really take a contrary position and stall
> things. Everyone seems to get along and mostly be aligned to the same
> set of goals.
>
> I could talk more, but I have actual open source code to debug and fix
> and publish.
>
>
>
> -a
>
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