Growing the Awesome

Initially we were unsure what the focus of this would be, but distilled it down to one question: How do we want to grow the Awesome? The Awesome Foundation wasn't initially conceived with a growth model; the original fear was that people wouldn't be interested. Now we have the opposite problem and need a plan for growth. The Summit gets a bunch of people in the same room, so it's a good time to figure that out. There are some issues to cover, specifically focused on the next year of the Awesome Foundation (for middle to long term planning, see Future of awesome).

Declaration of Awesomeness

This is focused on one central question: is there some set of core values that we want to be able to give people? Following from that:

1. Is it important for us to signal a set of core values?
2. If yes, how should we do that?

Core values

Maybe just giving people some process guidelines is enough. For example, AF NYC has a simple set of 6 norms that each trustee adopts. These chapter operational norms are generally accepted, but what about broader values that are non-negotiable? This initially came up because new chapters have come up asking for more guidance. Bonnie provides an example from another organization she is in. There are 3 core principles: monthly, playful, reciprocity. So every group has to adhere to those principles - something like that might be a good balance.

In Boulder, the chapter realized about 3 months in that they needed to have a discussion about what Awesome meant to the group. It was very helpful for the chapter to specifically do that themselves. Overall, there is a balance and there are many positives to the fact that Awesome was left undefined. There is also some consideration of what these core values would be - the Awesome Foundation is a lot about what it means to participate a lot more than what gets funded. For example, if a group of 10 people wants to focus on giving grants to the elderly it's about the fact that 10 people want to get together and fund things that they think are Awesome, not the specific things they fund.

Maybe part of the magic is that there isn't a definition, and yet we're all still here now. It's analogous to hackerspaces, in that there isn't a central organization defining it, just facilitating networking and communication and conferences. "If more people have the ability to lead more fulfilling lives, that makes the world more awesome." - the AF is awesome because it gives people opportunities. Maybe we should worry less about trying to define it proactively, because it's so hard to describe. When it comes up, the same things surface in everyone's minds even if it's hard to explain it.

Open questions

• How do we get other people to understand our core values?
• Should we be focusing on defining core values, or is just advising on process enough?
• What is the role of creativity, and is there a minimum bar for something to count as Awesome?
• Should there be boundaries on how much funding a chapter can provide and still be considered part of the AF?
• Should there be other "guard rails" around behavior?
  • For example, no giving money to campaigns. We should have some guidelines to protect the integrity of the Awesome name.

Conclusions

Overall, people are more or less agreeing around leaving it undefined, but providing examples and guiding principles. It sounds like the actionable item here is to send a summary of this discussion to the list. And instead of a core set of guiding principles, maybe we should collect a gallery of examples and send them to new chapters instead.

When Awesome goes rogue

What do we do if any of these (hopefully unlikely) scenarios come up?

1. Chapters blatantly violating principles.
2. Individuals acting badly within Awesome chapters.
3. Other forces co-opting Awesome name.

