Hold Meetings

To organize your group, you’ll need to hold meetings—a lot of them. And the more people who are at these meetings, the longer it will take to reach consensus. Here are some tools that will help you get through these discussions.

• Have an agenda —While early gatherings are more about forging relationships, any working meeting needs to have an agenda. “Meetings should not be to discuss things; they should be to decide on things,” Hack Factory founding president Mike Hord advised. “Long, drawn-out meetings can kill an organization, especially in the early stages where people are interested in getting to know one another.” Having an agenda forces an end to contentious or drawn-out discussions.

• Rules of order —Many hackers have poor social skills and like to interrupt each other. Even worse, some toxic individuals seek to take over meetings out of a love for pedantry. The solution is a set of guidelines for managing meetings called rules of order (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_of_order). The rules call for an ordered, polite series of verbal exchanges whereby the majority opinion of the group is decided upon. The system most widely used is called Robert’s Rules of Order, which lays down specific procedures for motions, amendments, and votes. “These are important to keeping a process moving forward,” Hord explained. “One person cannot deadlock the meeting if everyone else—or even ‘just’ a majority—is in agreement.”

  You don’t have to use rules of order in every meeting, but at very least there should be an acknowledged chairperson of the meeting who can impose the rules if arguments break out.

• Keep minutes —It’s important to keep minutes of every meeting, if only to inform people who missed the meeting what happened. More importantly, most hackerspaces are very open and sharing organizations, and any sort of deliberate secrecy is frowned on. Having a paper trail in the form of meeting minutes encourages that environment. “Transparency and member involvement are key to the success of a hackerspace,” Hord agreed. “Pre-posting an agenda as well as posting minutes allows people to involve themselves in issues that they have a key interest in and prevents them being blindsided by decisions that affect them.”

  Of course, a high percentage of members will never read them, but the important thing is that they have access to the hackerspace’s records if they’re interested. Additionally, groups interested in attaining nonprofit status must keep minutes and other administrative minutia to stay in the good graces of state and federal regulations.

• Reach consensus —Many hackerspaces place a high value on decision-making via consensus, rather than having the leadership make the decision. Usually this involves discussing the matter until all present are in agreement. “My general rule is that you are only allowed to dissent if you have another solution you’re willing to act on,” Brugh said. “That said, everyone should have a chance to be vocal about where they stand—vocal with a time limit.”

  Hord agreed. “Even after [a matter] has been moved, seconded, and voted upon, some people will still insist on attempting to reengage,” he said. “Parliamentary procedure suggests gavel pounding and declarations of ‘out of order,’ but in a less formal setting, a firm but polite ‘we’re done discussing that,’ repeated over and over will usually suffice.”

• When in doubt, call bike shed —There is a recurring phenomenon in collective groups like hackerspaces called bike shed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_shed), in which a trivial matter can derail an important undertaking. The classic example has a group agreeing to build a shed to store bikes but spends all its time arguing over what color to paint the new shed and end up not building it. One of the arts of meeting facilitation is learning to recognize bike shed behaviors and put a stop to them.

  “Consensus building,” Hord explained, “is about knowing when to apologize and say, ‘Sorry, but you aren’t going to get your way this time because the detail you want to argue about isn’t important enough to derail the entire project.’”