Hey everyone,
I've been focusing on serving the membership working group for a few months, and I'd like to highlight some issues I see with our new member joining process.
1. It's not clear what membership means. Longtime sudo room members have told me that membership isn't necessary to participate, it's just a designation that allows you to weigh in on consensus proposals and endorse members. This isn't the impression the word has with any new members I've spoken to, though. The term for most people signifies belonging, and an allowance to attend events, and this misunderstanding is particularly accute in my experience when dealing with BiPOC folks, women, anyone new to tech or hackerspaces... just anyone who doesn't arrive with a preexisting sense of belonging to the dominant cultural ingroup.
2. The new member process puts up a lot of barriers to joining. When people discover Sudo Room, they often arrive with a sense of excitement to dive in, and then when I start walking through the steps, I watch all that excitement dissipate. The endorsement process, for instance, feels like a massive mud patch on a foot track. It seems to interrupt people's ability to focus on learning about who we are by creating an open-ended social challenge. Once again, I don't think tech bros who show up or have been members since the begining experience this at all, but if you're new to the town, or you've never been part of a hackerspace, this is stressful and confusing. I felt this way when I joined, and a new member just told me exactly this: they're non-white, their non-male, and they've never felt like tech spaces were built with them in mind. They really went outside their comfort zone and met people at events and got the endorsements, but it seems to be working completely against our interests to put up an obstacle that selectively filters people like this. Then there's a long wait where nothing happens, and often no one ever tells a new member that their membership was approved.
As an exercise I would like to invite people to respond to this email and answer these two questions:
What roles you think exist in our community? and What processes are effective for helping people enter into it?
I'm not interested in hearing defenses of the current system. That's not the exercise. Imagine we're starting from scratch. Maybe, we'll come to find that the current system actually fulfills certain aims well, but I don't want to frame this as a change, I want to imagine the process for helping people become at home at Sudo from a blank page.
Cheers,
Andy