Event:2015/11/15 Building Bloc

Building Bloc meeting #5 Sunday November 15, 2015

Intro

• Meeting notes & poems here: https://omnicommons.org/wiki/Building_Bloc
  • if you don't want your comments in the meeting notes, just say so at any time!

Who's here?

name, pronoun, message to Building Bloc of one year from now

• Yar; i hope there are more people facilitating the meetings
• Shirin; I hope this is still a cool place!
• Zee; I hope when we get to this point in the trip around the sun, there will still be lots of energy and fun
• Julio; I hope I won't have a headache
• Mary; "beautiful!"

New members

let's copy the questions from mary's interview for now: https://omnicommons.org/wiki/Event:2015/11/07_Building_Bloc#Mary

Shirin

• Why are you at Omni?
  • Wanted to screen a documentary, talked to yar, want to be more involved beyond screening. Good way to start! I agree with omni's values - importance of shared common spaces. Want to support that.
• What do you do here?
  • Not a whole lot yet. Hopefully more.
• What struggles do you face?
  • confusion over what that means
  • Want to know more about omni besides what's online. Will learn to this committee and hopefully help others learn
• What do omni's values mean to you?
  • funny how we think of a place having values, but i associate it with ... people want to make the space accessible to everyone in the community for producing things outside capitalistic model, which i agree with and value. i lived in berkeley student coops and that opened my eyes to radical ways of living, sharing, creating. would like to continue that outside a university setting. not a lot of spaces where you get to share radically like this.
  • videographer/filmmaker, maybe will join birdhouse
  • julio's interested in finding out why someone would want to be part of a collective
  • besides just making art, want to make community accessible to everyone. president of castro house, would love to share knowledge or things from past. it was a self selecting group, was one of the only first generation students there. why? because no formal welcoming committee. it's basically who's friends with who
  • someone walks in on a field trip from urban studies, julio gives a tour
• What do you need from us/ the group?
  • space to talk, organize. I guess you guys are providing a structure within this space so i can participate with you.
• What do you ahve to offer?
  • past experiences helping run cooperatively run spaces. my time. experience facilitating meetings.
• What are you grateful for?
  • That i'm here in beautiful oakland, finding like minded people, spaces that support that
• consensts to photos
• will follow & share with omni on social media? yes!
• mailing lists? announce, buildingbloc, i'll send an email
• contact? email, yar has it
• weekends are best for volunteering, maybe sometimes thrusday or friday nights
• how far away? live close by but work far away
• mary & yar think she should be a member. julio is cool with it

Zee

• why?
  • because i share the long term vision of this as a permanent home
• what do?
  • i've been a satellite contributing energy and snippets here and there and i think that's more almost spiritual, philosophical, even more than mechanical details. holding the vision.
  • yar: you also helped lay the ethernet at old sudoroom, donated projector screen, giant ducted fan
  • zee: yes but it's the contribution to humanity that's most important
• struggles
  • oh boy... sheer scale is exciting but challenging. i'm a quiet extrovert, prefer small deep footprint. need people.
• values
  • so in line with my own. it's astounding. my personal vision for what i want to contribute to the universe is totally in tune.
• need
  • can't do it alone. artist, scientist. important to share that art, curiosity, exploration. not something i can do by myself. from omni, i need people. everyone here. to share themselves, be authentic, genuine, uninhbiited
• offer
  • long term commitment to vision of establishing this as an anchor, a home for this community. ocmmitment of spirit. i end up being facilitator for personal connections. i talk with everybody. NOT SWITZERLAND because yar lectured me about switzerland earlier. harmonious interactions between others. soft skills. empathy, acknowledgement
• grateful
  • broader opportunities that come together here. people already here. proespect of all the people to come
• photos? complicated, not a yes...
  • yar: if you're a maybe you're a no...
  • no, but feel free to ask on a case by case basis
• social media? YES but remind me
• mailing lists? announce, buildingbloc, booking, commons, invite me to others
  • also mary wants booking & commons...
• contact
  • phone or facebook. yar has phone #
• schedule
  • varies, comes in chunks. i live far away and will be here totally for a couple days, sometimes. can be coordinated & chosen to hit events.
• how far
  • santa cruz. 90 minutes
• yar & mary think zee should be a member
• julio was busy doing a tour but eventually came back and said he's cool with it. yar likes to move on with the meeting and get consent later for this kind of thing. sort of like how distributed systems have eventual consistency, our decisions have "eventual legitimacy"

