Process minutes: 2009-07-26

Minutes:

7/26/2009
9-10am
Membership/Process meeting
Present: Sarah, Adi, Jillian


Membership is currently Adi, Sarah, Emily, and Rod is the outreach contact
person.

For a while now it seems that Membership had not had enough clarity and/or
enough energy and/or enough continuuing members to keep the momentum going,
to do the core membership work.

There are some written documents, some need to be updated, and, if the
documents are never used they don't do much good.

And recognize that some folks really need to be talked through the documents
in person - just handing them printouts may not be useful. Membership is
supposed to do that for prospective members, buddies are supposed to do
that for new members, but are buddies having regular check ins and followup
with membership cmtee to make sure

Sarah brought copies of what she has:

- Member packet
- Prospective member packet

Both exist but need to be updated periodically. But are they ever given to
people, and talked through with people? If its central to a healthy
community that new members and prospective members fully understand their
commitments, why is there not energy in the community to do the work of
educating them?

People who are interested in what happens to membership go through the
mandate with people who have been on membership and find out what's been
happening and why?

I think we need to talk as a community about what we see as the crucial
roles of membership and how for that work to happen and if there is energy
for the work to happen. Seems like Membership has sort of drifted away - we
need to recoalesce the energy around membership as a community.

Could be really helpful to invite new folks from the last year - a range of
folks who are more or less involved. Ask them about their experience, what
happened, what could make it better, what's most important.

There's such a range of new people who move in - some who are ready to be
involved and some who seem to want to avoid being involved at all -
Membership cmtee needs to have ways of integrating the whole spectrum.

Its membership who has the "authority", the community mandate, to check in
with members, find out what's going on with them, if they aren't coming to
meetings, if they aren't in the work system. But this does not happen, why
not? Should talk about it.

Idea - create a template for anyone emailing with potential renters (and
buyers?) of things you must cover in your communications - work, pets,
meetings, etc. How about having it at the top of the Gocoho renting page
too? Sounds like a good idea.

Maybe this summer current membership could go through the packets we do have
and do some updating.

Is it a role of membership to check in with a member say who decides to
unsubscribe from "talk" - since its such an info flow for the community.
Could just find out why, and in future check in and ask how its been not
being on "talk", what strategies help keep you up to date with what's going
in.

What about in "inreach" role in membership - checking in with current
members about stuff going on.

idea - contact people who have been buddies and ask them how it went, what
was it like, how much did you do, did it seem to depend on the household,
etc?

Membership would be the group to offer support to buddies and should be
actively checking in with buddies.

Role of maintaining a waiting list? Maybe in future - with TS etc seems
like we won't have one for a while.

Idea - a periodic survey of GO that we do every year (?) - gather info -
how are you feeling at GO overall? Adi's been thinking about that. Or, it
could be say that every month each membership cmtee member has 3 households
they are supposed to check in with (all households, not just new), with a
set of questions that everyone gets - about living at GO.

Idea - membership cmtee members coming to steering meetings as a regular
thing - issues that are talked about at steering could apply to membership -
could become membership's work.

I think new member packet should be an online document with a print option.
Any time there's a new agreement, the book of agreements person could ask
membership if a new agreement should be added to new member packet and just
do it, if its an online collection of documents. Discussion about how a lot
of the info is better transferred in talking rather than reading. But it
does depend on the person - some prefer to read. Written form shoudl be
available, and also discussion. Written packet could have a list of
questions prospectives might want to be thinking about and ask as many GOers
as possible since they will get different answers - for the more amorphous
aspects of living here, like, what's it like to be a parent here? What's the
social life like? etc.

TImeline of when people moved in might be interesting and how many have
left. Interesteing to reflect on. Could even be a photograph of all of us
lined up in order of joining. Could do a continuum exercise.

And could do a continuum at a cmty meeting about how are you feeling about
GO in general, do you feel connected, etc.

MONKEY: Sarah will request meeting time for an upcoming community meeting,
for a discussion and hopefully re-energize about what Membership is supposed
to do and why, and who is willing to help jump start it again.

MONKEY: Before the community meeitng Membership (and process can help if
desired) will gather info from a spectrum of members, newer but could be
older too, about their joining/living here experience, and invite them to
come to the meeting to talk about it too but if they prefer to do it
anonymously this will gather the data.

MONKEY: Adi is going to work on survey ideas.
--
>From previous email discussion:
Membership to do list:

* New Member Packet
* Buyers Checklist
* Sellers Checklist
* Committee job description
* Names and Faces Roster
* Get important docs on the web
* Teen Members
* Childcare Discussionf
* Becoming Empowered
* Connecting with Sunward and TouchStone for Marketing purposes
* Quarterly Newsletter
* Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Sheet for the website
--
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gocoho.org/pipermail/process-minutes_gocoho.org/attachments/20090916/a3ad8a5f/attachment.html>