Event:2015/10/01 Delegates Meeting

Weekly Omni Delegates' Meeting - October 1st, 2015 7pm

Who's Here?

Introductions

Introduce yourself: Name; Prefered Pronoun; Affiliation

• Joel (TIL),
• Niki (BAP/sudo)
• Chloe (MPM)
• Laura (Becoming Omni, BAPS sorta) she/her
• Libbie (Becoming Oni, BAPS)
• Julio (Sudo)
• Helen (FNB)
• daniel (sudo)
• tom
• rachel/gws
• yar/she/her/SUDO
• Ed/it/SUDO
• alex/she/her/they/them/BAPS
• Sadie/she/her/BAPS
• Matt/he/him/Sudo
• Robb/he/him/SUDO/FNB
• Marc/he/him/SUDO/CCL
• Gerald (LL) he, him
• Jeremy/he/him/SUDO
• Rhodes/has worked w FNB, 1st time here
• Ken/he/him/CCL
• Alberto?

Meeting Roles

• Facilitator/s: Joel
• Explanation of hand signals: "deaf applause", "raised hand", "point of process", "direct response"(wildcard), etc.
• Stacktaker: Libbie
• Timekeeper: Sadie
• Notetaker/s: yar, niki, laura
  • URL of this pad: https://pad.riseup.net/p/omninom
• Vibe Reader: Rachel
• Next weeks facilitator(s):

Delegates

• BAPS: Sadie
• CCL: Ken
• FNB: Helen
• MPM: Chloe
• LL: Gerald
• Sudo: Yar, matt
• TIL: Joel
• GWS: Rachel
• Quorum: yes

Announcements

• Laura: bread & puppet show -- ANTI-WAR - will be here, Tuesday oct 6 - they started big puppets at demonstrations! from a farm in vermont!
  • Brewster from Internet Archive -- Oct. 8th--will host a reception at the Internet Archive - Laura, Matt, libbieWe completed a series of 3 racial identi
  • matt: please come, need to sell more tickets. last West coast visit
  • 6 people -- they need a place to crash. any ideas?
• joe: please help drywalling tomorrow & saturday - 10AM
• chloe: MPM workshops on sundays.
  • oct 11: "image & object: a history of words"
  • oct 25: letterpress 101
• libbie: just finished 3 racial identity caucuses. will be ongoing. join mailing list: https://omnicommons.org/lists/listinfo/race
• matt: Has a key duplicator to make keys. It is lawful esp if not charging. Sadie has the first keys Ihave cut. When the frint door is finished we will do the rekeying thing
• YAR: homes not jails has been meetin here for a few weeks. they are a squatters network with the purpose of keeping as much free housing open as long as possible. they plan to submit an application to become a member collective soon.
• a group is trying to bring Omni to First Friday tomorrow. we were approved but forgot to pay, so we have to go get re-approved. Leon is doing music! Come by -- Telegraph between Grand and 27th -- not sure exactly where. We will be set-up by 7pm.

Working Group Report-Backs

Building & permits

Meetings: Mondays at 8pm

• This group needs help; https://omnicommons.org/lists/listinfo/building
• please help drywall tomorrow & saturday
• also help clear ballroom for a party on wednesday oct 7

Becoming Omni

• Alex: It's happening this SUNDAY, breakfast starting at 9am. Becoming OMNI comes at 10am.
  • Please RSVP!!! https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/6N9J2BJ
  • We have been working on a series of workshops to strengthen us. We have about 13 people RSVP'd so far. Please RSVP. you can come even if for part of the day

Commons

Meetings: Sundays at 7pm

• need more people to help with taking on events
• working on updating info on booking events
• meeting with Cheryl from Liberation Ministries 2pm tomorrow to talk about contract

Communications

• not meeting, need someone to take this working group on
• we have an owncloud account, if you want access contact yar
  • https://omnicommons.org/cloud

Finance

Meetings: Every other Thursday at 7pm

• no one here from finance but we need money
• we raised over $1,200 from rent parties

° We wil make it through October

Buy the Building

Meetings: Mondays at 5pm (new time!!)