Future Meetings

• Tuesday November 24
  • Daron said he'd bottom line
  • Julio can be here after work hours
  • Mary can be here by 6. let's say 6.
  • yar can remote in at 6
  • shirin can't make it on weekdays usually because of job
• Friday December 4 (at first friday, if it happens?)
  • website says it's scheduled to happen
  • maybe 5-6?
• abe wanted to come but isn't here now. we should have paper fliers!!!
• yar invited ben daniels & matt griffin, ben hasn't replied yet

Goals

• Our short-term goal is to collect all working group members who aren't part of existing collectives, or anyone interested in helping with our goals, and then to become an Omni member collective.
• Our medium-term goal is to create a quick, easy path for new people to have a sense of ownership over the space, and give them a good experience which orients them to Omni's values and social contract.
• Our long-term goal is to transform Omni into a place for alternatives to capitalism, equitable distribution of power & resources, solidarity with people in struggle, fighting gentrification and freedom from harassment and violence.
• julio likes to say displacement instead of gentrification
• shirin: i like that too. maybe debatable whether places like omni contribute to gentrification
• yar thinks gentrification is about more than just displacement
• hard to explain what gentrification means to us

Welcoming Committee

• https://omnicommons.org/wiki/Frontdesk
• How do we overlap? Maybe the monthly orientation could double as a BB meeting
• Welcoming Committee started a year ago, didn't get taken up much, but wasn't as big a deal because la commune was open. now we need it more, jenny proposed every member collective commit people to some hours every week.
• Julio knows how to man the door but it's not an obvious thing for everyone. Ask people where they're going, depending on what's going on, give them info, get them involved. Not all agreements on what all the things entails...
• do we want to "orient" shirin right now? as practice?
  • mary: if people want to be part of omni in some way, they could come to an orientation meeting... what would we do with them? how would we orient them?
  • shirin: it would be nice to know more about the collectives besides the short descriptions online
  • zee: that's critical if we're onboarding people. initializing them to what omni is about
  • mary: maybe if each collective can't have a member present, they can write out something they want conveyed, so they have info to share
  • what are they looking for, for members?
  • in the end, if they're not interested in those, how do we pitch our group? building bloc.
  • what yar said earlier today - there's no place just to talk about the building. orienting.
• yar: what would you need in order to orient new people to omni?
  • shirin: be able to pitch it concisely, written description of what omni is. basic FAQ people will have. rules if you have them.
  • julio: also values, ethics
  • shirin: explaining berkeley coops was so hard. so many values, everyone has different takes.
  • juliio: my shpiel might be different than any of yours. i'm interested in this because we had a lot of conflict early on with people not understanding the values or feeling confused, then breaking the rules without knowing, leading to conflict. having something saying "this is what we're about, this is what we're not about" from the beginning.
  • mary: not just gonna come in here and rent the space for whatever you want
  • julio: i don't even explain what it means to be a collective. they're all different. open, closed.
• "not tech bros"
  • julio's a tech bro
  • you can totally change people. seen it happen.
  • people willing to go out of their comfort zone
  • yar: not jsut about tech bros, but also about men thinking they can just touch people without asking
  • you should be informed about the values
• hard to easily communicate all our values. you have to parse the existing documents and condense it yourself.
• becoming outreach people had the same problem - "let's do it! oh wait, what do we say"
• maybe we should join forces with them
• our homework for all of us is to think really hard about omni's values and how we want to explain them
• maggie was working on a google doc
• should we go to the delegates meeting this week?
  • yar can be there

Membership Drive

• What do we need to do between now and then?
• we're kinda doing it

Name

• maybe the building wg should be "hammers and nails"
• also when your name is based on a pun- a word with two spellings - you're also doomed because people are never sure quite how to spell it
• how to describe it?
  • A collective for people who love Omni!
  • A merry mob of misfits!
  • An emergence of incendiary entryists!
  • A hotheaded housewarming of flaming fire-breathers blazing trails for ourselves and our friends.
    • zee: what about elsa...
• zee likes that we're the primordial ooze, the soup of amino acids from which life gets assembled
• mary: maybe we should be "primordial ooze." the oozers.
• don't want name to be welcoming committee, we're way more than that

Poem

• Bridging understanding is showing us the way.
  • apparently you're allowed to say more than one word. mary said "the way"