Thanks, absolutely wonderful post, and I agree with all of it. I’ve said it multiple times but it bears repeating that as it stands there are discrepencies between how we practice management and governance at Resonate and our ideals, goals and manifesto. The reason I’m still there is because I’m absolutely convinced those discrepencies are not by design to obfuscate any creepy hidden agenda, and more the result of us trying to build something fundamentally at odds with how society is organized and how wage labor oppression (and all its implications and fundamental pillars : racism, homophobia, patriarchy, etc.) functions on a global scale, especially because Resonate is a global project, and therefor, also struggles with incarnation (which is one of reasons why I think open chat rooms and video calls are so important, they’re the only little realm of incarnation we’ve got). Taking into account all these pitfalls, I understand why it’s easier in many instances, particularly for the board, to just not always have to make that path back and forth between “Resonate the company” and “Resonate the striving-for-self-governance international community”, because it IS absolutely a tiring and potentially complex process that needs a certain approach to even function.
However, and that’s where I concur with @psi and thank him a lot for the courage to mention this out loud, it IS an absolute necessity, it’s not a detail, it’s not something we can nonchalently call “over communication”. transparency can not be “transparency up to a point where some people think transparency might make us lose some time, or lose a good opportunity to have some money, or lose a good partnership” or, or, or, add anything that feels “life threatening” for the board to “Resonate the Company”. We’ll never have a good “self-governed” community if the thinking process behind the nomination of someone as crucial as a “board director” is done completely in the dark, and just mentionned as merely a functionnal item on the bulletin board that we’re politely informed of, however great that person may be (and as @psi already said better than me, Thom seems great and seems to make sense).
Doing that undermines how the community can feel about itself, and basically turns anyone not in the know of the board member’s decision process into lower class citizens of this common endeavor, much like they probably already feel elsewhere, and why they’re here to help build something different to begin with. And if it’s too much effort to let people know why and how these decisions not only are taken but are even considered in a first place, to make them not only public but public at the moment where they are taken, then it feels to me like saying the bare minimum is too much effort. I think the community would actually also like a backstory on how most opportunities came to be (do people contact us? Do we contact them? Are they personally related to the board or a specific board member or are they people who contacted resonate to help out and have been silently following the project for a while with no personal ties with board members? Etc. yes, this might sound cumbersome, but this all matters and is part of transparency).
So yes, this will imply much more communication, but that’s the reason why other companies don’t do it : it’s a lot of effort, it’s not just some words it’s praxis and it involves changing a lot of comfortable usual patterns we commonly find in almost all structures under capitalism, with very little in terms of “reward” besides community respect and trust, which might not immediately materialize in the form of a lot of money or communication or whatever. But it can solidify Resonate as a community led project, and to me that’s really the most important point of it all.