Event:2015/04/23 Weekly Delegates Meeting

Weekly Omni Delegates Meeting

Reportbacks

Building

• Meets Mondays at 8pm
• Note to ALL people working on ANY building project that is in any way structural, please email building@lists.omnicommons.org your building project proposal or come to a weekly meeting to get consensus from the group

Weekly Omni Delegates Meeting - 23 April 2015

The meeting begins at 7pm, every Thursday, and ends promptly at 9pm, unless we agree to continuation.

Introductions

In attendance:

• Jenny, grateful for Laura T.
• Noemie, grateful for the spring
• David K, grateful for whoever did such an amazing job cleaning out the trash room,
• Matthew H, CCL, grateful for my brother
• Yar, sudo, grateful for housemates, our facilitators this night, and this comic http://assignedmale.tumblr.com/post/101150399997/gender-pirates-gender-pirates-dont-mess-with
• Joel, grateful for corn and nice snacks at recent meetings
• Niki, grateful for DK taking care of her while she was sick
• Ava, MPM, grateful for how inviting this meeting is
• Drew, grateful for the people here who are putting in time and effort to manage the space, also grateful this is happening at all, impressed and loving it and happy to have a space to work during the day that is radical and excellent and starts meetings with asking preferred gender pronouns
• Pam, LC, her comrades upstairs putting on event tonight
• Ross, grateful to be here
• Amgo, grateful for so many things, the people in this room who represent putting in the effort for a larger vision of what can be different in the world
• Dusty, grateful for being given the time to introduce himself

Delegates:

• Jenny (SUDO)
• Noemie (OpAl)
• Matthew H (CCL)
• Joel (TIL)
• Ava (mpm)
• Pam (La Commune)
• Amgo (Bay Area Public School)
• David K (Black Hole)

Quorum? Yes!

Announcements

• We need people to sit at the Omni table at the Bay Area Anarchist bookfair from 10am until 6pm this Saturday at the Crucible. It would be great to have enough people to have at least 2 there at all times. You can come in for 1 or 2 hours. Each collective is encouraged to send members and whatever materials or small displays they would like. If we don't have enough people we'll have to cancel it even though we paid for the table.
  • Noemie, Jenny, DK, Drew (dhornbein at gmail), Ava
  • We are sending around a signup sheet with times
• Also, we need people to be at the Oaklandish store in the Dimond neighborhood the 3rd saturday in May (the 16th), 12-4, because we are the "Non-profit of the month." We will have a table on the sidewalk and can also use a small area inside.There is a lot of foot traffic. We will get 10% of sales for that day. In addition to just an info table, collectives could hold a few "events" like a discussion on the commons, help with mobile device security, live music, poetry reading (just ideas, other ideas welcome). We would put the times for these in the publicity for the event.
  • Jenny can prep a cryptoparty
  • Noemie can demo some of OpAl's videos
  • Joel can organize a poetry reading
  • David can organize a RevTheory class
  • Niki + others can organize a group discussion on building the commons & horizontalist organizing
  • Dusty: creative and interesting way to talk with people about imagining other worlds. Game around radical imagination.

Contact Laura for both of these: scylla@riseup.net

• Jenny and Noemie just came back from a facilitator training with starhawk, yay! Wisdom to share.
• Occupy the Farm is having two big action days on April 25th and 26th to defend the Gill Tract.
• AK Press celebrating their 25th year on Sunday from 5-10 in the ballroom
• Go to omnicommons/p/lists for lists of all groups
• Sudo Room FUNdraiser next Friday, MayDay! in the evening in Sudo Room - also First Friday art in the ballroom and a SPAZ soundsystem party in the basement

Working Group Reportbacks

Please be brief! Maximum 5 (five) minutes per W.G. WGRBs are Alphabetical; All W.G.s are equally important. Report-backs consist of answering 3 (three) questions:

• What did you accomplish this week?
• What problems or action items are you currently working on?
• What do you need to bring to our attention and/or need help with?

