Improving membership

visioning exercise

Summary

Sudo membership should:

• Be easy to facilitate
• Be welcoming and accessible
• Shepherd applicants toward the values that sudo embodies
• Prioritize the well-being of the community

Notes

I want sudo room to have welcoming, accessible, and good / encouraging experience for potential and new members that maintains and preserves the values sudo room's community already embodies and seeks to perform.

I want sudo room to have a membership process that encourages members to pay their dues and to take on responsibility that empowers themselves to participate doocratically.

I would like this process to be a simultaneously non-intinimidating easing into the culture of sudo room, through the process itself, AND

my main concern right now is that all application processes are intimidating. secondly, there's an aspect of interview-interviewer judgment that weigh on the process. Both should be mitigated as much as possible.

• First, we can have small and easy approachable steps
• Second, we should make it more welcoming, and a process that actually introduces people to the space, culture, values, history, etc.

Approach

1. Immediate hacks
   • Change the application online
     • Better explain the membership process at all.
     • Change to present tense
     • Change questions / format
     • Add placeholder / help text in form to explain meaning of questions, etc.
   • Change the agenda at meeting (informally)
2. Policy changes
   • Now
   • In the future, soon (later)
3. New system - https://github.com/sudoroom/sudo-humans
   • New process / incentives to do membership
   • Peer-to-peer system (rather than full group)

Policy Changes

• Have new policy for membership postponements or blocking concerns.
  • Use individual member volunteer to discuss blocking concerns with member-applicant
    • Meaning, we don't do this during the meeting, or on public email list, yay!
• Clarify that folks with blocking concerns do not need to be identified, but at least one member must be able to communicate with the member-applicant being blocked.
  • Communication around blocking concerns should be consented upon by the members present for the member-applicant's application. This communication should prioritize protecting the privacy and anonymity of any members with blocking concern, as necessary, and at discretion of the membership.

Future

• Peer-to-peer
• Membership questions update
  • Who, if anyone, do you know at sudo room?