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Meeting Notes 2019 02 05
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=== GUILDS === What if, instead of "Noisebridge Membership", how about I come to the sewing area, and it turns out they have a guild, and they have a process, and they have agreed as a guild to uphold the values of Noisebridge, so you become a member of the sewing guild, then you're a member of the greater Noisebridge. Fileline: I feel like it might add a lot of bureaocratic complexity. It could all work out just fine, but I'm focusing on the negative. Is this a solution for membership complexity? What if we could eliminate the ambiguity of what membership meant, would that solve the problem? Naomi: The ideals of NB Membership and the pragmatics are at odds with each other. It's possible that we could just fix this by realigning the expectation. We could also fix this by not having members? Fineline: I think the problem as you see it, could be solved, if we had a group that met every week that talked about what these ideas meant. What if some of us members just wrote some shit down and put it up about what membership is, and took some time to make it non-ambiguous? Would it solve the problem? Ryan: Sounds like we're trying to discuss the Guilds and Membership stuff together -- are we talking about using Guilds as Membership -- Naomi: YES Ryan: -- or are they about using Guilds to manage resources? Naomi: Also yes! Ryan: If we do this, do we need to get rid of the existing membership structure? Just shift some ideas of membership in this new style. Housekeeping should be distributed over, but e.g. sewing machine maintenence should be for that guild. Victoria: I'm not making any direct response -- i want to explain my experience being a KDE developer and how similar it might be to this Guilds idea. Right now i work in Law! I was an engineer for KDE; If you've used Amarok I'm sorry/grateful you've experienced my work. It's a massive commnunity, bigger than 20 Noisebridges. Huge, all over the planet -- literally all over the planet. Brazil, China, islands. I informally became a member of the KDE multimedia team, i was just showing up and doing the work. If you're part of a subgroup, you're part of KDE. Eventually I was the lead of KDE multimedia. That also meant I was part of a big part of KDE generally. It was my responsiblity to work on collaboration across other teams. What tied these communities together (sysadmins, conference organizers, lots of disparate groups) is we all used this shared infrastructure (just like NB!). Maintained by many of us... not all of us. Nuts and bolts: the sysadmins maintained the servers, I didn't, I just ran stuff on the servers. It's had growing pains as any anarchist collective does. ANARCHO-SYDNICALIST PARADISE:society composed of smaller societies (Guilds, if you will!) and at the fringes is where you interact with other groups. The risk of not collaborating is no longer being part of KDE. So at Noisebridge we might do the same by having Electronics Guilds, Sewing Guild, etc. We all use the front door. We all use the wifi. To manage these common things were the sysadmin group that maintained infrastructure. I don't think NB's problems are all unique (maybe the combo is unique) but there's a lot of other anarchist communities we could model ourselves after. Rando: (I only run KDE in a chroot.) Currently Members have a legal distinction, so we could make a distinction between legal Members and Consensing Members. If NB had 99 Members you would have to appease all of them to be the 100th member. Would that person have to be essentially BLAND to make it through? You can join multiple Guilds! It's not a competition or territory, it's about your interests. Tim: A lot of interest groups here, but not all of them are represented well at these meetings. Getting more representation from less-visible groups is a positive thing about Guilds. Naomi: <jazz hands> Lemons: Steve, reflecting on your comments earlier about clarifying memberhsip. Things made a lot more sense before we had this idea of philanthropists. It was well intentioned, but the problem is I could never understand the difference between a philanthropist and a member. When you asked what the prospective philanthropists what they wanted to contribute, it sounded a lot like memberships. Steve: <tries to interrupt> Lemons: <aint having it> Lemons: The grey zone between Phil and Membership confuses ME and I've been here a while! Anarchosyndicalism is very well founded in other communities, like Occupy. Individual groups that had topics of interest. They bring the things that affect everybody to the broader table. I like the idea of Guilds, also think Rando's point was really good -- we have a 501c3 situation that required Membership. Philanthropy never made sense to me. Victoria: Interesting about lowercase c consensus... i would argue NB already has Guilds. It's more like delineating these boundaries. In