Process minutes: 2018-03-22

Agenda:

3/22/2018
Process cmtee meeting
7-8:30pm, CH sitting room
Present: Jillian, Bob, Patti, Sarah by dial-in

Agenda
1. Check-ins
2. Monkey Review
3. Any April training next steps
4. Skills and Thrills - follow idea for June (discussed at 3/10/18 cmty
meeting) or change direction
5. Next meeting(s) currently scheduled for: Monday April 2, 7pm (at unit
18; the CH is booked), and Monday, April 30, 7pm, CH sitting room

2. Monkeys
Bringing chocolate for the two community meetings a month.
MONKEY Jillian to provide workshop with Process on scheduling facilitation
Re-MONKEY Sarah to share their handouts and powerpoint to the Process cmtee
google folder in drive. (See 3/19/16 Process minutes)(Feb 2016 Training)
ONGOING MONKEY: at each facilitator brunch: could ask facilitators - when
there’s a new proposal, or discussion of any new idea, ask for questions,
then ask for positive reflections about it, before they go into discussion
of concerns.
ONGOING MONKEY: Let’s schedule a few refreshing policy moments:
Parking
Expectations for interacting with visitors (from New Member Packet)
Cleaning up after yourself in the CH / Expectations for teen and youth cmty
work, CH access, and supervision
Review of GO proposal and decision-making processes and revisiting decisions
Overview of BOA and how to search for agreements - demo
Minutes must be emailed to their minutes email address for the BOA and to
talk.
RE-MONKEY: Jillian will add to the BOA updater job description, tracking if
committees are sending in minutes, and if community meeting minutes are in
there too.
COOLER: Jillian will add Vice President (infoco convenor) and Secretary
(process convenor) into the mandate and email out new copy - BUT check
with Debbi first to makes sure it is correct, F&L may change this anyway.
RE-MONKEY: all of us to read through the vision and see what ideas for
skills and thrills are in there.
DONE - Sarah will send out an email about the April alternative meeting -
needs to be a meeting that does not need a facilitator, minute taker, or
child care.
DONE: Sarah will draft an email about facilitation volunteers for April, to
send to certain TSers, and will show it to us and F&L.
DONE: Jillian will email facilitators next season and work on
pre-assignments.
DONE: Sarah will email CRC, and will email to seek volunteer facilitators
for April.
Re-MONKEY: We need to create an agenda item for blocking processes, for an
info discussion item, then from that we can craft a proposal. Jillian will
email Yi-miau and ask her to put it in the queue.
DONE: Sarah accidentally did not include Mary King and Daniel in her
message in February to the ad hoc committee improvement group - Sarah will
forward to them and let PRocess know what she finds out, and how we can
help get a discussion started again.
DONE: Sarah will send out an email about the skills and thrills idea.
MONKEY: Jillian will bring the list back to the April 2 process meeting and
we’ll shape it further APril 16 presentation.
MONKEY: Jillian will ask for some time on 4/16 meeting.
MONKEY: Jillian will check in with buildings, see if they would be willing
to present to the community about the committee structure they have been
trying

Minutes:

Monkey Review discussion items:

Chocolate - recent request for dairy free chocolate, so has to be dark
chocolate. Patti will look at her chocolate covered pretzels. If anyone
finds themselves at Trader Joe’s pick up some dairy-free chocolate.

Monkey review: Sarah accidentally did not include Mary King and Daniel in
her message in February to the ad hoc committee improvement group - Sarah
will forward to them and let PRocess know what she finds out, and how we
can help get a discussion started again.
Reply from both of them, no time right now.
Maybe a next step on that one might be to just for community meeting
discussion, Buildings cmtee? Maybe Mary King would be willing to present to
the community about what structural things they’ve tried?
Process, maybe we should report back to the community that we’ve tried to
help an ad hoc cmtee but not been able to get traction on this. People did
not want steering cmtee. We could check in with Bldgs and see if they would
be willing to present, and then let the cmty know that Buildings would be
willing if we wanted them to. Or we could check with cmty first and then
check in with buildings... There are cmtees doing things differently, could
start by listening to those committees.
MONKEY: Jillian will check in with buildings, see if they would be willing
to present
MONKEY / FYI: CRC is meeting and is working on next steps. Talking with
parents about involving teens in discussions - get the parents perspectives
and concerns and get their ideas on reaching out to the teens.