• Yar: We need to work on making more money either by finding mmore donors or having more events.
• no shortcuts!
• Matt: we could have a more comprehensive and cooperative fundraising effort with all of the collectives
  • KivaZip is doing things that are interesting to us that might help us make money. A rep came t otalk to the FR group. Is very interested in supporting projects at the Omni to get no interest loans that will be matched
  • https://zip.kiva.org/
• a business plan -- was not explicitly requested by would respond to the lender's needs
• 30-year loan is not going to happen. might be a 10-year loan. he wants to be repaid before he dies.
• Sadie: Point of information: we are putting together a strategic plan for BAPS and Birdhouse, and that template can be shared/replicated if helpful.

Proposal: End DK's sabbatical

The 3-month term of David Keenan's sabbatical ends this week. Originally, it was proposed that he be allowed to return to Omni as a member of the public (not participating in organizing or working groups).

• A healing circle / accountability process with the UCB Restorative Justice Center has also been proposed.
• reintegration of David Keenan, a valuable member of Omni community back into sharing and building this shared ~ dream space~.

Discussion

• Jenny thinks that a healing circle with all involved is a good idea, but that the distinction between 'public' and 'omni' is a dangerous precedent to set, since a commons entails shared stewardship and participation. Rather, it seems prudent to have honest and open conversations about how the decision transpired and why it was made in order to mitigate future issues through compassion and care.
• formation of transition team to work w D Keenan to complete transaction of tasks and billing, and relationships that have enabled omni this far. Integration of D Keenan into balanced relationship w Omni for shared stewardship of these shared dreams.
• yar: his sabbatical does not end until the delegates decide it ends. i support this happening but only if the process is followed
• ken: can you give background on this?
  • joel: DK was a founding omni member. put lots of work in, so much that his involvement turned into more of a leadership role than we wanted for our organizat to the point where it was hindering rather than helping the growthof the collective, so a meeting of delegates decided to put him on sabbatical for a minimum of 3 months and now we talk about it
  • ken: can you explain some tangibles?
  • yar: i think the healing circle should be where most of the conversation happens
  • gerald: short summary? 2 minutes? i don't even know. can't vote on ignorance. please explain what's going on
  • rhodes: was he violent?
• Helen: david is a brilliant guy and he understood every part of the organiaiton, and he knew it all and he carried it around in his head. and people came to rely on him because he knew everything. and that isn't the whole story but it's part of it
• Marc: he became the go to pereson for everything in the building and that was both bad for us and bad for him. he became almost unable to do anythign else than work on the building, and the community consensus was that it was detrimental to his health. There was also bottle-necking going on, because he had so much in his head, stuff that was only in his head, very important stuff. we tried to deal with that by having someone with him at all times and at meetings so that someone else would know it, but it didn't really work. Personally i think part of that was that he was compeltely overworked.
• Niki: I agree that DAvid ws really overworked and needed a break, but there are some things that aremissing in what has been said. The meetings that decided this were secret. The delegates that were there were not selected by their collectives. I ned ot osay I live with David and he is a difficult perosn whois hard to get to stop an slow down. There was also a social context that others contributed. He tried to step away o a number of occasions. I think there needs to be alarger proces so that we can create a framwwowrk to hold eachother accountable for everyone's role
• Daniel: one of the reasons i join this group, before it became Omni (Sudoroom where we were on 22nd) its because of its horizontal organizational phylosophy. I come a long way to come here, because I believe in this idea. I firmly believe david should come back as an Omni member. We violated one of our primordial values when those secret meetings took place. I feel that we own an apology to Omni members that were not included in this decision,and to DK in particular. <daniel holds up 2 signs "HE'S TAN,RESTED AND READY! DK Omni Commons 2015">

*Helen:  A part of the proposal is that there be a restorative circle. I think part of thes task of the circle would be to come up with a plan and structure to prevent this from happening again to anybody.

