New subject: Fwd: Letting members vouch for others to have key cards

18 Jul 2019

I've proposed a change in how we give people access to Omni. Thoughts?

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Yardena Cohen &lt;yardenack(a)gmail.com&gt;
Date: Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 7:12 PM
Subject: Letting members vouch for others to have key cards
To: &lt;consensus(a)omnicommons.org&gt;

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?