Hand signals

During the January 30th general meeting, Vicky started a conversation on using hand signals during meetings as a way to rank speaker order and mark shifts between the topic at hand (*sad trombone*) and the conversation's meta-process. This page is for you, yes you, to refine and add to before submitting a formalesque proposal to the rest of Sudo Room!

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These here are people working on or generally interested the proposal. If the feeling's right, Vicky will organize a meet-up or email chain to help move the proposal forward.

ykciV
jenny
notconufsing
Tommy.york (talk) 18:45, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
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Concepts and Filosfeez

Yeah, man, like, order and not speaking over each other and shit. I am intrigued by the Occupy "feelings" signals, but am a bit wary that doing something like this in Sudo Room will make meetings painfully long. Do other people know of other concepts for bringing order to decision-making segments of group meetings/councils like ours? Vicky (talk) 04:48, 3 February 2013 (UTC)
...

Examples

Vicky's cooperative housing example

The example I brought up were signals from my old consensus-run housing cooperative. Imagine the following symbols as being formed by hands. They are described in descending order of priority:

(^) Point of Process

The conversation is getting out of the facilitator's facilitation; An aspect of the Articles of Association is relevant to the conversation and should be mentioned; etc.

(! ) Point of Information

You know a fact about something and bring it up in order to clarify the conversation; etc.

(?) Question

Wait, what does that mean? Could you clarify what you mean? etc.

(=) Direct Response

I have a comment that directly clarifies a comment, point of information or point of process, or answers a question.

(C) Comment

blah blah point of view or general comment.

Occupy example

The file over yonder represents the typical signage used during Occupy. --->

Note the "Speaking" vs "Feeling" duality!

In the most effective General Assemblies that I've participated in, the most commonly used hand signals were:

Twinkle fingers - For expressing support / agreement. At sudo room, we have already established a practice of snapping to express agreement, which is my personal preference :
Wrap it Up - "Wagon wheel" with index fingers pointing toward each other, to indicate that the current speaker is taking too much time, reiterating the same point, and should generally try to wrap it up.
Direct response - "gun fingers" to indicate a quick clarification of the current point or a question to further clarification. Not to be used for opinion- or emotion-laden responses / points of view.
Point-of-process - As per the triangle of thumbs and index fingers shown in the top-right corner of the image, and aptly described by Vicky above.

--Tunabananas (talk) 05:44, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

What next?

Vicky will round you up, and we will agree upon a set of hand signals.
We will spread the hand signals idea around as a Sudo Room social meme, subliminally convincing everyone of how great hand signals are for our organizational health.
We will make sketches of our agreed-upon hand signals, and chose a Wednesday meeting to propose them to.