• Laura: i have a lot of responses to things people said. i miss david being around, i'd love for him to come back. at the same time, having been involved w/trying to set some boundaries for him so that the knowledge he had would be shared so he wasn't overdoing it, so other people would take on responsibilities etc, and having that not work at all, and also having seen ... the way we're talking about this is not portraying the extremity of his obsessiveness around the omni.
  • the reason why things were kept into a smaller group is because we didn't want to publically have to put david in front of everyone and say the things that we had observed about his behavior in front of everybody. to me that would have been way more humiliating. i even hate to do it right now. i wish we could have done it more openly but at the time that was our concern.
  • in retrospect i think the two mistakes we made were - some of the poeple involved, initiating this final step of saying we needed to not have david in the building were very inflamatory in the way they raised the issue. we got a little bit sucked into that. it'd be better if we tried to make it official to make it clear we're serious, if the group closest and most concerned had a very serious meeting saying "david we love you but we won't let you in here", take an autonomous action. group of friends doing it. because his names' on the lease, etc. i don't want to rehash everything. we had a whole delegates meeting qs answering in detail. happy to talk in a small group.
  • final point: i do want to find a way to bring david back into the community. but i don't think david has taken enough steps to deal with his obsesesiveness about the projects he is involved with. so i am not confident that things will change if he comes back to the omni.
• Matt: i spoke with david today. i put a lot of work into this process, understanding, and i felt burned, excluded. I personally don't believe transparency is monolithic--it's more about discretion. i'm not pretedning that these secret meetings were not a problem. but we also have to undersatnd privacy and discretion, and we have to think about that balance.
  • I'm seeking reconciliation, we are interested in our own personal reconciliation, i'm interested in working towards that and doing the emotional labor, and i think others are interested in that as well. i'm interested in what that looks like. Robb mentioned he's down to be a conflict steward for our mediation process and ALSO using the RJ healing circle.
  • i hear tredpidation and discomfort wtih the prospect of david coming back and repeating behavior, and i want to legitimize that. people have messy feelings and legitimate feelings. let's rectify the wrongs and the process.
• Chloe:
• marc: i think the language of "member of the public and 'not as a member of the public'" is weird & he won't want to come back if we use it.
• Joel: claryfing question: Laura, what have or haven't seen?
• Laura: haven't seen him a lot.
  • Joel: I would also like to see David back and I miss him a lot. I do have some concerns about him repeating his same behaviors, and us as a community falling back into a co-dependent mode. It was also all of us... his overworking benefited all of us because we didn't have to do those things. I wanted to suggest we shift the conversation in the direction of next steps.
• yar: i wish we could have taken an autonomous action to block david from coming in the building but his level of involvement was so big. i'm not ready to going back to business as normal. it's hard for me to hear that i am part of enabling david, when mostly what i did was walk away in frustration, and feel disempowered. but it's a normal response to the kind of thigns he was doing. and it was a response that a lot of people would not want to be part of a project where that type of behavior was enabled.
  • I really hope that if the delegates come to a decision that we can re-direct our energy away from fighting over it but also that a process can happen outside of the context of deelgataes countil.
• Julio: in favor of removal of official procedures. We've all had traumatic experiences with David, and that is because he was over-worked, which is traumaatizing itself. I know people have legitimate interpersonal issues with David which need to get resolved.
  • And we need some sort of limitations as part of the restorative process.
  • He does embody this figurehead, which could have happened to anyone.
  • We are different now-- he is not on the lease, and he is different beacuse he hasn't been around. The conditions are different. That fear should be diminished that it could happen again in the same way.

Ken: Laura_--was he just refusing to do the techniques that were asked of him to eleviate the issues? Laura: he quit completely at a point when he had so much knowledge in his own person that we couldn't continue without him. So we came up with a written list of guidelines for how he would return to do specific things and not do a lot of other stuff that he was doing. It was actually written down and he agreed to it. But after a couple of weeks it started sliding back into the old pattern. Ed: the most dedicated people are going to have disproportionate influence. I am aalways looking for yar or matt or david who knows a lot about what's going on. I never saw this manic side of David which most people seem to have experienced. I think we should accept him back and see if the sabbatical has worked. If the problemtatic behaviors are returning then maybe we can use a more open process.

• Gerald: I tend to agree with some of what edd just said, nbut to be perfectly frank I don't know what you're talking about. I'm from a different world. I think David is confident. I choose not to deal with it but not for any negative reason but I wasn't clear on the processes of this building. I do think that at least to be responsible people need to start being omre concrete about what they want to se, about what so-called changes they want to see in his behaviour. Some people said there were something written down but I've never seen it so I don't know. <Something>. <repeating that we need to be concrete about demands>.
• Yar: Direct response- my request is really concrete. I request that he participate in some kind of circle
• Gerald: Are you saying as a pre-requisite for him doing useful work that he would have to participate in this.
• Yar: I would prefer that it is a pre-requiste but I would just like to reach some kind of understanding
• Libbie: I would like to put out a new proposal, I am just repeating what I have heard discussed thus far:
  • We welcome David Keenan back: She has heard two proposals:
    • One: Is a healing circle
    • Two: Crating a structure for his particpation in other activities at the Omni. This should be worked out with him. Which brings us back to the healing circles.
• Robb: i would like to add an amendment- I think it should just be one mandatory healing circle instead of a series then if more issues rise we could have more.
• Libbie: Just to clarify my understanding is that healing circles are usually a continual process because healing takes time and it is a long process.
• Sadie: We're at time again.
• Laura: Joe has been talking about scheduling the healing circles so it is something that is in the works.
• Matt: There has been a lot of talk about proposals or agreements- I just understand from hacker culture is that rules are meant to be broken but something that stood out to me that our lawyer said is that culture is what matters- it's less about processes and more about a cultural problem.

Culture! The restorative justice circle is a process and a culture! We need to create cultures to sustain ourselves.

• Helen: SOmething here is bothering me - a resotartive justicie healing circle, which usually focuses on an individual and the problem here is bigger than David. This is what we need to fix . May it's just a matter of terminology but I'm not sure that restorative justice is what we need here.
• Sadie: Just as a direct response- if we used the resorative justice process with Julie as a mediator we would have at least 2 people there to mediate.
• Julio: Restorative justice is a response to the legal and punative system. This could be seen as a restorative justice circle.
• Helen: Well I think that should be articulated in teh proposal.
• Ken: Well being I guess objective here because I don't know anything about it. The whole thing I'm hearing really creeps me out. Fifty percent is this guy and fifty percent is the people who had secret meetings and violated your own processes.
  • People leave, Ken continues to speek, is asked by the facilitator and group members to stop speaking, then asked to leave the meeting. Agrees to stop speeking but says he will stay until the end of the meeting.
• Rachel: what seems the next step would be to meet and people say what their issues are and how we are going to move forward and let him come back in and work and evaluate. people know what the issues are so it seems like we should move forward and it will be clear if it is collectively working or not.
• Matt: I just wanted to re-iterate briefly which is, I think people have legitimate feelings around tredpiation and concern around both sides fo the table of the situation. i want this to be a marker for discretion--We should use discretion with the way we speak. In everytihg I've done at the Omni--some folks are questioned and other folks are not quesitoned. you might feel that quetioning a lot as a good faith collaborator. It can be really alienating if you are constantly being questioned for your good faith collaboration. It's really important that we articulate it and I really want to support aht.
• yar: I'm sorry for leaving the meeting briefly.
  • First of all, I want to be a little more concrete about what I am afriad of David doing and what I'm not afraid of. I'm afriad of him coming back and returning to the same behavior of
  • owning parts of the building
  • hoarding contacts
  • I'm feeling more confident that that's not going to happen.
  • I think he should really come to Becoming Omni. Saying that we should wait until a circle happens is really rough. In my opinion we should be really clear that he is welcome on Sunday.
  • Part of a larger vision about what I want Omni to be is all of us figuring out a way that we can work together so that we can carry those skills fowrard into building stronger movements for all of us.
  • There were many things that David was doing and people were doing to enable him, which were also harmful to building a mass movement.
  • Rhodes: what y'all are going through
• joe: [about the healing circle] Whatever it is called :We sit down in a circle with a talking stick anddon't get up until we each understand what and maybe even why it happened that way. If that works to any significant degree we can sit down again with the goal of designing ways to prevent it from recurring.

