This archive documents a critical moment in Noisebridge history: in March 2014, three out of five elected board members—Tom Lowenthal, Ari Lacenski, and Al Sweigart—acting without the consent of the other two board members, pushed changes directly to Noisebridge's governance documents in the bureaucracy repository (now called deprecated-bureaucracy) without going through the customary pull request process.
These changes introduced a new governance structure documented in a separate cabal repository that would have replaced Noisebridge's traditional consensus-based governance with a hierarchical voting system. The three board members acted under the premise that the board could make policy decisions using simple majority (3 out of 5 votes)—without prior discussion with the community or the other board members.
This unilateral action prompted immediate pushback, including Naomi Most's proposal that board policy changes should require a 4/5 supermajority instead of simple majority. The community responded swiftly with PR #29 to revert these changes, leading to an intense two-week debate about governance, process, and the future of Noisebridge that culminated in two of the three board members resigning.
On March 26, 2014, board member Madelynn Martiniere announced on the mailing list that "the newly elected board" had agreed on changes to membership and consensus processes, and that these changes were "now available" and "effective immediately."
But this was not true. Naomi Most, also a board member, immediately contradicted this announcement publicly on the list: "Disregard. The board has, in fact, not 'agreed' on these changes, because they were never discussed."
Naomi then revealed the truth: "about 10 different issues were all lumped together in a single 'proposal'" that was submitted while she was unavailable, and "Only two board members plus the proposer voted in favor—totaling three votes out of five" while the other two board members had no discussion of the changes.
The community quickly analyzed the actual governance documents that had been pushed and realized how they fundamentally disempowered the membership:
This public exposure of the board's betrayal of trust turned the tides. The community now understood that three board members had acted unilaterally, without discussion with the other two board members, to fundamentally restructure Noisebridge's governance—and then tried to present it as if "the board agreed." Only after this exposure did Madelynn create PR #29 to revert the changes on March 26, 2014. The changes were merged on March 29, 2014.
This betrayal made board recall not just necessary, but viable. As Naomi would later signal in Cabal Issue #18, people needed to realize the current board had broken faith with the community—and they did.
These documents do NOT represent how Noisebridge currently operates or has historically operated. They represent a brief, controversial attempt to change the governance structure that was ultimately rejected by the community.