practice, I don't give a shit how the sewing guild runs the sewing area. If they make changes, I don't have a say, I don't use this stuff. If something big comes up, I trust they'd bring it to the rest of the community. Like we already have these groups, now we'll just write it down. Ryan: This is starting to remind me of some of the meeting conversations we've had over the last 3 years: member, or ranger, all of that stuff. It seems like it's always something we talk about every 6 months or something. Now seems like a very critical time to figure this stuff out. Come up with good names for the separation scheme. Earlier, during the explanation about consensus, I think more than one person was confused about little vs. big C consensus. Or also user/philanthropist/member of the space which can add a lot of confusion, and some of our explanations are complex because the naming schemes requires us to over-define things. Naomi: Another benefit of trying to do AnarSynd-Utopia here in the space, Tim brought up that some of the groups don't have a lot of representation at the table. We can't have a 100 person conversation. We have a lot of resources that go unmaintained, like I can't get access to <blah> because I don't have the password and don't know who has it, or know someone who knows who has access. One of the visions was that guilds could keep knowledge in a person container. If someone asks "how to get into this rack?" there's knowledge about who to ask. This kind of already exists, but could be more apparent. What you get as a consequence of guilds is more recognition of who is doing what. Fineline: All of these people have the opportunity to come to the meeting and participate. I feel like this is already happening naturally. You're trying to codify it to solve a problem, frustration with Membership, but I think that could work better by just communicating Membership better. You're talking about what positivity Guilds can add, but I'm concerned that adding bureaucratic layers leave more opportunity for people to come in and GAME the system. We've seen lots of that here. People who have nothing better to do. So I'd love to hear more anecdotes, stories, narratives about why this would be better. Alex: We do have informally guilds of various kinds, and they have degrees of "meeting the definition" of what we image a fully fleshed out guild might be. Some groups have/haven't had situations where there's been a need for provisions and chains of knowledge. I see initial value of the guild as a brainstorming/template as ways that guilds can be excellent: if you're doing a guild, try one of these things that might make the most sense for yours. PyClass was able to keep consistent classes. CHM needs rebooting; used to have the most consistent and impressive meetups. I looked up to other groups, "my group should do that too." I'd say the min deinition of a Guild is a Set of Design Practices -- to be Excellent, it's an addressable GROUP so you can help people find resources, find people, etc. I like the idea of having a formal definiton of what a guild is. I want the gamedev group to be an exemplar of all of this. Multiple teachers, multiple updators to the Meetup group. If another guild likes these things, they can do it too, and we can add it to the guild templates. THe part that I'm unsure about is the idea of changing Noisebridge Membership. I always thought that philanthropy functionally great, example of hacker space in Germany for people visiting for CCC: easy to get added for short period of time, but if they're a problem, easy to expell. If we intermix Guilds and Membership, I want to hear a good case for it. What will and won't work? What are the problems and good things about it? The first thing I wanted to ask is, not that someone *wants* to game the system, but e.g. adding students to Slack is too high friction. Only if students frequently attend do they get on Slack. Victoria: I agree with a lot of what Alex said. While ppl were talking, been thinking about a way to describe this. In my org'ing at Noisebridge, I've come to see that there's kind of a core infra guild. I've called it "the working set", like the working set of hard drives, you lose one you swap it out and swap in a fresh one. The sysadmin team at KDE kept things running. It might be worth writing down a list of priorities for infrastructure. Certain things would really tank Noisebridge. If someone blew up the roof internet laser -- we have a vested interested in keeping that running as a whole community. The sewing machines are really important to the sewing people, the soldering irons are important to the electronics people, but losing tehse things wouldn't ruin Noisebridge. Important to think about in terms of how guilds might delinate the responsibility. Disputes within the Gamebridge, maybe that's self contained. If it spills out, then it makes me think about what Naomi said about a community therapist. Some group -- some body of people who work