Who should get a vote/say on the direction of Nest and how it is run

strongly disagree, how can you set the minimum contribution fairly considering everyone has different amounts to give? what is the minimum and why? considering everyone has a different amount they CAN contribute. also to assume everyone is a sparkle pony in their first year is frankly insulting to a lot of people. There was one person who went from newbie to running half the tech of the whole event in a few days this year. who are we to judge people ? also if you promote the old guard to some elevated position the event will stagnate. I think voting at all is a terrible idea, consensus is a much more modern system based on our updated understanding of human nature and i think we should be moving to that instead of voting. This document explains more and is already part of nest governance sub-group https://loomio-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/files/000/193/242/original/consensus.pdf

Interesting document. Not my politics and I disagree with it as a way to run Nest but that’s all irrelevant.

Who gets a vote (or a say in your consensus model)? Contributors? Anyone who buys a ticket?

P.S. I didn’t assume every first timer is a sparkle pony, it was a fabricated example to contrast the differences between those who contribute and those who don’t. The person you mentioned would absolutely get a vote in the model I propose.

Your disagreement is not irrelevant. I think we should value all opinions (regardless if you volunteer or not) . As to your comment on sparkle ponies. Who decides then who is one and who isn't? This is much like the debate on if prisoners should get the vote this issue has a long history and the prevailing wisdom is any system other than everyone is terrible in one way or another. I also ask what are you trying to prevent? If your worries about the outcome of votes , maybe we should focus on what is being voted on? Not who gets to vote

I started this discussion to get the ball rolling on determining who gets a vote/say. Not to discuss the pros/cons of whatever system we may adopt (that’s for another discussion).

There will need to be a benchmark of some kind to determine who gets a say/vote in steering Nest. What do you think it should be?

They are called "memberships" for a reason. Which means everyone who attended the last event should be eligible for voting. I'm not totally adverse to the last 2 years of memberships being considered. But I'm also not saying that we should have a voting system either. Perhaps the most relevant thing to me would be to have the equivalent of the petitions website for the government. i.e. if enough community members comment or agree with a proposal on Loomio then the core team should consider at their next meeting. But even this may have issues in that the core team are largely not active in their roles for about half the year so it may seem non-responsive unless that was changed. And do bear in mind they volunteer and we might want to cap the number of things discussed so there isn't a 5-hour meeting from a backlog.
I'm not sure there's any easy answers here.

Something we all need to consider and no matter how much we don't like it, we have to operate within the UK legal system. There are a quite a few legal structures that can be adopted and Governance can be vote by shares or vote by people. As far as I can tell voting is the only way by which constitutional decisions are made unless you are an unconstituted org (which won't work for us in terms of licence and stakeholder contracts). This is why we are currently considering a Company Limited by Guarantee which is a membership organisation where people vote on decisions not money and it is our personal guarantee as members which underwrite the contracts (finacially liability is limited to £1). I'm sure the way voting is carried out has some flexibiity, but ulimately we have to register the org with Companies House and it has to pass their scruity

I should add that the powers of the membership is limited to certain matters enforced by legislation; ie holding an AGM, returning accounts to Companies House etc. Operational matters can be Governed outwith the constitution and it is up to the Membership to set policies or form committees to run the activities. So who becomes a member is important as they guarantee the contracts, licenses, Health & Safety but they are not necesarily the people who decide how we do Gate or recruit rangers, provided the legislative and statuatory conditions have been met

The straightforward approach is to either give everyone who bought a ticket in 2019 one vote until Nest 2020 (i.e. for one year) or until Nest 2021 (i.e. for two years); and if you transfer your ticket to someone else, they also get your vote. Limit of one vote per person. It becomes really messy (and pretty unproductive to work out) if the system would be something weird like "all rangers get +0.2 vote per shift, welfare members gets +0.4, weekend visitors get only 0.5 vote" :laughing:

London Decompression is membership owned company limited by guarantee, but, being a do-ocracy, we only give a vote to full members. These are the Leads (including theme camp leads) who are active in building the event. You are not obliged to give every member a vote unless you want to do so.

I think this topic has become slightly fragmented between discussion on legal voting of members in a company to choose directors and the like and voting on how nest is run which was the title. Personally I think voting for people at all is a sure fire way to only get a popularity contest in communities like this and the advice process is a much more progressive method to avoid such pitfalls and others such a exclusion of minority viewpoints. If we are to vote on anything I suggest we set the bar to be way higher than 50% as that is also very excluaionary. Two thirds majorities are very common in voting systems for communities and in the Quakers world 100% is the chosen method. I'm studying Quaker decision making at the moment and there is certainly some lesson to be learnt from their version of full inclusion although I don't think it would work directly in this community due to it being more transient and dispersed.