[IMC-US] m19 coverage

[bht]

hey all.  again i was disappointed in the amount of participation in the 
m19 stuff with us imc. 

as before the austin conference, it was me and bradley and john doing a 
brunt of the work.  i saw bradley helping asad int he chatroom last 
night before i went to bed.  that was nice. 

mostly i am disappointed that no one (aside from betsy) asked to help or 
expressed any interest.  this begs the question, are people interested?  
and if people are, what is the hold up? 

we are starting a collective bookstore here in portland.  In addition to 
our house, we also own a commercial space just next to our house.  There 
are nine of us in the house.  We havent been moving forward on the 
bookstore because some folks in the house dont see it as urgently as 
others, yet continue to express interest in being a part of it.  But 
time constraints and an inability or fear to speak up has led the projet 
to stagnation. 

So it has been three people doing alot of work in the space and then 
bringing the ideas we have from working on it to everyone else because 
we operate on consensus.  When people that dont do anything just balk at 
some of the ideas, it kills progress and just makes you not want to do 
anything.  THis happened a few months ago with this project, us imc. 

My housemate neil, led us through an examble from one of the collectives 
he had been involved in in the past where during the summer many of the 
folks that expressed interest as being part of it wanted to go to other 
things and he basically covered all shifts and kept the store open.  
This led to people being angry and feeling that he was taking over the 
bookstore, because he was the only person doing the work.

I am not getting at it quickly enough, but when three people are left to 
deal with a project the project will begin to reflect those people.  The 
longer it is left that way, the less accessible a project becomes.  
Eventually it will lead to some people feeling so left out that the only 
course of action is to decry an injustice and point out folks for taking 
over a collective project.  I am not at all interested in that as a 
possibility.

I am not interested in putting so much effort into a project while so 
many others just watch.

as always, an unorganized, yet completely serious thought from bht. 

here to the possibility of woking WITH some of you one day.
bht