---

3. Any April training next steps

Just confirming that this is a TS and GO training not just GO, yes that’s
fine.


4. Skills and Thrills - follow idea for June (discussed at 3/10/18 cmty
meeting) or change direction?


MONKEY / FYI: CRC is meeting and is working on next steps. Talking with
parents about involving teens in discussions - get the parents perspectives
and concerns and get their ideas on reaching out to the teens.

-------
Community meeting minutes 3/10/18 on skills and thrills
Brief presentation about Skills and Thrills 2018 idea:

Info about this was sent out on email the other day by Sarah. We had a
Skills and Thrills brainstorm at a community meeting in early January. Very
wide range of ideas, some involving physical projects to be planned and
implemented. Last year’s Skills and Thrills was very idea oriented rather
than planning and implementation oriented so might be time to do the latter
this time around. Idea is perhaps have Skills and Thrills in late June, and
have it be a day or 2 day process where we get together, people pitch ideas
of projects to the group, quick process of people ranking projects for most
interest, then people join in groups discussing the most popular projects,
and can actually plan and even implement some that day, and some amount of
money for supplies too.

Questions/ discussion about this idea? Do people like it?

Idea – can there be some element of teaching how to plan, maybe provide a
template for planning a project?

Idea to do an alternative meeting ahead of time to teach planning?

For me it would be useful to narrow it down to know what people have the
most energy around in advance, so people aren’t coming with an idea that
they put a lot of time into and then find out that people aren’t
interested, or, that there are so many ideas that it dilutes the process?
Useful to me to know what three projects I might work on ahead of time.

For example I know Glenn is really interested in having bluebird houses
around the property. If that’s an idea people felt would be a good project,
if we knew in advance we could have the supplies on hand to actually do it
on that day. Same thing with the kitchen idea. If Willie and crew knew that
working on the kitchen design process was one of the top three things, he
could prepare stuff ahead. That was what was so cool about the pedway mural
painting, we knew ahead of time so could have everything ready.

In the past we’ve done skills and thrills over 2 days or 2 weekends, we
could split it apart into discussing and prioritizing ideas one date and
then the next date for planning and/or implementation?

Where the preparation ends and where the real skills and thrills starts was
unclear to me. So the idea of pitching a project, like a hackathon, when we
go in we don’t know anything about any project but we know they were worked
out beforehand by the hackathon planners, so they know the scope of it,
what materials needed, what the goals are. And we as participants go in,
listen to 4 projects and then we join the one that we like best – all 4
projects happen though. Might be helpful to have a preparation small group
that gets the project set up.

I think there’s a tension between the excitement and energy of the ideas
and the whole thing happening at once, and, the idea for it to be more
planned, separate, over two weekends, a more concrete way of doing things.
Open space is not planned ahead by its very nature, so that may not be what
we want. I’m not surprised Sarah suggests doing it all at once, she is
comfortable with the uncertainty, but I think we as a community will need
more planning.

Process could do some work to help generate ideas and potentially have the
group narrow them down at a community meeting soon, get honchos involved
and then we could have them pitch the solid ideas that morning.

The pitching on the day of skills and thrills would be, we assume these are
the X projects that will be worked on, all will be done you just decide
which to do.

Some of things we’re talking about are things we typically do on workdays
so it could be some planning on this day and implementation on workday?.

So now this will go back to Process and this will come back again for a
next steps.
-------------(end community meeting minutes)

Sarah heard from Marta who wants to pitch putting on a production of a
short play.
Sarah heard from Willie who wanted to workshop designing a Great Oak flag.

Could consider creating a form that asks: What is it?
Rough Cost?
What’s involved?
How much time?

Group did not want to leave it so open and unplanned. If we propose ideas
ahead of time and people vote, that’s still some setup time.

Willie could use time for kitchen planning?
If teens want to do a project, how could that work if it could get voted
down? Not good.

We need to pick a process for doing this that does not put all the work on
process.
Could bring back the list we already have, solicit more ideas, bring them
back for dot storming
Solicit for honchos, and getting commitment by a certain date is key to
funding and moving forward.

Maybe this is too much like a great oak workday.