Building

• Meets Mondays at 8pm
• Structural drawings under the stage for improving it for better storage of wood and construction material. Still need approval from structural engineer, architect and landlord
• Discussed spending ADA money put aside for widening the front door on opening up the big door on the 48th street side of the building, a larger door that's been cinder blocked over
• Power Fridays! Electrical work going on every weekend & this Saturday & Sunday
• Don't mess with the breakers on Sat/Sun, electrician will be actively working on it
• We just got approved to buy stuff for the ADA bathroom.

Challenging Dominant Culture=

• CDC now meets every other week end on Sundays at 3pm. We did not meet this week so we'll meet next sunday.
• We decided to focus on a party. A conflict working group now focuses on conflict resolution. We'd like to combat burnout. It will probably be for the 24th. Invitation extended for folks to come up with ideas / gifts etc for this!
• Restorative Justice training approaching - May 30th - only a few spaces for Omninoms. Contact cdc@lists.omnicommons.org if you'd like to be involved in that.
• Someone expressed concerns about chemical sensitivity. We should take this into consideration re: the materials we use for building projects. Looking for someone to do this research and send CDC a list of recommendations we should keep in mind.
• Noemie recommends a pamphlet: "Mindful Occupating: Rising up w/out Burning Out" http://mindfuloccupation.org/

Commons

• Meets Saturdays at 1pm in the blue classroom.
• We need more people. We schedule all the awesome stuff that happens in this building. It's really fun. You can take on just one or two event and help be the point person for it. That means signing a contract and being a point person for the event.
• There are more discrete one off tasks that people could help with such as where to put a dropbox for contracts and payments, streamlining our processes, etc. (Joel volunteers)

Communications/SysAdmins

• We don't meet. If you're interested, ping comms mailing list.
• Yar is trying to update who's actually a member collective on the website.
• We set up an open source platform that does a lot of what Google Drive does: omnicommons.org/cloud. Email sysadmins@omnicommons.org for login. Working on moving everything over from Google Drive to cloud.
• Niki: thank you!!
• David: Could we have a dev version of the website?
  • Yar: Talk to me if you or anyone you know has interest in making another version of the site to hack on

Finance

• Meets Mondays at 7:30
• We could really use some more members that are willing to commit to being somewhat consistent or do distrete tasks
• Need someone to communicate w/new member collectives re: sublease before they are voted in! Niki will do this in the interim but want to find someone else who can volunteer to be this person more long term.
• We owe $5500 in loan repayments and have $6900 in the active bank
• We still have $50k in buffer but buffer is for emergencies!
• Dusty: What's the process if a member collective doesn't pay rent?
  • Niki: This has happened with a couple of collectives in the past. We reached out to both to try and talk about the situation but both groups were hesitant to discuss. Eventually, we voted them out. One of them stepped back after a mediated conversation. It really illuminates how hard it is for us to talk about money.
• CCL rent and util!
• TIL rent and util!
• La Commune rent and util!
• SUdo modified rent paid
• Rise Above rent and util!
• MPM rent and util!
• please pay rent:
• BAPS
• Phat beets
• Optikal needs to get invoiced and then pay

Fundraising

• on hiatus
• Grace taking on perk fulfillment

Kitchen

• no one here from KWG

Welcoming

• Meets Thursdays at 6pm
• No one showed! Not on main calendar. Jenny will check on calendar synch problem
• make pamphlets and signage to help orient newbies
• Dusting is hosting weekly Omni orientations on Sundays from 1pm-3pm
• Drop a stack of collective or working group in
• Works on filling out front desk shifts
  • www.ethercalc.com/omni-front-desk

Roles that we need people to take on

• Onboarding new collectives and tenants
  • Talk to _____Niki?
• Finance wg needs members finance@lists.omnicommons.org
• commons WG needs members
• Welcoming committee

Proposals

Please provide the following information with your proposal:

• The date the proposal was put on the pad;
• The group or person making/bottom-lining the proposal;
• Who will be speaking to the proposal at the meeting;
• Where the full text or other information about the proposal can be found, if it's not all here.

