Postby chombee » Fri Mar 25, 2011 8:03 pm
Your post is very one-sided Neil. The old working groups system was no longer working, but it had its good features as well as its failures. In coming up with a new system we should try to keep the good things about the old one and fix its failures.
Getting access to the FWG worked like this: If you had been coming along to one of the open working groups and volunteering for two months then an existing FWG member would nominate you to be in the FWG. There would be a discussion about it on the private FWG forum on the bb. If there were no objections, you would be invited. I thought this was a pretty good system.
So far, as far as I know, there is no defined way of getting access to the new FAT group or the trustees group.
There was supposed to be at least one FWG member bottom-lining each open working group and attending all of its meetings. But the open working group meetings all kind of stopped happening. If you ask me the problem was too many different working groups and too many meetings to keep up. I thought the recent proposal of one big regularly open meeting in which we make an agenda and then split up into subgroups was promising. Maybe we could focus on doing just one meeting every month or two and doing it well.
I don't think the consensus decision making process is to blame for all our problems, I think that's a scapegoat. Doing consensus properly is in fact probably the one thing that will save us from endless bickering, keep meetings on track so that effective decisions that everyone feels part of get made, etc. Forest has never been very good, or at least not very consistent, about actually using consensus decision making. I mean having an agenda, proper facilitation, using the hand signals properly, keeping on topic, etc. What we have done quite often is have really long meetings that meander a lot and can be ineffective. I think people tend to confuse that with consensus decision making and then blame it.
I've had it with you. If I had an image of a laser gun I would absolutely position it right here in my hand...
Ha! I have a real laser absolutely positioned in my hand!