I love the idea if there is a project that the teens might want to do.
Could it be figured out that early?

No I don’t think so.

Part of what i thought separated these projects from workday projects were
they were more fun, less work, but I’m not sure the group thinks so!

We could put out to the group, who has organizing energy for which of these
projects? And then NOT vote them down - whole idea is if someone has energy
to lead it then we go for it.

How about if you want to lead a project you make sure you have at least X
neighbors who you know want to help you. Or just know that you may or may
not have helpers.

I’m trying to picture, End of day at Skills and Thrills what do we want to
be different? We want to have a more cohesive community, sense of working
together, sense of shared contributions to greater good. Often there is
learning. Idea of people sharing their passion or interests and skills
through a project. See what we did and what others did.

Bob - something like building a playground in a low income community nearby
or cleaning up a nature area where kids can explore or having some kind of
a thing that we could do to contribute. Community service project.

If I was in town I would organize a community service project for 6/23. The
whole community will not want to do that, but some could come and some
could do something else. Not get hung up on getting everyone to do the same
thing which is so tiring and frustrating.

Community wants Projects ahead of time and projects ready to be implemented
with honchos.

I don’t think we’re back to square one, we have some ideas - I feel like we
have Glenn, Marta, Willie, lots of ideas from the 1/3/18 brainstorm.

We could clean up the brainstorm list, add the recent items to it, and see
if there would be anyone who would want to honcho any of these.

Move some to a parking lot that are clearly weekend-long discussion items?
But, some small group could figure out the next steps of some of the
discussion items as their skills and thrills work.

FYI Sunward is working on aging in place, social worker developing a
process for aging in place for them and then will invite us in.

Work behind the scenes to find out if people want to honcho each of these -
approach individuals? And then go the community with the list?

Just not sure if this is inspiring enough. Just feels like too much work
and too much like a workday.

Is there a chance that the Teens issue should be the weekend focus?
Probably best not to start with a large group process. Better to work at
level of finding out needs, one on one and one on two or three kinds of
discussion, that works based on my experience.

I think that information could be presented about child development,
parenting styles? Could have presentations that might give us info about
next steps?

Circle meetings are very different than the meetings we have. If you do
circle meetings it can change your culture and when something comes up you
have a way to discuss.

Child development expert. How interactions are seen from a teen
perspective. Concept of belonging and isolation/exclusion.

We spent two long weekends on living well with children, ten or more years
ago! Maybe it’s time to do it again. How to be supportive of the kids and
parents and community.
Teens are more isolated and anxious and suicidal, in the general
population, than ever before.
Dawn Farm is a great local resource.

How about something around the issue of belonging as the theme?
Belonging through the life span. Children, teens, seniors.

What does community mean to you? How do people get excluded here? What can
we do about that? We’ve had constructive conversations about this in the
past.

If we had a whole day together we could watch a movie, read some short
pieces, have some poetry or songs that spoke to the topic, gain some info
or perspective. What cohousing feeds in us.

Seems like we do have people here at GO who could present on this topic, if
its chosen.

I like the idea of it being connected to our experience, not just outside
expert. How is belonging experienced here at Great Oak, an exploration.

It’s helpful to me to have some of the outside expert info too though, what
goes into the feeling of belonging, and then I can apply it and reflect on
my own experience.

Book - Braving the Wilderness, Brene Brown
Could use a little funding to buy books. Or communication & Marshall
Rosenberg.

But it needs to be something we all benefit from, life learning for all,
not just about or for a few people, I’m not sure this is the right fit.

I feel like we need the community to go back and choose the topic. I feel
like we had such a huge push to create the vision and try to support it, I
don’t want to do that again.

Add emergency preparedness as a skills and thrills topic? (Not just fire,
all kinds of things.) (Bob suggests some thing at each meeting, 5 minutes
on some safety tip. All run to a rendez vous spot!)

Bring the list back and dot storm it to make sure the community wants to do
this?

Should we try to get time on April 4 or April 16?

Maybe we need more time to sort it out internally? But we do want the
community to do the work of choosing.
MONKEY: Jillian will bring the list back to the April 2 process meeting and
we’ll shape it further APril 16 presentation.
MONKEY: Jillian will ask for some time on 4/16 meeting.
--end--
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