Loomio
Mon 4 Apr 2022 7:22AM

AP: Community Assembly @ Celtic Burn #1

FE Fran Ellis Public Seen by 47

Context

I love decentralised decision-making and distributed authority. For me, the aim here has always been to create the conditions for a leaderfull community, in which power flows to whoever needs it to make a decision, create, and innovate. When decision-making is decentralised, leaders and hierarchies still tend to arise, but they are (ideally) temporary - power should not be static. However, this can only be so when a decent proportion of the community is actively engaged in its (constant) creation. If only a small % of (the same) members actively participate, those people will amass unofficial power over time. Whilst I think we're doing a good job at creating the conditions for a leaderfull community in which authority is both officially, and unofficially, distributed, a relatively small % of members are actively engaged in Loomio APs and Trello tasks.

As such, I've been thinking about ways to invite more members to get excited about taking ownership of this community and our gathering(s). Initially, I was going to facilitate a workshop, but I remembered the best way to learn is by doing. I would therefore like to facilitate a Community Assembly at the burn, demonstrating decentralised decision making by doing it.

Proposal

The question posed will be: "Should we stay or should we grow now?"

(I.e. - shall we stay at the same venue with the same 100 participant capacity for next year's CB, or should we begin to grow and seek a larger site?)

Since we're not abandoning decentralised for democratic decision-making, Sam will be the proposer. The rest of us will be providing our advice. We'll use the format of a people's assembly. This will involve splitting into smaller breakout groups for discussions, before returning to a whole group to feed back our advice.

My question is - then what?

Options:

  1. Sam contemplates the advice whilst we take a short break, and then makes a decision at the gathering

  2. Sam creates a Loomio AP and I post the results of the Community Assembly as advice

I think option 1. Reasons:

  • It is essentially a 'live' Advice Process.

  • Whilst it does not give those who did not attend a chance to participate, are those people members? Who are Celtic Burn's members if not the people who attend Celtic Burn?

  • Option 2 is anti-climactic.

What is your advice? Can we make this decision IRL as the first members of CB? Or would doing so be contrarary to our own decision-making proceses?

I'll leave this open for a week, until 11th April.

SL

Sam Lee Mon 6 Mar 2023 12:25PM

Sounds good. I don't think besz will be an issue, will be a happy problem if we have a spare bed