[sudo-discuss] Fwd: Letting members vouch for others to have key cards

I've proposed a change in how we give people access to Omni. Thoughts? ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Yardena Cohen <yardenack(a)gmail.com> Date: Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 7:12 PM Subject: Letting members vouch for others to have key cards To: <consensus(a)omnicommons.org> Right now our policy is to only give key cards to members of collectives or working groups. People typically get a card by asking in person from somebody who knows how to add them (usually me, Jake or Anthony Di Franco) but I always encourage people to use this form: https://omnicommons.org/keys/ The form goes to a mailing list and I'm usually the one who follows up on those. I feel that the current rules are not flexible enough. There's a lot of cases where it's easier for everybody if non-members have keys: * people putting on events with significant set-up periods. More than one commons working group member has asked me to give them extra keys so they can hand out temporaries to the event runners they work with. * People doing volunteer work which is only ambiguously affiliated with a working group, or for a working group without a formal membership process (which is almost all of them...) Recently I declared two new people to be members of the building wg (Ian C & Matt L) because they were doing so much work, but it was hard to know what the right move was, and I got pushback * People who have been long-standing guests of members for so long that we all see and trust, but they either can't or won't apply officially * Probably a lot more cases also Those of us with the power to approve keys are often caught between allowing the rules to be stretched in order to make life easier for other volunteers, or being accused of abusing our power. I don't like it. An even more difficult burden is put on people who answer the doorbell and have to decide on the spot whether to accept and vouch for the person in front of them who wants access, who they may not even know. This problem has led to significant conflicts. Wouldn't it be better if that decision was made asynchronously so everybody has time to contemplate the question and talk to each other before things become urgent and heated? I propose that we enable more people to have access to Omni by letting active members vouch for other people. This way we can give people a key card even if they're not directly a member of a collective or working group. When they apply, we can ask "which members will vouch for you" and then confirm with those people. We'd keep track of who's vouching for who, and if there's ever a problem, we know who to talk to. Thoughts?