New day/time for Weekly Civics Meeting

Since January 4th, we have been having weekly civics meetings at Collective Agency, Wednesdays 10am-10:45am.

Today, the second item asked about by members was: changing the civics meeting time. Members at the morning meeting unanimously agreed to change weekly civics meetings to 3:30pm Tuesday.

About half of our members (not people at the morning meeting) want to meet evenings after dinner or around happy hour (day/time TBA), so we will likely have two weekly civics meetings (one in the afternoon, one in the evening), and some way of getting consensus across the two groups.

Friday night socializing was also suggested, but nothing was yet done about it.

Other items covered today:

• A dropbox/pickup area was suggested by a member, so that she can leave envelopes/packages to be picked up by friends. This can be done under the existing Terms of Service (and the Community Guidelines and Constitution), so Fitz and Alex said it’s fine. The member will determine the dropbox/pickup area.
• Our first direct democracy vote was last Friday. Alex showed a photo of the vote to members here this morning, most of whom participated in the vote, and clicked on the photo to show the text. Alex said he was the one vote on Option A, and that he thinks he would have done the wrong thing without the majority opinion of members (the issue itself was resolved excellently with Option B and is no longer an issue).
• New member website events calendar, wiki, and blog posts were shown.
• The events calendar was suggested by members at the civics meeting two weeks ago, and was built by Fitz. It is live on the site, but is not yet the main calendar until we get more events on it. It exists so that members can share events here and around town that they’d like people to know about.
• The wiki was suggested by members who wanted to know how they can help, ways they can tell other people they can be involved, how to use the printer, etc. Members can edit pages and add pages, and each page has a history of who adds and edits what.
• Blog posts can be written by members here.
• To summarize, there are events for the calendar, wiki for a handbook, and blog posts for thoughts/requests/updates/photos/etc that are thought by the member to be supportive and nurturing of people and the group here overall: relevant to our “Collective Agency”.
• Alex emailed a username/password to all members at the meeting, who now have full access to add/edit events they care about, write blog posts, and add/edit the wiki. All items added by members will show up in Google search results pretty quickly.
• Alex reminded members that they can do pretty much anything here that they want to be done or change.
• Members can call a vote on anything actionable to get broader support and consensus.
• Policies, such as terms of service, rates, items in the Community Guidelines and the Constitution, need to be approved by the 4 Council members (or as per Section 8 of the Constitution, can be overruled by a 2/3rds majority of members), and each person will honor the contracts/agreements that he/she has entered into. But a vote by members on something actionable will strongly influence the Council members.

And in 20 minutes, that was our weekly civics meeting. Next time: Tuesdays 3:30pm-4:15pm.

Categories: Democracy