When you say "unilaterally", do you mean no individual board member should edit NB bureaucracy, or do you mean the board without the membership? Doesn't this effectively get rid of the board's power to do anything beyond consensus? What counts as a "highly contentious issue", is the "small group of elected representatives" always going to be the board? Is sleeping in the space "highly contentious"? Is banning someone "highly contentious"? Even after we have a metric for what "highly contentious" means, who decides if something is highly contentious or not? By "default voting mechanism" do you mean majority vote, like in the bylaws, or consensus, like the default way NB has been making policy?
If this is making a sort of House and Senate bicameral system with the Membership and Board, can the board similarly veto things that have passed membership? (e.g. in the case where the majority board members are not members of Noisebridge with blocking power.)
When something qualifies as a "high contentious issue", what can the board do exactly to "steer the ship"? What can the board NOT do?
Thanks for asking questions.
1) "Unilaterally" meaning the board. (I presume that no board member, acting as a board member, would take individually-unilateral action to edit the membership policy!)
2) No, it doesn't. That's the point of the "board delineation" document. The board then has a finite number of things it has full power to act on. Everything outside that realm it would have to be explicitly granted by the membership, which is part of the point of this Proposal.
3) What counts? That's for the membership to decide. One possibility is that issues could be PETITIONED for deliverance to the board as a "highly contentious issue". That's basically another way of saying "majority vote" in the membership.
4) Yes, the allusion to "elected representatives" simply means The Board.
5) Yes, sleeping in the space is highly contentious.
6) Yes, banning people tends to be highly contentious (but I hope the board is not expected to field any of that, going forward).
7) Again, "contentious" is not for the board to decide. We're not going to be helicopter parents.
8) By "default voting mechanism" I mean $DECISION_MAKING_MECHANISM -- meaning, I am not going to specify in this language what voting mechanism the NB membership would be using here. That's for the membership to decide. Currently that mechanism is Consensus.
9) I never stipulated a House / Senate relationship, and none of what I've written follows that model. But if I take your question naively: no. At least, not in this proposal.
10) The idea is that the membership would "pass the buck" on decision on any arbitrary issue they'd like to pass to the board. The board should deliver any decision it sees fit ("steer the ship") on that one specific issue, in whatever manner the membership asked the board to consider it. The membership should accept the conclusion of the board's deliberation just as they would accept a Consensus item.
The above entails that the membership accepts this relationship to the board.
I don't really see how the board will have meaningful authority unless the membership agrees to the content of that relationship. This is one attempt at drawing up a "formal relationship".
By the way, I should mention that the language of what I wrote in this Proposal and the 2 other items I posted the other night is not "document worthy"; it's meant to kick off discussion that helps write the document.
Pursuant to #20 -- something to add to the Board policy document.
The Board of Directors shall never edit NB bureaucracy unilaterally.
However, from time to time, certain highly contentious issues may require the input of a small group of elected representatives -- namely, the Board of Directors -- to help steer the ship.
For these issues, the Board may be called upon by the NB membership to issue a Recommendation.
The Recommendation should be approved by the default voting mechanism in the Board, then written in clear, simple language and passed back to the Noisebridge Membership. This language should include some detail on the thought process of the board members and the reasoning behind the final conclusion.
When applicable, the Recommendation should be submitted along with a Pull Request to the NB Bureaucracy github repo containing relevant recommended changes or additions.
(The proposed process cannot be expected to have any effect on the NB membership unless and until the membership accepts a complementary proposal that allows the Board some form of ingress. This could take the form of the membership accepting a "special exception" process for accepting Board Recommendations, e.g. a 2/3 majority vote.)