[sudo-discuss] defining our membership: notes, next steps, and what's at stake

hi all, we've been trying to figure out who is a member and how we determine membership for a long time. we have not yet come up with a resolution. although we keep (miraculously) making the rent, we are severely constrained in our ability to expand (expand our space, become a nonprofit, etc.) by not having good answers to key questions like "who is a member," "how do people become new members," and "how do people continue to be members." we have explored a lot of ideas but no proposal has had the support of enough people to allow us to move forward. there was apparently a great discussion about membership at a meeting a few weeks ago which i sadly missed. unfortunately it was not super-well documented, so with marc's help, i've tried to represent some of what got discussed. so, here are the notes (marc and others who were there, please add if i missed anything or correct things if they're wrong): - people at the meeting agreed that membership should be based on * contribution* to the space and *trust*. - it's unclear what the mechanisms are for determining contribution and verifying trust. - here are the mechanisms for contribution that were discussed: -- people agreed that there should be space for financial and non-financial contributions. (personal note: our community as a whole has agreed on this since our founding, but we get tripped up when starting to think through the details of how something like this would work. we have not yet found a solution to this problem.) -- some folks proposed a member sign off (eg a member signs off on the contribution you've made to the space, or you report it yourself) - here are the mechanisms for trust that were discussed: -- noisebridge model: 3 existing members vouch for a person who is applying to be a member. (also discussed was lowering it to 1 existing member with 3 being seen as too high). - a guiding idea was that it should be easy to become a member and easy to revoke membership if trust was violated and/or contributions are not made. - additionally people were generally in agreement that membership should provide access to the space (door access) and access to sudo room resources. with those two issues as the standing problems that need to be resolved, people agreed to propose and share as many different mechanisms for verifying contribution and trust as they could come up with. so..please add here or on the wiki at https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Sudo_room/membership.