Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of projects/leadership-committee/2012/08/notes

Timestamp:

Aug 29, 2012, 1:08:36 AM (12 years ago)

Author:

Daniel Kahn Gillmor

Comment:

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projects/leadership-committee/2012/08/notes

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+[[PageOutline()]]
+= mfpl leadership committee meeting notes 2012-08-28 =
+
+membership meeting Oct 28 10:00→17:00  at the brecht forum.
+
+staff has planned, wants LC input.
+
+https://support.mayfirst.org/wiki/projects/membership-meeting/2012
+
+ * similar to last year's meeting
+ == Timeline to Membership Meeting ==
+
+https://support.mayfirst.org/wiki/projects/membership-meeting/2012/timeline
+
+{{{
+August 28: Discuss Membership meeting process and meeting with LC  
+August 30: Data entry: begin collecting and enter addresses and phone numbers of members 
+August 30: Initial email to members about the meeting
+
+September: send out survey to members, ask for responses to last
+ year's priorities and suggest new priorities for MFPL. Priorities are
+ general directions that the membership wants the organization to go
+ into.
+
+September 6: Finalize Postcard announcing meeting 
+September 13: Mail postcards 
+September 15: Announce request for Leadership Committee nominations (Lowdown)
+
+    MFPL will request one-paragraph bio and one-paragraph vision statement from each nominee
+
+September 20: Begin phone calls and emails 
+over September: staff writes reports: membership, finances, infrastructure, overview
+
+    reports published 1-2 weeks before the membership meeting;
+    additionally will publish all nominees for LC for membership
+    review
+
+October 1: Candidates and proposals announced and publish via the Lowdown 
+October 21: Target 200 phone calls and individual emails made/sent 
+October 21: Online voting for LC members begins. Announcement sent to LC
+
+    This is a new proposal, a departure from past years
+
+    7 day online voting period, the week before the membership
+    meeting. Members can also vote online during the membership
+    meeting itself
+
+    purpose: encourage more participation
+
+October 22: Reminder about meeting is sent 
+October 26: Last reminder about meeting 
+October 28 Meeting happens 
+meeting schedule
+
+    no need to read the full reports at the membrship meeting; instead
+    recruit a small (3-4 person) panel that might have something to
+    say and ask them to give a 10-15 minute reflection on the reports
+
+    membership meeting happens in NYC and Mexico city simultaneously.
+    Panelists are in both locations.
+
+    simultaneous or consecutive translation
+
+    joint (bi-directional) audio link so that the meeting is held concurrently.
+
+    collaborative democracy workshop is already multi-site-capable.
+}}}
+
+== Questions/Comments/Reactions: ==
+
+dkg: I like the vision; I have technical concerns about feasibility of
+some details.
+
+Having an online voting arrangement introduces the need... removes the
+secret balloting process, particularly if people can also vote in
+person during the meeting. Need to keep track of who has voted and who
+hasn't. Will that change the character of the LC voting process? I
+agree with the goal of increased participation, but online voting is
+fraught with many problems that can't be resolved. On the otherhand we
+might decide we don't care about people's ballots (?)
+
+Audio between NYC and Mexico City: wiring both rooms while avoiding
+feedback problems seems like a major challenge, no idea how that will
+work. Would like to have a fallback plan to think about; if it doesn't
+work and we try to conduct the meeting with it, it will be absolutely
+miserable.
+
+Also curious about how we'll select panelist; I really like the idea.
+
+Jamie, in response: everyone should start thinking now about who would
+be good panelists
+
+audio feedback loop: Agreed; maybe we can discuss that at next
+face-to-face support meeting, figure out a fallback that will
+definitely work
+
+anonymous voting: last year we had both online and in-person voting,
+and that was even more complicated. Would like to simplify it by not
+having in-person voting, only online. Last year this was designed
+technically to preserve an anonymous ballot; system kept track of
+which orgs voted but didn't link that record to the vote they cast.
+
+That said, any time you log in and vote, there will probably be a way
+to guess who voted for whom.
+
+This is an important political decision for LC; Jamie proposes that
+this is a comrpomise to make wider participation possible. dkg agrees
+that this is an ok tradeoff
+
+mallory: providing streaming audio for folks not in MXC or NYC; last
+year there was an audio stream; i didn't watch the video; and there
+was an IRC channel that someone could read from.  I don't necessarily
+need the two-way, but i do want the stream to follow what's going on.
