Meeting Notes 2025 01 13

These are the notes from the 848th Meeting of Noisebridge.

Date	2025-01-13
Note-takers	We-z, Elan, Anh, Naomi
Moderators	We-z

Previous Meeting Edit redirect [Last meeting]

Next Meeting Edit redirect [Next meeting]

Meeting Summary

• Announcements: Global Game Jam volunteers needed (Jan 26-Feb 1), Wikipedia 25th birthday celebration Jan 24 at SF Main Library, Eric's workshop storage sorting this Saturday
• Consensus Items: Membership tiers were decided: Core Member, Access Member, Supporting Member
• Discussion Items: Membership tier renaming proposal (supporting/access/core), LLM use policy discussion, Restorative Communication workshop and implementation

Introductions

• Weezy - likes to learn, love love <3
• Anh - Graphic design and games
• Nthmost - turning a Rockband piano thingy into general controller
• Carl - hacker
• Jane - doing a lot of embroidery (hand)
• Zach - raise butterflies
• JD - teach lasers (in charge of NB ;)
• Elan - <3 wiki lover
• Joseph/Jojo - enjoys fashion
• Dean - meshtastic
• Jawa - Fashion
• Daniel (Web) - Jack of all trades master of none, 3d printers, is a chickenhawk
• Zacchaeus - in search of Guix people
• Brad - into CAD / woodworking / sailing
• LX - global game jam
• Angelo - working on hardware, industrial man
• Farley - philosopher / ex web dev
• Michael - (departed early)

Short announcements and events

• LX: Global Game Jam (1/26 - 2/1) would like volunteers to help out since it'll be big
• Elan: Jan 24th come hang out and celebrate Wikipedia at the SF main library (also posted in discord) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event:Wikipedia_25th_Birthday_Bay_Area
• Elan: This Saturday Eric's sister will look through Eric's storage/workshop and see if there's any relevent items for donations

Excellence

Our One Rule is to Be Excellent to Each Other.

• Naomi: positive part (showing up for the community, doing praxis) negative (don't be mean, treat people how you would like to be treated)
• LX: treat people how they want to be treated
• We-z: kindness, empathy, emotional intelligence

What does that mean? Please see our page on excellence https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Excellence!

Anti-Harassment Policy & Community Standards of Excellence

Noisebridge has an Anti-Harassment Policy https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Anti-Harassment_Policy

Everyone is expected to follow the Anti-Harassment Policy, please familiarize yourself with it.

More approachable & specific guidelines: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Community_Standards

https://safespace.noisebridge.net/ is one way to quickly raise issues which will be seen by people in Slack.

Brief Kudos

• Naomi: kudos to Daniel (web) for new signage
• LX: and his new donation site

Zoning & Permitting Standing Item

NB city bureaucracy WG -- JD & Alice, among others.

Matt had to submit a final letter that is bounding on final working/formatting for compliance.

Happy path = 1 week completion

Big C Consensus Items

Nobody likes 3 hour meetings, only explain if new people are present. https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Current_Consensus_Items

Consensus Items

Only for talking about Big C consensus items, small c consensus items should be discussed with people at the space at the time of the change/new item or can be reserved for the discussion section of the meeting.

Discussion Items

It is recommended to post items for discussion ahead of time at https://pad.riseup.net/p/nbmeeting.

Item prompts should follow the format: From/Raised by: [your name here] Seeking [decision/outcome/advice/something else] On topic: [topic]

Discussion Item 1: Membership Tier Renaming

From/Raised by: Daniel

Seeking: final decision

On topic: change names of membership

Tell everyone coming in for the first time to become a supporting member.

These tiers were previously called "Member aka Big-M Member", "associate member", and "supporting member". Renaming of membership tiers to: Core Member, Access Member, and Supporting Member.

Online poll to rename membership tiers completed w/ a few stragglers (according to Daniel). Core Member replaces big-M Member

Wheezy: anything but "Big M"

Naomi: hear hear

Various: maybe something like "janitorial member" gets the point across better.

Discussion Item 2: LLM Bridge Policy

From/Raised by: Elan

Seeking: community decision (not necessarily this week)

On topic: LLM bridge

https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/LLMBridge#TL%3BDR

• Elan: It's good practice to have llm policy on nb wiki and interpersonal communication. I think there are weird issues, if someone is written slick, it's given authority. Would like not to see relationships at NB be governed by LLMs
• Michael: the point of making someone a member of sudo room is excellence. if we use llms, we take away moral agency.
• Naomi: is that what happened?
• Elan: I did not agree with how someone mediating used ChatGPT responses during the process. It gave me the ick.
• JD: Using LLMs how is it different from talking to your spouse or someone you trust for advice on a negotiation/mediation you're stumped on for reflective feedback?
• Zackie: Are you sending someone directly the output of the LLM or reading it and using your own words?
• WE-Z: I want to second what Daniel said earlier - ie treat it like Medium.com. I.e. attribute generated content solely to the person rather than the Noisebridge-voice. I think these should be e.g. Wheezy ideas.
• Daniel: Most know the feeling of having your head wrapped around a problem - there is a feeling about figuring things out a problem and using LLM a tool. This is totally different than letting the LLM do the work for you.
• LX: Made a template for when people use LLM on the wiki disclosing use
• Michael: When people use LLM it should be up to personal use - the privacy issue is not a new issue. Data tracking issues is not new
• Elan: Agreed and makes sense. For me, it's disclosure. Disclosure solves all of the problems. Policy generating stuff, wiki articles, those things are less emotionally wrapped up. Using ungrounded input (for mediation) and treating the output as legit is not okay. The template that LX mentioned helps with these issues.
• Wheezy: LLMs are excellent tools for processing personal emotions - they literally will echo what you say back tell you you're right. Personal LLMs are great.
• Elan: process to 86 elle last week went down shitty.
• Naomi: I did not 86 her
• Elan: I can't tell the difference between permanent ATL and 86.
• Zackie: one difference is that you can still go to other hackerspaces - "something has to change" was the sentiment at that meeting.
• Elan: I was told part of the reason for not 86... I feel like we should make it an 86 if it is behavior not allowed at NB
• Weezy: clearly this person is a manipulator - can we ask this person to stop being political and trying to power grab? if we are bothered by their behavior, can we come together and ask whether or not we should 86? it should be egalitarian and not dictatorial - it should include everyone. David last week was caught off guard.
• Naomi: that is why I wrote the anarchy paralysis page
• JD: thought it was LLM
• Naomi: it's not
• Elan: all of this was a response to policy injection. I trust JD a lot with laser but he's not the king
• Naomi: why are we talking about guilds?
• Elan: because we are talking about power grabs. People are being accused of aggregating power by essentially practicing do-ocracy. This feels shitty and I did not like how it went down
• Weezy: I asked Elle to leave and did not want it to be super secretive which is Elle-like behavior. You (Elle) do this private political chat move that is shady. Noisebridge is a high trust community and we find out if you are trying to pull strings in the background. I was not going to be private about the ATL because I want to be transparent.
• Elan: I agree and we should be public. It seems we have a different set of standards. Elle is not coming back -- we have double standards and that feels unexcellent. Similar things happened to other people doing good work. It sucks.
• LX: It was better that she was not 86'd - I think the consequences of 86 propose a direct safety risk rather than behavior disagreements. We can thank a person for their help and still get to a point where we ask them to leave without banning them from other hackerspaces. Naomi handled it better by not using a direct 86. I only had positive experiences with Elle. But I got a better understanding from other people and got that the discussions that were done were healthy. Elle was really nice with certain people and got into strong conflict with others. The process was fair and represents all the emotional labor done (mostly by Naomi). The most serious issue was injecting an ATL during mediation via Policy Injection and conflict escalation.
• WEZ: All these dark patterns that I were not appreciative of...it was a double edged sword. We have one rule which is to be excellent and not be manipulative. There are a lot of smart people here who are capable of manipulation. To Elan's point, we should have everyone's perspective involved for this
• Michael: I've met Elle before and the interaction was good. Using private chats and channels itself is not problematic but we are a hackerspace so transparency is important. We have to consider if this person imposes a harm to NB.
• Elan: WEZ made precisely the same claim about transparency - ie that was claimed by Elle to be the norm when talking with Justin about talking in #bravespace. This is was called out as policy injection and it feels like its a repeated trend of a double standard. She calls people out stronger than need to be, and ruffles feathers - we say we do things for one reason and then treat them differently. I was on vacation and two people messaged me about the mediation chat - it feels like things were done without me since I would have a differing opinion
• Naomi: there was more info that was involved
• Elan: it feels shitty and I hope we can do things better in the future
• Daniel: Elle did not propose physical or property harm -- the harm was mostly sociological (that was my understanding).
• Naomi: the triggering event was not scraping logs - I reached out to Elle about 2-3 weeks ago - I put her on notice on purpose. She said we should have a private conversation -- which conflicts to what she said earlier about having a rule to not have private chats. She responds that things have been very stressful and came at me for 4 different things and had "please fire me" guilt energy. I was trying to have a decent convo but that triggered things for me.
• LX: as a friend of Elle, Cloud was asked to leave during mediation and that was a violation of our standards - you do not get to decide how things go, that's the mediator's job. Either we allow someone to improperly ATL Cloud and be at the space or we took the steps that we did.
• WEZ: Appreciate your insights - NB kind of runs on vibes. We can vibe out if an ATL is in good faith - we have this policy in place to help people feel safe. I did everything I could to help Elle feel safe even with the ATL. It sucks bc I also have friends that cannot handle the open transparency that we have. We are a leaderless cult. Some people can't handle NB because of their nature and tendencies.
• Naomi: That feels like you're saying it's a nature thing but I don't think it's a nature thing.
• WEZ: Yeah some people just really want to know who is in charge around here. I didn't mean to make it sound like a nature thing
• Elan: People don't always act excellent. People are imperfect - I'm sure if you look through my discord you could find examples of me being snippy.
• Naomi: I analyzed you as well for the record [referring to the ElleWrites document Glasl analysis]
• Elan: Sure. That's a weird thing to do. [is it? it wouldn't be a good analysis if i didn't compare ppl's behavior. including my own. --nthmost]
• Elan: Anyways - this is a mess. I'm just saying call people out and don't be mad when people call you out. Don't put off having uncomfortable conversations. We could have corrected this behavior and people don't have to be friends. The revealed preference of how we handle non-safety-related interpersonal issues is by kicking them out (which I would say is the wrong approach).
• WEZ: Mmm. We escalated someone who escalates
• Naomi: Someone took a disagreement and reframed it into a WIN-LOSE situation. Why do you think this situation became more than what it initially was?
• Elan: *thousand yard stare* In a bygone Cloud took on Wyatt's cause as a way to fuel the vendetta with Elle (and others)
• Naomi: I don't think she was wrong in a lot of her intuitions but I didn't even use any of that. It was a lot of situations where things were framed as WIN-LOSE
• Michael: Whoever blocked her Big M - is that confidential?
• Everyone: No, it was Mark.
• LX: Naomi is trying to put together a draft that better improves our process and conflict resolution toolkit. I offered to host a workshop for these things as well.
• Carl: If Elle returns in the future.. Is there an opportunity for her and what does that look like?
• Naomi: Right now there isn't a great path except for time. There are more than a dozen people who are not keen on seeing her. And we are bad at mediation. Maybe we should have a relationship with a 3rd party mediator. Mediation isn't cheap. Elle would probably have to be in mediation with a dozen people.

