[Imc-makerspace] Thursday's organizational meeting: notes for discussion.

[Erich Heine]

Hello everyone,

At Thursday's meeting we had a discussion about the space, its organization,
and it's future.

The discussion began  2 Thursdays ago when some folks interested in starting
a hacker space in Springfield showed up to the wireless mesh reading group,
and started asking organizational questions. A few other people (myself
included) who are new to the group also started asking questions, and the
conversation carried over into this last Thursday.

I was asked to put these notes on the mailing list to facilitate a
discussion of them amongst the membership that wasn't present at that
meeting.

The conversaion started with discussion of the vision of the space and
the principles by which the space should abide.

For Vision, we decided we thought the current mission/vision statement from
the website covered the idea pretty well.

For Principles:

* There should be jobs/roles for certain key tasks (see below)
* Roles are strictly volunteer
* Roles convey no special privilege
* Strive to keep membership/dues rates as low as possible
* Donations and Dues are private to the member (opt-out)
* The space should be self-sustaining w/out Americorps help.
* The group should generally governed via consensus

We then discussed various roles we felt would be good for the space.
These roles may not end up having a 1:1 mapping with jobs, but completeness
a this stage is considered beneficial.

* Keymaster
- on the lease
- tracks and distributes space keys
* Treasurer
- Knows the financial state of the group
- Interacts with the IMC finance committee
- Tracks/collects dues

* Business Development (or some better name, e.g. outreach coordinater?)
- mail brochures to potentially interested people
- participate in IMC foundation group
- advertise/promote/etc successes and mission

* Quartermaster/inventory specialist

* root (webmaster, other IT infrastructure)

* safety officer

* representative/spokesperson
- be the contact person for the "outside world"
- maybe be person for new attendees to talk to?

Communication and Consensus was also a topic of discussion:

* We talked about email or other electronic consensus, for small and
moderate issues, deciding that it would be a reasonable way to reach
consensus unless someone blocks or wants to discuss it in a "real business
meeting"

* We discussed the idea that sometimes people are incommunicado for a while,
or otherwise unable to attend meetings. As such, we liked the idea of
bi-monthly agendas, giving some warning on topics coming up (when possible)
so those with concerns can get them to the group prior to the vote.

* Alternatives to Email were brought up, as a better medium for discussion
and consensus building. Suggestions include:
+ forum
+ wiki
+ polls
+ skype
+ IM/IRC/other chat
+ Google Wave


Finally we had some actions for this coming thursday (and who was assigned
that task):

* Bringing these principles, roles, and ideas to the list for
discussion (Erich)
* /root tasks - freshen up the website a bit (Brian, Isaac)
* Look into and possibly demo the communication alternatives (Isaac)
* A short (approx 1/2 page) document on what new attendees can expect from
the space and it's members. (Derek)
* Put together a list of successes that the space has had (Brian)

So, what comments, thoughts, etc are out there on this?

Regards,
Erich
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