[sudo-discuss] Sudoroom's sponsorship of Spaz events at Omni

To all concerned, Spaz has been throwing a lot of parties at Omni Commons, and Sudoroom has been sponsoring them. As a member collective, our sponsorship gives them the privilege of bypassing many rules and oversight of Omni's commons working group. But at last night's Sudoroom meeting there were many concerns about continuing to sponsor these parties, especially the most recent party on Saturday night 8/31: * Loud noise after hours (11pm on friday/saturday) should be confined to the basement, but there was amplified music in the entrance hall all night. It undoubtedly disturbed our neighbors, which puts the whole building at risk. In the future someone will need to do outside sound checks with a proper sound meter througout the evening, keep logs, and be ready to share them * The relationship between SPAZ and SKAST was not clear - at first we thought SKAST was just curating an art show at a SPAZ party, but now it looks like SKAST was actually throwing the whole party, which meant the people running the party didn't have a sense of ownership or even know what the rules were. This is a bad idea and also an abuse of our sponsorship. * There was nobody clearly responsible or able to keep control of the crowd - Joe was a point person who was trying to tell people to turn down the music but everybody ignored him * There was alcohol flowing freely, but they did not have an ABC license or insurance for this. Even when the party is BYOB we are still legally responsible for the presence of alcohol. * There were probably too many people. You need to limit attendance by counting in and out guests * The party leaked into the rest of the building, and many people were going into non-party areas such as the ballroom, sudo/ccl & upstairs. This creates more risk and more mess for everybody to clean up. * People left a huge mess - even after several Omni volunteers working *ALL NIGHT* it was still not clean enough for an event the next day. The activists who got up early Sunday for a nonviolent direct action training, preparing for next week's climate strike, did not have the best experience at Omni and they should not need to deal with the consequences of someone else's drunken benders. * Communication with others at Omni has been poor. If spaz people can't make it to the Commons WG meeting, then you all need to figure out a better time to talk to each other (e.g. not 5 pm when people are just getting off work). * Omni recently forced out a member collective, in part because of similar concerns about unpermitted boozy events. If we don't hold every group to the same standards, then we are hypocrites. We love spaz, but we cannot keep sponsoring these events until everybody has met in person and resolved these issues. Thanks, Yar on behalf of Sudoroom