+
+jamie: i really want bidirectional audio somehow; for other folks, we
+should try for one way audio (outbound) and have a text channel back
+(similar to last year).  ~30 second lag is OK for that arrangement.
+
+dkg: are we going to record this?  are we going to discourage others
+from recording?
+
+Jamie: not opposed to recording it, though it's tough to do something
+with 9 hours of audio. Any objections?
+
+jack: i'm curious about how the reflections from panelists would be
+structured?  will each panelist cover specific reports?  or specific
+areas that they're involved in?  or less connected that way?
+
+jamie/alfredo: we haven't made any decisions there.
+
+jamie: probably looser than stricter.  give panelists leeway to
+discuss what they think is important.  each would get all the reports,
+and then they could pick up the themes that they wanted to discuss.
+
+jack: seems like it might be a good idea to make sure all reports
+should be covered.  maybe ask ahead of time to ensure there aren't any
+huge holes.
+
+alfredo: why should we put someone on a panel to discuss hillary's
+financial report or even the membership report.  they're critically
+important reports, but i don't know if a panelist could make
+reasonable commentary on it.  I was thinking we'd take jamie's report,
+divvy it up by themes and have the panelists present parts of them.
+So we don't do all the reports, just the political report from the
+director.  i might be off-base, though.
+
+jamie: jack, you're expressing a concern that people won't read the
+other reports.  but we'll distribute them ahead of time, and then also
+have them printed in front of them at the meeting.  i think people
+will get more that way.
+
+jack: maybe i misspoke; i don't expect that all the reports will be
+fully covered, i just want to make sure that the important points get
+covered.
+
+dkg: from the perspective of thinking what it would be like to be
+asked to be a panelist, and being given a huge slew of reports and
+asked to talk about what's important, I might be less intimidated by
+being assigned a section and thinking what to present based on
+that. That might be easier than being given all the sections and
+needing to distill an analysis on the whole thing.
+
+Jamie: do people have thoughts or proposals on panelists? Staff came
+up with Carlos Fazio, Mexican journalist. Great panelist: relatively
+well known in Mexico, good radical politics, a MFPL member. Any other
+ideas to put forth? Who we choose will be really important to the
+success of the meeting.
+
+Jamie: also want to throw out: is it acceptable to have a panelist
+that's not a MFPL member.
+
+dkg: wouldn't want a panelist actively opposed to being involved with
+MFPL; allies who aren't members seem fine
+
+alfredo: this panel is as if we took Jamie and made him into six
+different activists from across the country, grouping their
+experiences, reflecting on your report. The relationship to the the
+report/MFPL's work needs to be relatively intimate and on point.
+
+for example: we could take someone from SWAP to talk about
+massification of membership recruitment; but ??? is conversant with
+how MF/PL works internally, so we need some selections of people who
+know what's going on within the organization itself; members will know
+more about the on-the-ground issues.  this is jamie's report!
+
+jamie: our goal is to have people who are members; but our need is to
+have people who can converse intelligently about the goals of the
+organization.
+
+dkg: wondering whether you were thinking that LC members should be
+part of this panel or presentation or not.
+
+jamie: all LC members are candidates for that. Certainly not thinking
+that LC members should be excluded, they would be fine on the panel. I
+also think that any LC candidates would be great.
+
+jack: jamie, by wanting to find folks who are conversant with the
+issues, it made me wonder what you think the themes might be.
+
+jamie: i haven't written the report; i plan on having a draft in the
+next week or two that i'll share with workers and the LC.  The general
+sense of what i meant is: we need someone who is able and ready to get
+their hands dirty with the politics of the organization and the
+technology; the need to own our own infrastructure and what that
+means, and so on.
+
+jamie: in particular, for this meeting, we'll want to talk about being
+bi-national; what is the impact on adding over 100 mexican orgs, how
+does it affect our political outlook and what does it mean for the
+organization?
+
+jack: in part i ask because the topics that folks would be talking
+about would affect my choices of who i would propose as members for
+the panel.  so more details of the report would help.
+
+carlos: panel logistics: is this something that we're asking them for
+the whole day, or could a panelist just show up for the report part?
+
+jamie: we'd want them for the whole day but we could be flexible.
+
+jack: collaborative democracy workshop is always something that feels
+cumbersome and not completely successful.  I realize i bring this up
+often and don't have a constructive counterproposal.  i've also heard
+that feedback from other people at the event.  i think it might be
+useful to think about either changing that approach completely, or how
+the process could change; what are the goals that we could maybe meet
+some other way?
