2014/05/03 Omni Hackathon/Values

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Existing list of core values on Wiki:

The Omni Collective chooses to value:

  • Community over seclusion
  • Consent over coercion
  • Communing over isolation
  • Consensus over factions
  • Do-ocracy over bureaucracy
  • Process over the tyranny of structurelessness
  • Cooperation over competition
  • Commons over private interest
  • Independence over centralization

The Omni Collective chooses to value:

  • Fostering radical discourse and education
  • Maintaining an active, publicly accessible commons
  • Providing a venue for innovative cultural production
  • Striving for social, economic & environmental justice
  • Standing in solidarity with all oppressed people
  • Cultures of consent, against rape, violence & exploitation
    • Safe spaces
  • The survival & thrival of our communities and neighborhoods
  • Create a community where we can be autonomous in a non-alienating environment

Concerns with existing values

  • feels apolitical
  • casts equal shade on rape and paperwork
  • could be more explicit
  • what is the forum?
  • Seeming contradiction between 'consensus over factions' and 'independence over centralization'
  • Move away from the culture of head-nodding and consensus models where those who have the most privilege / comfort / loudest most persuasive voice in a group influence
  • What is the motivation / aim of communicating our values?

How do we develop our values?

  • What we want to achieve vs. What our process / philosophies / politics are
  • Framing things in terms of being for over being against
  • Broad more abstract values that include explicit examples
  • Public-facing vs internal functioning
  • Political vs process

Moving Towards....Moving Away From

  • Activity / Engagement....Passivity / Apathy / Hopelessness / Apolitical
  • Creativity....Productivity
  • Community....Alientation
  • Consent....Coercion
  • Dialectic / Rhizomatic....Programmatic
  • Need to adopt conflict resolution policy
  • Values are often latent, and inform all of the other aspects of our functioning together
  • Broad statements we can all get behind, but from there we need to define what these terms mean
  • Values there as these dyadems we point at each other from across the space, all holding this orb of vague
  • Maybe we should be actively articulating what we *don't* want in the space
  • Definition of safe space at the Omni:
  • How are we putting our collective resources behind anti-oppression?
  • Value of specificity, clearly stating we're antiracist, antihomophobic, etc
  • Plastic vs. non-negotiable values
  • Adopting practices models - a framework for how we deal with specific situations in non-oppressive manner
  • These values are ways for people to identify us when "shopping for community" - functioning in a manner similar to hashtags

Link to Safe Space / Dominant Culture notes: