Notice of General Meeting August 15 & Resolution to elect Thom Stewart to Resonate Board

By a decision taken in their meeting of July 28, 2022, the Resonate Board proposes an online General Meeting open to all qualified Members 2022-08-15T15:00:00Z. The online location will be posted in this thread prior to the meeting.

This General Meeting will include a vote to decide on the following Ordinary Resolution:

  • Resolved: Thom Stewart of Galway, Ireland is elected to the Resonate Board as a Director. (More about Thom.)

Voting will be conducted in this area of the Forum and will be open for at least three days following the General Meeting.

This notice is posted according to the procedures required by the Resonate Rulebook, Sections 22, 24 v. & 37.

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Are there more informations surrounding the process that lead to this decision, why, what are Thom’s implications/ties with Resonate, what’s the thinking behind the board’s choice etc. ?

As it stands personally I won’t vote because this is a decision I don’t feel informed about enough to participate in, but since I seem to understand there’ll be a public vote I just felt like asking so that people could come informed at the general meeting on August 15.

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Thank you @LLK, excellent questions.

Under our rules it was most important that the notice appear two weeks in advance of the meeting.

Now that this obligation has been met, there is time to expand on the topic.

In the coming days I look forward to giving Thom more of a proper introduction and sharing my excitement at the potential of his participation as a Director.

I will say that as an organization registered in Ireland it will be of enormous benefit to have a Director from that jurisdiction, particularly one so connected with local social movements.

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Just want to note that it looks like for online meetings there are no quorum requirements for a vote (24.v). I hope this is something we’ll change in the bylaws through an amendment sometime in the future. 24.i indicates to me that we should aim/hope for 8% of membership to be involved in this decision (I think this is 48 people, with 600 members, though I understand there is no accurate count?). It looks like we’re aiming for a simple majority vote.

As a personal note on this vote, I understand why it is needed, but I do wish there were a bit more Whereases (or a less formal version of it) in the above resolution. Reading Thom’s profile I think they seem like a great person and I really respect the work of starting mental health co-ops. It’s something that society sorely needs and I have close friends doing similar things state-side. I also strongly believe that most folks can govern an organization, and Thom looks like they have a lot of experience in this field. But was any work done to reach out to current members who might live in Ireland to become board members? It feels a bit like a decision being made from being in fire-putting-out-mode and I wish there had been more transparency around the needs and expectations here. Or at least a bit more heads up.

It’s my understanding that publishing of board meetings is in progress and I think that would have helped members be ready for this vote. I also understand that there is conversation about making board meetings open to membership. I think that will help massively with transparency.

I know that most of us are volunteers here and we’re doing the difficult work of trying to create a democratically accountable organization that can compete against massive amounts of capital, while suffering the pressures of wage labor, while primarily communicating in modes that lose a lot emotion and sympathy. This isn’t easy. I have a lot of faith in a lot of the folks I have interacted with here though.

:fist:

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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.

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Can an e-mail be sent out about this?

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If you’re refering to an email blast about this particular meeting and resolution, @sganesh contacted me about this last week, so I am on it.

I am just waiting for the email test confirmation and the official member list with everyone’s emails to send to.

See the draft for the email (android mobile view screenshot) below:

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@richjensen could you please create an event for this meeting in your original post so that it appears on the Discourse calendar? Thanks!

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In the coming days I look forward to giving Thom more of a proper introduction and sharing my excitement at the potential of his participation as a Director.

Also hoping for the forthcoming information on why that is needed so that folks can join the meeting fully prepared!

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done ! will get the URL link up once meeting location is finalized

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Email should be on its way now.

Keep me posted if any members don’t receive this by the end of the day tomorrow as I am still working out some contact hiccups and learning to use the new email system more efficiently.

Also check your spam/junk folder too, incase it may have landed in there.

Thank you!

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Just want to say another thank you to everyone who is putting in the effort even for these administrative decisions. I don’t have nearly as much time as I’d wished I’d have to involve myself but I’m very encouraged by the level of commitment I keep seeing.

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Hi all! I’m only an occasional worker here these days (taxes :wink:), but, from separate work with Coop Credentials, I would like to endorse Thom’s energy, creativity and vision.

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Thanks Nick. Perhaps I should mention that I met @Thom in the Coopcreds Forum. I encourage all Resonate members to join that environment and observe the work being done to create technical and social conventions for cooperation amongst and across cooperatives.

Coopcreds was initiated in mid-2021 as a consortium project between three co-ops: Resonate, Fairbnb.coop and thepavilion.io and has since benefited from the participation of more than 15.

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Location for today’s meeting: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/8595099074

Hi Sam, I didn’t receive the email. I’m using Posteo, which doesn’t have a Spam folder, but I’ve been receiving other Discourse notifications in my inbox just fine.

Hope this helps.

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Hey, thank you for the notice!

I will follow-up with you via a direct forum message now.

Thanks.

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