+
+jamie: goals: to provide membership with the ability to shape the
+priorities of the organization. The big vision for that is that the
+members pick the main priorities; then it's the job of the LC to
+propose and pass more specific proposals for how to achieve those
+goals and priorities. It's pretty straightforward (?) piece for the
+membership to do. With the org now straddling both Mexico and the US,
+it's challenging to figure out how one group of people can do that in
+one afternoon. That's one reason to be very partial to the
+collaborative democracy workshop; for whatever its struggles and
+difficulties, it's relatively successful in being able to do that. I
+think there are some changes, in fact one in particular: adding some
+sort of chat to it. Having a chat isn't as critical when everyone's in
+the same room, but with multiple locations having chat might relieve
+some of the pressure that people feel by providing direct
+communication. That's one small change that I could make; if other
+people have ideas about suggestions, I'm all ears.
+
+alfredo: i thnk that there's any question that the decision-making at
+the last membership meeting was extremely lacking.  we weren't able to
+implement most of the decisions made by membership, and the decisions
+themselves as general directions were too broad and amorphous and the
+LC didn't implement a lot of that stuff.  that's part of the
+growing-up process.  no surprise.  I think the LC needs to be more
+proactive about what the challenges are and what some of the issues
+are that the membership needs to decide to move forward.  Just doing
+an amorphous thing about growth doesn't cover the important thing
+about what we do hemispherically.  we have severe differences within
+the membership and within the leadership committee.  Jamie and i just
+go and do something or the staff does.  If LC can tell membership what
+these issues are and ...  that can make a friendly conversation into a
+more political discussion.  we need debates and discussion where these
+things can be brought into relief.  I intend to flesh this out in my
+own thing i write as an LC member.  I think that explains some of the
+triumphs and some of the stagnations of the organization.
+
+jack: i think one of the things that seems important here in the
+collaborative democracy workshop is to be clear what we're asking the
+membership to come up with; i've been in some CDW's where it seemed
+like what we wrote right then would be published someplace, which gets
+into wordsmithing instead of broader understandings and priorities.
+depending on what we're asking people to provide might help people
+focus better.
+
+jack: it's also hard with this tool and this workshop to indicate
+relative priorities.  people don't seem to be able to indicate what
+they might care about more seriously.  if there are limited resources
+and limited time, how do they prioritize?  it would be useful to hear
+about that.
+
+jamie: re: alfredo's comments: our survey in which we propose 5 or 6
+priorities should be written in a somewhat extreme way, propose things
+in an extreme way so that people want to respond, and use that to
+jumpstart the CDW.  What jack made me realize now is that what the CDW
+encourages now is wordsmithing and endorsing, but not ranking.
+Ranking suggests a different tool.  imagine a CDW where there are 5 or
+6 priorities and your group needs to consider the rankings.  then
+there could be an accumulation of rankings to see which ones come out
+on top.
+
+alfredo: but you also want the membership to discuss it.  wordsmithing
+can be annoying, but it can also be a conceptual disagreement being
+phrased and framed.  Part of the CDW idea is to see the importance of
+their language; and exercise in getting people together to think about
+how to use language.  we were thinking of ways to get worldwide and
+hemispheric discussion happening.  It may not be the tool for the
+meeting.  people view it as an exercise, so they do all kinds of
+things: battle over nuance, etc.  i don't think there's enough
+realization that this will be setting the workload and direction for a
+bunch of people.  I have trepidations over the CDW, but on the other
+hand expecting people to raise their hand and go to a mic might be a
+bad thing too.  i don't have answer!
+
+mallory: i need to get off the call.  nice hearing all of you!  i'm
+excited about the meeting, and will be available for more help <exits>
+
+jamie: seems like Jack and Alfredo are both saying that people don't
+grasp what people's responses are going to used for. Obvious
+suggestion: better framing before starting the workshop, which can
+help but only go so far
+
+jamie: wordsmithing suggestion: what if we put a severe character
+limit?
+
+jack: seems like there are good ideas coming out of this for the CDW.
+we could get feedback from all the groups, and maybe have a scribe in
+each group that records "what didn't you like, what did you like, how
+could we improve it?"  then you could get the feedback and details,
+and lend some nuance.  it would also be better than just seeing what
+the last word was.
+
+my other thought is that the hemispheric/bilingual nature is going to
+be even tougher on the wordsmithing front, esp. if there is lingo or
+poltiical jargon.  if we're going to have that participation it's
+going to be even harder.
+
+jamie: challenge is figuring out how to provide a space for people to
+reflect on the issues AND share feedback with the other
+groups. Particularly interested in having that happen between Mexico
+and NY.
