Reimagining the new member process - sudo-discuss

25 Aug 2023

Hey everyone,

I've been focusing on serving the membership working group for a few
months, and I'd like to highlight some issues I see with our new member
joining process.

*1. It's not clear what membership means.* Longtime sudo room members have
told me that membership isn't necessary to participate, it's just a
designation that allows you to weigh in on consensus proposals and endorse
members. This isn't the impression the word has with any new members I've
spoken to, though. The term for most people signifies belonging, and an
allowance to attend events, and this misunderstanding is particularly
accute in my experience when dealing with BiPOC folks, women, anyone new to
tech or hackerspaces... just anyone who doesn't arrive with a preexisting
sense of belonging to the dominant cultural ingroup.

*2. The new member process puts up a lot of barriers to joining.* When
people discover Sudo Room, they often arrive with a sense of excitement to
dive in, and then when I start walking through the steps, I watch all that
excitement dissipate. The endorsement process, for instance, feels like a
massive mud patch on a foot track. It seems to interrupt people's ability
to focus on learning about who we are by creating an open-ended social
challenge. Once again, I don't think tech bros who show up or have been
members since the begining experience this at all, but if you're new to the
town, or you've never been part of a hackerspace, this is stressful and
confusing. I felt this way when I joined, and a new member just told me
exactly this: they're non-white, their non-male, and they've never felt
like tech spaces were built with them in mind. They really went outside
their comfort zone and met people at events and got the endorsements, but
it seems to be working completely against our interests to put up an
obstacle that selectively filters people like this. Then there's a long
wait where nothing happens, and often no one ever tells a new member that
their membership was approved.

As an exercise I would like to invite people to respond to this email and
answer these two questions:

*What roles you think exist in our community?* and *What processes are
effective for helping people enter into it?*

I'm not interested in hearing defenses of the current system. That's not
the exercise. Imagine we're starting from scratch. Maybe, we'll come to
find that the current system actually fulfills certain aims well, but I
don't want to frame this as a change, I want to imagine the process for
helping people become at home at Sudo from a blank page.

Cheers,

Andy

*Andrew R Gross, (he/him)*
412.657.5332    -   shrad.org <http://www.shrad.org>