Proposal to switch meetings to First and Third Thursdays

• Jenny proposes we only meet first and third thursday of every month (semi-fortnightly)
  • postive vibes all around
  • If we have an urgent matter to discuss we can call an emergency meeting
  • Passed!! Next meeting is May 7th!!! Woot!

Discussion

• Can we talk about closing Omni for a month in July to anyone that doesn't attend a working group or collective meeting-discuss:______________
  • We should accommodate certain groups or allies who have been meeting here such as Icarus, Community Democracy Project, OTF, etc.
  • We are not in a place where we are ready to address certain needs for accessibility .
  • Niki: We could be more explicit about our accessibility, and what we're capable of at a given moment. It would be great to have someone be an accessibility liaison.
  • Jenny wrote a parapgraph on the wiki under building info. Or if you search accessibility on the wiki, you find the info.
  • Need more obvious link to info about accessibility
    • Booking link and accessibility info more prominent on the homepage
• Dusty: interesting to hear people say "This is what the Omni is" makes me realize that people are unaware of how much work is being done (building, etc.) right now.
• David: wrote accessibility into the event contracts feel like no one reads that. Now that we're pulling permits, %20 of what we spend on voluntary improvements need to go towards ADA. Icarus requested certain improvements but feel like there was miscommunication around the amount of construction that was needed which caused conflict. Could contact a group that does deal with chemical sensitivities and get info from them.
• Amgo: what would you think about something directly on the homepage re: needing help making Omni accessible?
• Drew: if people want to stay after the meeting, happy to help put that on the website
• Matt: Kind of have to put your own mask on before you put the make on of the person next to you, we don't have our own mask on, maybe that's something we need to formalize. Help us!
• Thoughts about changeable rent conversation: Do we have a process for temporarily reduces rent for emergency needs? How can we establish a culture of supporting one another financially? Should we?
  • We've talked a lot about financial transparency, what do we want the culture of the Omni to be around money?
  • This project is partly based on a sliding scale model. Transparency helps because people can show that they may be having trouble. The question of utilities: feel like all collectives should be paying utilities
  • Want to have a culture of mutual aid but want people to take their obligations seriously and not just rely on others to pick up the slack w/out striving to meet obligations
  • How do we make sure that a culture of mutual aid isn't exploited, how to we inspire a sense of accountability?
  • There's a tremedous amount of shame around not being able to pay their bills, particuarly the communities we serve. How do we ask? It's not easy.
  • What if we have people come in and talk about money in an attempt to demystify it. We could ask financial advisors, other collectives, etc.
  • Keep trying to think of ways to offset that cost (utilities,etc) some of the other non-profits I've worked with have diverse ways of bringing in income such as membership, seasonal fundraiser, etc.
  • Sudo sends out links to their expenses to their list every month, maybe we could rotate a new collective each month and ask people to help pay these expenses
  • We should have a GALA!
• Omni Unconference:

   ** we've been talking about having an extended visioning session. we talked about having it outside of the omni but that was pushed back on due to difficulties w/transportation, etc. PLACE is having an organizing meeting at Omni this weekend. Maybe we could propose to have our unconference at PLACE. 

Action Items

• Joel will drill the dropbox into the wall next to TIL woot woot!
• Jenny will put the accessibility info on the front page of the wiki under featured pages.

Optional Breakout Session

• Unconference session:

Creating a container to our work:

• • Radical imagination session. Talking about possible worlds. At the end we can larp it. Playing a game when you're embodying the world you want to see.
  • Transparency tools: game "if you really knew me". example: "you'd know that I'm living out of my car" Tool for building empathy and trust.You open up the floor for creating empathetic.
  • Rituals
• Visionning. The issues we could work on:
  • Diversity and intersection oppression. Work on concrete cases studies that we have experienced. Ask Lynice Pinkard to come.
  • Starhawk on trauma and conflict resolution.
  • Where will be in 10 years? How do we get there?
  • Reportbacks and skillshares from people who've
  • Tools for Facilitation
  • Changing our relationship with failure

Closing

• Ally Circle