+
+dkg: The CDW internally has a record of whats been edited and changed;
+just because what's displayed is the last edit. A change that would be
+useful would be to find the edit that had the most endorsements on
+point A and highlight *that* at the end, or something like
+that. Jack's proposal about getting nuance and comments/feedback is
+useful; I see some sort of way to do that within the current
+framework. Eg when you make an edit, explain why your group made that
+edit in a few words. Also thinking about the relationship between CDW
+and a ranking exercise; smells like straightforward vote arrangement;
+that could miss out on the discussion part of it. Group discussion is
+really useful; that's very different than thinking about what to get
+out of it at the end. Maybe those two things shouldn't be explicitly
+tied together; we can make it clear when we're aiming to get people
+talking, hear where folks are coming from, what they agree and
+disagree with, and also make it clear when we're actually trying to
+set an agenda. Maybe what makes it hard is trying to do both of those
+things.
+
+alfrdeo: i'm assuming that we'll divide int groups of 5 or 6 in both
+places.  it strikes me that the people in mexico are going to be a lot
+less conversant with the history of the org than the folks in the US.
+the major challenge is that the org, when it talks about politics has
+to incorporat in its language the reality of mexico, which is very
+different from the reality of the US.  this is delicate because a bad
+experience on the part of the mexican members could result in them
+leaving, or at least in many of them not helping to build the
+organization.  many of the mexican members aren't particularly
+comfortable with collaborating with folks in the US.  this is 1/7th of
+our membership so we need to make sure we really bend over backward to
+invite them.  the CDW as we have it framed is a minefield politically.
+
+alfredo: you put something up on the board in spanish, and someone
+else that you don't even see (from the US) goes and changes it in 5
+minutes.  it comes across emotionally as yet another imperialist grab,
+even for epople who unerstand the situation technically and
+intellectually.  care has to be taken on this issue.
+
+dkg: is there any way to enforce that the groups themselves could be
+binational within the CDW?
+
+jack: the translation issues and communications issues alone are
+really challenging.  alfredo is completely right on in what he said,
+and it makes me leery about how to handle the workshop as one big
+workshop.  i think it could be really bad for people to see their work
+be wiped away by a remote party, and people in mexico will see
+themselves as being excluded.  maybe two separate workshops?  though
+that is difficult too.
+
+jamie: yes, and despite the very real challenges you describe, i think
+it's also really important to try to do this.  I think it's good if we
+can try to have people try to creatively and respectfully engage
+across cultures and nations, and is worth the risk of a bad result.
+
+jack: i almost think there is a guarantee of a bad result with the
+tool as it stands now, for two reasons: timing and typing and language
+fluency is aggravating.  also, while doing the engagement right you
+describe would be awesome, i'm not convinced that we'd be able to do
+it effectively enough, especially as a roomful of US folks trying to
+engage with others.  i say this even as a spanish-speaking latino in
+the us.
+
+alfredo: I'm absolutely sure that it's a certainty that people will
+get pissed off about it. I agree with you to some extent, that is to
+be understood and is part of the learning process; there's no one here
+with bad intentions and everyone understands that. The issue that Jack
+just raised is: is it too much learning, and are we demanding too much
+learning and growth in a session where people should be concentrating
+on setting the organizational path. (We're running out of time, and
+this group is fairly small.) There has to be much more instruction at
+the very least before the meeting takes place, not during the
+introduction. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise: maybe we can use
+the fact that we're hemispheric to talk about a new way of talking,
+conversing, decision-making, and talk about how that works; pioneer
+that to some extent, which would require some things being sent out to
+membership and some conversations.
+
+alfredo: I don't think we should go into the CDW the same way that we
+did last year, because the organization is so radically different that
+to involve the membership in the discussion, we must practice a huge
+degree of sensitivity about how decisions are made.
+
+dkg: We seem to be batting around ideas of different things to get out
+of this workshop, including bad things; in terms of the things we
+want, it sounds like people are saying the possibility of figuring out
+a new way to engage is in itself a [good thing]. That's very different
+than saying we're going to hash out the program for the organization
+via this workshop. Having the opportunity to interact with fellow
+members is a critical part of the membership meeting, particularly
+when operating under the kind of gulf that we have. Maybe that goal is
+more important than a CDW, more important to find ways to open those
+conversations so people can see where these conversations are
+difficult
+
+Carlos: last year was the first time I participated in the CDW; it was
+new to me, and there was that feeling of working hard on a proposal
+and it disappearing. Having time to reflect and talk about the process
+in the small group; we didn't have that so much. Is there a way to do
+it so that it's a merge-type workshop where there's some aspect that
+is voting/online/live thing that we do, but there's also more nuance,
+connection to how people felt during the process, obviously very well
+facilitated. That would have made me feel that the work we did in our
+small group last year, coming up with different principles and
+proposals, was somehow recognized.