• What about if corporations try to take on our brand? What do we do?
• If any of those things come up, they will clearly not be Awesome. Can they really co-opt our name? What exactly are we afraid of?
• Look to open source software. Risk is bad press... Maybe there can just be an IHAS stamp of approval of something.
• Norms and precedents should help establish behavioral guidelines. And not everyone has to follow all of the same rules, but having examples should help.
• So if a whole chapter is messing up, we can kind of disown them. But what if a single person is a problem, or if there are multiple chapters in the same area can't agree?
• We're all adults, everything is opt-in and consent-based, should we really be worrying about this.
• Probability of a PR disaster is low, but still exists. But if something happens, we probably can't predict it. Maybe we can set up a group of trusted individuals to plan ahead for that and plan ahead.
• Well, what if a grant goes badly? Example: flamethrowers. If that went badly, it would be unintentional but still very bad press. Also, distinction lies between organization and a group of people.
• Problem also of people not understanding that it's a distributed network, not an integrated organization. If something really bad happens, it can fall on all of us.
• What if we deal by re-branding?
• But that's not a long-term solution...
• This came up because of conversations with the Berkman Center. When they found out that there's no trademark of the AF name, they flipped out, and then wrote a huge white paper about what it means. Rough consensus: that the name can be trademarked and enforced loosely.
• Hang on, what are the negatives of trademarking the brand? What's the sensitivity of that?
• Example: word caught on in Baltimore, a cafe got named after it and then a festival, owner trademarked and it turned into a huge mess. Not really analogous here, but...
• It's a question of what happens if something bad goes on. Do we trust Christina and Tim and company to handle it.
• Danger of someone trademarking Awesome under their own name is probably low.
• But what if a chapter tries to take on the name or trademark it out from under us? Or if, say, the TV show leads to the network or something trying to trademark it?
• Maybe we are worrying about this too much. Hackerspace adage: don't fix problems before they happen.
• Can we have a summary of the Berkman Center recommendations?
• Yes, it will get sent to the list. And the recommendation was basically to trademark it to protect the brand (for example, TV show scenario could be very real).
• How about if we can just trust Tim and Christina. This would give us a little bit of a blanket of protection and that it is highly unlikely that it would get abused.
• Maybe it's better that the community is so open and that there is uncertainty about this and that we talk about it, and that's something that makes the AF open and accessible.
• What is the jurisdiction of IHAS to intervene in things?
• Example: Reddit, and controversy over subreddits, and who draws the line.
• Personal scare story: a friend had a cool idea, told someone about it, ended up having it stolen by a beer company and spread around. Having the basic protection seems worth it.
• Yeah, and if something comes down we can mobilize quickly.
• Don't like the idea of having a (TM) or (R) after the AF name. That's a signal of some central reporting, and if something bad happens it could be even worse - like if a chapter does something bad, that mark points to something.
• This makes sense conceptually, but people are going to assume that there is a central control structure regardless. Don't overthink things, there should be a very small group of people doing the minimal needed things. Would feel comfortable with a small group that has the power to do things as needed, even if 90% of the time they do nothing.
• If we ended up getting a trademark, it doesn't mean anything more than if we didn't - we'd still have to lawyer up and protect our brand. For example, if Israel does something bad, if we gave them permission to use our name specifically it would be even worse. And we couldn't tell them no unless we went after them with lawyers.

General consensus: lots of people aren't necessarily opposed, some people are opposed, but general consensus is to have some kind of working group to handle this.

• Real fear of corporitization. Maybe that is a bigger concern for us than dealing with rogue chapters and such.
• Willow thinks we should all read the white paper before making decisions.

Volunteers

How do we structure volunteers?

We have people volunteering to do things, for example group on shepherding in new chapters, hacking on the website, etc. Should there be incentive structure? Recognition?

• These things are already happening... is there a problem that has come up so far?
• There is generally a shortage of global volunteers in things.
• Right now web, for example, is a disparate group. There isn't really a system of accountability, and we are short-handed in a lot of ways, and this is a more real problem than the other issues discussed.
• IHAS is there to support the growth of more chapters, and there are chapters interested in helping grow new chapters in their areas (especially ones alone in their country). Facilitate chapters taking responsibility for that?
• Kara: The lack of system and structure and hierarchy is something we want to maintain to some extent, but there is a negative impact in the lack of response. And it's something I see over and over again and people are excited initially but lose steam. It's something I would like to see be more affirming.
• We have it almost too good, we just need more people to help out because lots of places need people.
• It's hard to know what is going on already, we have a lot of people but we don't collectively know what anyone else is working on. What if there was a wiki or something on the AF site.
• I didn't know you needed volunteers. I am on the mailing list but had no idea, although I could easily step up. What if one person was managing volunteering and taking on responsibility for helping disseminate that information.
• Yeah, having stuff on the website makes sense, because right now the mailing list is the main channel and it's hard to catch up if you miss something.
• What if there was an internal digest, as well as the external one.
• True, every time we put out a call for volunteers we get people.
• Something like a wiki or a basecamp, where it's clear that there are things to sign up to do and people can just sign up to do things and it's clear what their status is and then you don't need to have someone wrangling volunteers. We have a lot of self-starters, so maybe we don't need someone to manage the volunteers.
• Agreed, if there was a place where people could see what was going on that would be good.
• It's a matter of not having a pipeline in place, Kara has some ideas of what we could set up to get things going.

General comments

• All 3 of these things... our success has been based on us being decentralized and loose, and these are all focusing on the downsides of that. There are lots of examples of communities that have done this, there are people who have done work to solve these problems, let's look towards those.
• Christina: great segue to a panel on Monday.
• Some of this is about problems we don't have yet, some about problems we do have. Let's be careful about the problems we don't have yet and be very specific about what problems we are trying to tackle.
• There should be a set of internal principles that we should all get, minimal things that we need to build those support structures, but keep the integrity of the organization and keeping it as amorphous as possible. Keeping bureaucracy as minimal as possible.
• Overall, let's trust the "leadership", they haven't steered us wrong. Maybe having a best practices/best guide, people are free to deviate from it, that's a good solution in the spirit of what we're doing.
• Good job moderating, Tim and Christina.