I'm generally with romy - if you have more money than man-hours, you should use the money to pay people to do things you need done. You do the things you're good at, pay ppl to do the things you're relatively not good at. HOWEVER I think sudo room has more man hours than time.
The next step is to make a list of tasks you think should be done during clean up, and then decide how frequently/ when those things should occur. Then I'll sign up for maybe two sessions a month. I would 1000% rather pay dues in labor than in cash.
Part of what you get out of hiring someone is knowing the task will be done at a certain time. We can get that without hiring though.
The downside of this plan is that there will be uncomfortable times when individual sudoers will find themselves in the position of being enforcers. There will be times when you will notice that a person didn't show up for their shift, or did, but did a bad job. Then you'll have to decide which of the following two actions you find less distasteful: calling/ emailing the person to say, 'hey, what gives' or say nothing and do the cleaning yourself. To me though, this is part of the point of a club like this. If you don't have dedicated enforcers (cops) then the task of enforcement falls a little bit on everyone. People hate doing it, that's why we have dedicated enforcers in so many of our organizations, but here we're trying to be self governing. Right?
On Thursday, May 16, 2013, Marina Kukso wrote:
hi romy,
i really appreciate your continuing the discussion on the topic of keeping our common area clean, but i was quite offended by you saying "Could we pay for a small family owned immigrant cleaning business." i'm really not sure why you suggested that it could specifically be an immigrant business... it's hard for me to see a reason for you suggesting this that doesn't involve stereotypes about who does what kind of labor in our society. if i've completely misunderstood or if you'd like more details about my perspective, let's talk offthread.
i think that this speaks to my larger discomfort with suggestions about paying people to clean our space. part of what we are doing at sudo room is learning how to cooperatively manage a resource - something that many of us (myself included) have had limited experience doing. from my perspective, part of this learning process is learning how to keep things clean so that we can all use them and enjoy the space and not alienate our landlord. i think there's a tendency in our society to start paying other people to do "unpleasant" or "crappy" necessary work when we have the financial means to do so and this is all based on ideas about what's "crappy" work and how much people should be paid to do this crappy work (the answer is usually cheaply...as if it's not worth a lot to clean, take care of children, prepare food, and do other things that our society has considered "crappy" at different times in history). but we can choose to reorient our conception of cleaning from "crappy work that no one wants to do" to "we are learning how to work together to manage a resource that is for all of our benefit." with that perspective, keeping the space clean becomes less of a problem to solve and more of an interesting question - how do we take a bunch of people with different ideas about "clean" and different feelings about their responsibility to the space and create the conditions that help everyone feel ownership of the space to the point where it becomes apparent that maintaining it is a key part of keeping it usable? and what kinds of mechanisms can we use to help people participate in maintenance of the space?
not everybody is interested in that kind of challenge, but if we hope to have longevity in our community, it seems like it's something that we have to address... plus we don't have any extra money for cleaning services right now :P
at this point we can have a long discussion about paying people, labor, etc., and i would be happy to discuss this with people offthread, but i think that if we hope to continue the discussion onthread, we should be addressing 1) advantages and disadvantages of paying someone vs creating community solutions for keeping the space clean and 2) ideas for mechanisms (such as sunday night clean) that would help people easily plug in to keeping the space clean.
- marina