+
+Jamie: we usually have that at the end of each workshop; we didn't do
+it last year. Maybe ran out of time.
+
+Jamie: another thing with the CDW is that we normally don't pre-seed
+it with priorities, particularly based on feedback from survey, would
+give us an opportunity to start the workshop differently. Break into
+small groups, online part isn't enabled, spend a good chunk of time
+discussing what's there with your group before typing anything
+in. Might give the chance to have that level of engagement without
+having to frantically type things in.
+
+Jamie: the history is kept; the interface gives the impression that
+it's disappeared, but we've just disappeared it. I wonder if there's a
+way to make it more visible and prominent to get more of the nuance
+that Carlos is talking about.
+
+jack: are we anticipating that there will be translation going on?
+
+jamie: we did that in guatemala and ny in 2008, and the wsf in 2009 in
+4 languages (which was crazy and fun).  the way that translation works
+is that when you're editing, you have both edit fields visible, and
+can copy/paste yourself, or use machine translation.
+
+jack: the translation seems problematic; maybe we don't want machine
+translation since they're so bad.
+
+jack: wondering if there's openness to doing something other than the
+CDW?
+
+jamie: I'm open; I do think CDW is valuable, we don't have much time
+before the membership meeting to implement something else.
+
+dkg: we might not be able to make the changes necessary to the CDW to
+make the tool meet our goals, e.g. remote communication would be
+critical. If the goal is to make it feel like one organization, not
+having that ability to facilitate communication would make people feel
+even more isolated.
+
+Jamie: I don't think we've come to a conclusive decision, but this
+conversation has been incredibly productive and useful. Let's think
+through next steps, moving this forward, make some assignments and
+figure out follow-up.
+
+dkg: seems like there's an open question about whether the goal for
+the CDW time-slot in the agenda is a decision-making process or a
+communication/facilitation process.
+
+== NEXT STEPS: ==
+
+ * We need a proposal for how to achieve this goal of inter-member discussion on priorities.
+  * jack: i could write up a proposal about how to have the
+    conversation/facilitation section of the meeting.  i could get it
+    done by the end of sunday.
+  * carlos: this is a holiday
+  * (conversation between folks on the call about how to give
+    proposals for CDW or alternatives; agreement that we can put out
+    at least a couple of proposals for how to approach it and discuss
+    further on the LC list.)
+  * carlos: if CDW was included, it should be changed to respond to
+    the concerns that have come out of using it in the past. If we can
+    figure out ways of including the CDW in the more conversation-type
+    workshop, there could be a possibility of joining them
+  * jamie: i'll put together a proposal of how we might modify the CDW
+    to address some of the concerns raised here.
+  * dkg: most of the concerns folks have raised about the CDW, I have
+    in general about the whole meeting. It will be difficult, people
+    will get annoyed and frustrated, there will be technical glitches
+    and logistical aspects that piss people off; nonetheless, I think
+    it's good that we do it. I mean this about the entire meeting, not
+    just the CDW. What we're proposing is a challenging process:
+    multinational, multi-lingual, multi-site concurrent meeting of
+    lots of groups that haven't met before.  It will be difficult and
+    we shouldn't expect to come out of it without a few scrapes.
+  * Jack and Jamie will work on these and get them sent to the LC by
+    end of day Sunday.
+ * We need to draft initial priorities for the membership survey that will be sent out in September.
+  * Jamie: purpose of afternoon is to either set and/or discuss
+    organizatinal priorities for the coming year. The survey will be
+    before the meeting, get folks to vote on what they like, let folks
+    add new points; the results will help shape the pre-seeded
+    priorities for the afternoon discussion. Will also let membership
+    start thinking about the priorities, think politically, come
+    prepared to discuss.
+  * Jamie: also demonstrate we mean by priorities, what the scope of
+    an organizational priority is, by giving some examples. Don't want
+    members to come up with things that are so broad they are
+    meaningless OR so specific that they're [not actually useful in
+    terms of actual implementation] (that's a huge paraphrase!)
+  * Carlos: I can work on it, helpful to work with someone else,
+    bounce ideas off of folks
+  * Jamie can work on it as well
+