Code of Conduct Meeting 2
Roll call
In person: Vivian, Luna, Violet
On phone: Jensen, Emma, Desdemona, Maya
Setting up roles
Goals for today
Comments on code of conduct
Make plan for finalizing and publishing code of conduct
Schedule a public meeting! (after a show?)
Begin process of dreaming up our next show
Comments on code of conduct?
Vivian: doesn’t look like the part about meetings distinguishes between public versus staff meetings
Luna: I guess the only difference is whether or not someone is a member is based on whether they ask to join
Violet: I think we could distinguish staff versus public meetings by how they are advertised — you have to ask to volunteer and then hear about the next meeting
Maya & Luna & Desdemona: Discussion
Luna: Meetings we advertise publicly and meetings we don’t but everyone everyone has access
Maya: worried about over-communicating and people losing interest
Luna: Imagine similar to critical mass structure: there’s a flier, event, and then an invitation to a public meeting. It might be the only meeting we need!
Luna: proposal for census with violet amendment
One publicly advertised meeting after each show! We set the meeting date in the group chat with a survey (Rallly/WhenIsGood)
Proposal approved
Luna: Discussing violet comments
Violet: What sort of guidance do we require from survivors? Do we do exactly what consequences they want us to? Or do we just take “guidance” or do we go our own way
Luna: The definition and consequence of consensus is that people will leave if they don’t agree. You can have consensus without doing what everybody wants.
Emma: Consensus means everyone feels comfortable with the decision made, and if people are uncomfortable with our decisions then it’s not consensus?
Des: Overview of my comments on the doc as a whole
I went to my (wise, experienced) friend El about this situation about their perspective
They said its good but there’s a few big holes that make parts of it non-functional
Des: The event running thing: there’s not a section to protect anyone who creeps at events (nazis chasers racists misogynists). We don’t have time to take consensus during events and the security team need to have enough responsibility and policy to make decisions.
Maya: I don’t want cops at our events and I don’t want us to be cops.
Des: I helped with event at Club Pittsburgh where we hired bouncers. You need two people who are trained to respond to stuff and to throw people out.
Violet: I agree with Des we need security staff and here’s where I would modify the code of conduct to give the staff more power and structure.
Luna: we could pull in a lot of knowledge from other people who do similar work. This is actually one of valuable things that uns33lie could provide in terms of training, analagous to how we aspire to teach people to be performers and sound people. Who has resources / training?
Emma and Des can provide bouncer energy
Luna: Proposal to schedule Emma for self defense training
Violet: amendment to go beyond “self-defense” and also talk about reading situations, de-escalation, how to bounce specifically not just fight
Des: I might have a guy
Jensen knows a black belt
Proposal approved
Des: El suggests rephrasing the opening paragraph about harm-reduction
Des: El suggests rephrasing the opening paragraph about conflict and safety
Des: Conflict and safety section: response to safety concerns does not need to be the public code of conduct and only used in need-to-know basis and only when arises. It’s too extra to list out the consequences like that we eject people when they’re too drunk.
El: Mechanism is functionally inoperable. Where is this documented / who supervises it? Is there a grievance process?
Emma: we could have the code of conduct posted at the venue so we can refer to it for IRL complaints
Des: that’s good to have it in person but I don’t want that part of our structure laid out on the internet
Luna: I disagree I think it’s important for people to have access to all the parts of the org.
Violet: I am a transparency purist and I don’t even want to set up infrastructure to have a secret internal code of conduct
Des: Yeah that makes sense but the proportion of time we spend on it is so much it seems like we’re saying something without saying it. Also, it’s not good to have queer people on lists on the internet, in these times
Violet: I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I think having space for conflict mediation is radical anti-fascist work that can materially protect trans women. But, it’s high stakes and we need to enforce the space for it to be useful
Luna: it seems like we have still more work to do on the code before we’re ready to approve it. Maybe we are done discussing it for now and we need to work on it this week?
Vivian: discussing safety officer training more.
Luna: could reach out to street medic collectives, Prevention point can teach us about drug safety resources
Jensen: dance safe could help w harm reduction
Violet: I really wanna get this up and running as well as possible before it gets warm again. We should delegate and defer decisions as much as possible in order to get someting running again
Luna: I don’t even wanna wait until it’s warm again! I need joy right now.
Violet: We should pick Feb 1 or March 21 for our next show if we wanna shoot for something low key in the near time.
Closing proposals
Luna: I propose that we collaborate online to further draft the code of conduct based on the comments we received today. I propose that “we” schedule another meeting once the draft is finished. Luna can schedule the next meeting but will not facilitate.
Proposal approved
Luna: I propose that we party in someone’s basement on March 21
Proposal approved