Discussion Item 3: Restorative Communication

From/Raised by: Naomi

Seeking: talking

On topic: Restorative Communication

https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Restorative_Communication

• Naomi: [improv game: asks for a place, a relationship, and a situation to set up a hypothetical about RC]
• Michael: [interrupts Naomi in the middle of a hypothetical situation about RC] I just want to say i have to leave, I didn't come here for an extended thing about a situation i don't know about...
• Naomi: [looks flustered] wow. ok. Michael, when you stood up to interrupt me in the middle of my talking about RC, i felt frustrated. Next time, could you just stand up silently?
• Michael: uh, yeah?
• Naomi: Thank you!
• Naomi: wow that was way better than a hypothetical. [Michael walks off, a little confused...] Vocalize disagreements according to the RC template:
  • Look
  • Feel
  • Offer
  • Ask
• Naomi: no sneak dissing. Vocalizing in front of others helps people people to these agreements.
• JD: What if not everyone uses it?
• Naomi: yeah, there are multiple failure modes -- 1 is that people don't actually know what their feelings are. another is that you express your feelings and people take advantage of your vulnerability.
• Naomi: So that's why it's imperative to do this for the community all at once... you can't just do it one individual at at time.
• Naomi: Cultural interventions in order of how impactful i think they'd be:
  • Modeling of RC behavior by people who are around a lot
  • RC cards providing permanent, physical intervention in the space
  • Strategic deployment in the meeting template
  • Announcements for more RC workshops
  • Putting more stuff on the wiki about the meta of RC
  • Laminated page about RC placed in membership binder
• LX: Can run RC workshops
• Michael: [returns] sorry i just wanted to come back to hear what you were frustrated about

Do-ocratic Task Board

Participation also means doing stuff to contribute to the space. Propose new tasks or pick some tasks from Github, from what needs to be done around you, or whatever, and see if someone will sign up to work on that task. Anyone can sign up and it's a great way to show you are contributing!