on these kinds of inter-guild conflicts. To tie it all together: what's the critical infrastructure and what's membership vs. philanthropods? There's low collective risk for someone for someone to be a philanthropod, but there's very high risk for someone having access to our bank account. We don't want any "Rando" to have access to our bank account. If we think about the barrier to entry between membership and the p-word, you have to go through the community and build up trust for member, but not so much for philanthopy. If we have a meta-guild, that could be like Noisebridge Membership, that the other guilds rely on to keep things running at the space. That's not how we traditionally defined membership. The members of the guillitines are the ones to guild guilds? Philanthropists are guild members? Maybe we don't change how philanthropy works, but re-name membership as "guild of guilds". Maybe if you start a guild, you need a member, but that might re-introduce some problems. Ryan: Gamebridge is a good example of both faults, e.g. passcode to the VR machine. We haven't put it online, but we have a notion of different levels; the basic code (e.g. to use the computer) could be pretty public, but the cabinet with the computer has a lock with a more secret code -- separation of issues. There have been times where we've had problems: we had a guest account once and someone changed the password, and we didn't know what it was. We already do guild-like things a lot; if this is codified, it could be more bureaucratic, but it could also be more efficient -- you might know who you need to get in touch with. Rando: If this takes off, can we call this the "guilded age"? <groan and laughs> I currently would not have the access to do the things I do without Philanthropy. It really helps with the middle layers, and it's useful. I think we are definitely talking about the definition of membership. I have pretty significant trust and social capital, so I don't personally need membership, just need to talk to members. Right now, we only have one rule, and I don't know if we need any more. Fineline: I think we should be clear about what the definitions are. Tim: How do you become a formal guild? (Naomi: don't know -- half baked idea) How do you deal with abuse/trolls? What are the benefits of being a guild? How does leadership work for guilds? Naomi: The reason why I like tying guild memberhsip with noisebridge membership is the idea of having stake in having a guild and maintaining a group of people. Yes, we have guild-like objects (laser, gamebridge), but I am curious what could happen when it takes some amount of work and investment to become a formal member of a guild. Not just attending a class, but jumping through hoops defined by the guild. The guild itself would be Consensed upon by the Noisebridge organization and agreed upon so they can serve as a proxy for membership. I want to explore what if Noisebridge is too big for its britches at this point. Alex: A pattern that worked in the past is philanthropy, it solved a problem of membership by creating a new category. If we imagine certain aspects of guilds and how we might create benefits for becoming members of a guild. We may try: e.g. if you're a guild member + noisebridge member, would it make it easier to expand the membership group? Use the term "exemplary" guild to do things that have been "exemplarary" in the space, rather than a checklist. One challenge we've faced is card access: we have a way to go before it's as accessible as possible. The wiki pages that document e.g. 3D printers needed improvements so I did that about 6 months ago. The goal for a guild in my mind in this initial phase is: we come up with the current ways we are doing things, think/discuss about how we might make them better and what we've learned. The term I would use for the people responsible for infrastructural things: I would not tie to membership/philanthropists but have it be "maintainer" that's independent of those other concepts. Knowing how a things works and sheparding it. As long as we identify an exemplarary guild needs to have at least one maintainer for critical things. Minimize bus factor for maintainer roles. For teaching, we have about 4 people who could cover. We should have the documentation in place to get a new person up to speed, so even if all 4 of us get on a bus, there's still persistence. Exemplrary: existence of 2+ maintainers and existence of documentation. Victoria: I like what Alex is saying -- it's really good, especially about changing how we use the rhetoric. The way we talk about things is really important and thinking about power dynamics. History of other anarchist collectives: we don't have guild leaders/masters but maybe we do have delegates. The members of the guild choose someone to represent their intersts, given a mandate but no authority; the delegates themselves could be the core infrastructure guild.
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