• robb: is it in series or parallel?

Proposal

• We, the Omni delegates propose that David Keenan's sabbatical has ended. We invite him to a series of circles focused on community-wide healing and to the Becoming Omni Commons visioning and planning series.

Delegates: in favor: 7 (helen, gerald, rachel, ken, sadie, joel, chloe). abstaining: 1 (matt).

Proposal: Entrance Hall as Common Space for Month of Oct

The goal of this proposal is to rustle up a proper proposal or proposals to use the front entrance space. In the mean time:

The 'front desk' area of the Omni will become designated as a space for collectives to display info / exhibit projects and engage with people entering the space (incorporating ideas from the Welcoming Committee: https://omnicommons.org/wiki/Welcoming_Committee ), ideally in perpetuity.

The rest of the entrance hall will be designated as a commons, endeavoring, for example, to hopefully donate $1-2K/month to the Omni through a) facilitating regular 'collabazaars' for local and collectively-generated products, b) hosting pop-up restaurants, c) selling community members' art and publications, and d) booking events in the space through the Commons WG. We will trial run for the month of October, with a report-back and proposal to extend at the first delegates meeting in November (likely Nov 5th).

• Several folks have been discussing various ways of engaging with the entrance hall, from interior design to construction, front door shifts to vending booths. Participation from all member collectives and anyone interested in creating a welcoming and inviting entrance hall is invited and supported!

Vote: Yes, 6. Abstain, 2. Pass!

discussion

• matt: it'd be used by commons wg for whatever, like ballroom, disco room, etc.
• helen: there was also a proposal for a cafe there.
  • matt: who brought it? i think it wasn't formalized, just talk. need time
  • helen: ok
• libbie: who's empowered to steward it specifically?
  • matt: commons wg
• jeremy: i told nobawc about spaces available here. maybe there's other groups.
  • sadie: i agree but chances for getting october are slim. proposal is this month.
  • matt: proposal is ongoing until it changes
  • sadie: if anyone else wanted to steward that space, commons would be open to that
  • niki: that group deals with work already. if we say this room is for everybody, i anticipate confusion and communciation issues
  • matt: i'm familiar with lack of volunteer support for commons wg. i only mention because it's juristdiction open to everybody. de facto default. easy compromise: if commons wg doesn't want to deal with it, just don't add it to the booking form
• libbie: it's almost by default
  • matt: but designated for front of the building, particular use. vending machines, kombucha, etc
  • libbie: and we can invite people to join commons wg. feed 2 birds with many twinkles.
• joe I do not want it to bestpw this proposal , if it passes, with matt's "ongoing" status. ONE MONTH.
  • yar: would you block ongoing?
  • joe: yes, at this point; however Helen is our delegate tonight.
  • Libbie: we are going to add to the proposal a pieice that says the point of the space is to find a tenant or alternative use, not to keep it as commons permenantly
• joe: This decision has so much dependent on what happens at Becoming. That is my biggest concern that we are not cognizant of that potential redirection.
  • yar: but "ongoing" really just means "until we decide somethign else", which maybe we will in 3 weeks, right?
  • joe: I guess but ONE MONTH means we have to revisit it and it doesn't just sneek into long term without due consideration.
  • yar: helen is abstaining. one month and ongoing are the same thing, joe, when there is a specific time and place we've already agreed to make more plans
• delegates: 6 in favor, 2 abstain (matt, helen).
• remote-joe: OK Ciao

End of Meeting

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