Fwd: [omni-consensus] Candidates Statements - sudo-discuss

16 Apr 2020

Apologies that my own statement is lackluster at best >_<
but, i think y'all know me by now.
should we use our loomio account to poll the membership? anyone wanna
create a way for members to weigh in on this proposal?

Jenny Ryan
315.292.4656 | jennyryan.net

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: MaryAnn Tenuto-Sanchez &lt;enapoyo(a)gmail.com&gt;
Date: Tue, Apr 14, 2020 at 11:09 AM
Subject: [omni-consensus] Candidates Statements
To: &lt;consensus(a)lists.omnicommons.org&gt;

Dear Omni Comrades,

Roberto Martinez has withdrawn as a candidate for President of the Omni
Commons. The remaining candidates and their statements are below. Delegates
should forward these statements to your collective’s internal mailing list
and seek your collective’s counsel on how to vote. The vote will take place
at the Thursday, April 23, 2020 Omni Commons Delegates Assembly/Executive
Board meeting.

Thanks to everyone for your cooperation,

Mary Ann Tenuto-Sánchez

CANDIDATES

*PRESIDENT *

*John Torok - *Candidate Statement of John Hayakawa Torok for Presidency of
the Board of Directors, Omni Commons

Hi! My name is John and I am a Wage Slave and a Debt Peon. (Hi John!)

I participate in the Omni member collective, the Global Women’s Strike. I
am also a recovering Catholic, a recovering lawyer, and a recovering
academic. While I am an expensively educated and highly indebted activist,
I identify as a worker and a member of the working class.

I have been active in the community including helping start up the Asian
American Bar Association of New York over thirty years ago. While a
graduate student at Columbia Law School I became severely emotionally
depressed and following expulsion transferred into Berkeley’s Ethnic
Studies Ph.D. program where I completed a dissertation on immigration
policy enforcement during the Cold War. During the last financial
depression I was hired by the California Employment Development Department
and right away became a union shop steward with a strong focus on
grievances by fellow workers living with disabilities who sought reasonable
accommodations. California Unemployment Insurance is thus my state day job.
I now serve on the EDD Director’s Statewide Disability Advisory Committee.

I agree that state worker and anarchist is a contradiction in terms.
However I participated in Occupy Oakland and identify increasingly with
anarchist philosophy. There I became familiar with and known to many
Oakland activists and organizations. Previously, I was involved in
communes, collectives and cooperatives on and off over thirty five years. I
lived in housing collectives in Santa Cruz and Brooklyn, NY over a dozen
years. I participated in both a Santa Cruz and the Park Slope food coops.
My short organizing jobs have been in small self-governing collectives.
Lastly, while still in New York I served 10 years on the board of directors
of the Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS, Inc. as it
transformed from a grass-roots ACT-UP-like formation to something akin to
an Asian American Gay Men’s Health Crisis.

In Occupy Oakland from 2011 I was active in the Queer People of
Color/People of Color and Labor Solidarity Committees. Informed and
inspired by the Occupy moment, I have helped start up and run three social
justice grass roots Bay Area organizations since 2012, the Oakland Privacy
(Working Group), the Oakland Livable Wage Assembly, and most recently the
Bay Area Poor People’s Campaign Steering Committee. I am and have always
been very excited about the utopian experiment that is the Omni Commons.

I am thrilled for the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with all
the Omni Commons collectives and their members to build a sound basis for a
long-term sustainable future for this critical Oakland cultural and
revolutionary community.  I am eager, willing and able to use my organizing
and union leadership and legal trainings, and with your help, to make our
Omni Commons a domestic and international model for what we utopians can
both imagine and make happen in the real world.

Thank you for your support.
John Torok, Union Shop Steward, EDD San Francisco Building
SEIU Local 1000 District Labor Council 743 (San Francisco)
SEIU 1000 Delegate to Alameda and San Francisco County Labor Councils,
AFL-CIO
Member and Labor Representative, Alameda County Workforce Development Board

510-480-6153

*TREASURER *

*Jenny Ryan - *Hi, I'm Jenny, and I've been both the Omni Secretary and
Omni Treasurer since.. actually, I don't remember. Since ~2015. Last year,
I petitioned to be paid for this gig (which often encompasses dozens of
hours per fiscal quarter - keep in mind we are also the fiscal sponsor of 6
other groups), and for transparency can report I received $1,945 from Omni
in 2019.

I very much want other officers to take on these roles - but to be honest,
we've never taken these 'official' positions very seriously. At most, they
are needed for signatures. All decision are still made by the delegates.
Very little responsibility is required, other than reflecting the decisions
of the board - aka, the delegates.

Officer roles and responsibilities were expounded upon in Laura's proposal,
passed in 2019, to facilitate more responsibilities in these roles. But no
greater power in comparison to the spokescouncil.

I am totally fine with continuing to be Omni's treasurer and upholding
those responsibilities - but I seriously urge others to consider working
with me and other board members to step up right now and support the board
if you're able! I am happy to train _anyone_ interested in joining the
finance team, for instance.

You can find my work here: https://omnicommons.org/wiki/Finances
and my credentials at https://jennyryan.net

Much love, and I look forward to building the new world with you all,
Jenny Ryan
*Nonprofit Bookkeeping and Technology Consulting*
315.292.4656 | jennyryan.net

*SECRETARY*

*Robb Benson - *If elected Secretary of Omni Commons, I intend to begin
creating summarized minutes of the delegates meeting notes for approval at
the following delegates meeting and transparently report, to the best of my
ability, the substantive decisions and actions of the working groups.

Additionally, I’ll commit myself to furthering my understanding of our
reporting  duties to external entities, in particular, with regards to
activities and events of the commons working group

*Mai Sutton - **My motto when it comes to collective decision-making is
"Easy things should be easy, hard things should be doable." I'm involved in
several non-hierarchical organizations, have facilitated hundreds of
meetings, and have been a community organizer for nearly a decade. I
previously worked at the **Electronic Frontier Foundation*
<https://www.eff.org/>* (EFF) and **Shareable* <https://www.shareable.net/>*
as a policy analyst and writer, and have since been a self-employed doing
this work. I'm also the Digital Commons Fellow with the **Commons Network*
<https://www.commonsnetwork.org/>*, an EU-based advocacy organization for
the commons. *

*I've been involved with Sudo Mesh since October 2017 as a contributor and
steward of the project. Sudo Mesh has also long been a pillar organization
of Omni. Several of its members contribute their time and expertise to
maintain the building and its wireless network. We are currently applying
to become an official Omni member collective. *

*I'm running for Secretary because I want to ensure that Omni complies with
its legal obligations as a 501c(3) corporation and its internal governance
process. I only started to attend the Omni delegates meetings in early
March and the collective I'm a part of isn't even an Omni member yet.
Despite that, I decided to run for Secretary. I deeply care about Omni as a
community resource and space for art and radical organizing. I recognized
that there were several core Omni delegates that have been involved for a
long time and seemed to be burning out. I thought it would be helpful for
others like myself to step up. *

*I plan on attending the Omni delegates meeting regularly anyway. If I can
help Omni out by putting my name on the official filings, and be there to
organize board meeting agendas and elections then I would be happy to do
so. *

Thanks for facilitating this process!

Mai

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