Minutes from PUN Organizing Meeting 7/13/2020
PUN Organizing Meeting
July 13, 2020 8-9:15pm Eastern Time
Present: Kai, Jordan, Walker, Jim, James, Shelby
Repeat Mission Statement:
PUN is a digital community that helps young people pursue self-directed learning by providing resources, events, and friendships.
1. Should we add the word “mentorship” to our mission statement?
Vote passed: 4 in favor, 1 abstained
2. Should we have a “mentorship directory” to replace our old member directory?
Discussed concern about bad actors harming young people. To address this, we could have a middle step where people can see mentors but not contact them directly. The directory could be our own private directory, or with limited information, so that it’s not entirely self-serve. You can still ‘choose’ your mentor, but you don’t contact them directly. Mentors would write a “self-description”, expertise, experience with that expertise, hobbies, philosophy on learning, types of jobs, impactful experiences they’ve had, thing they feel they could help someone else go through (even if not an expert). ASDE/AERO organizations are good places to find SDE mentors. Action: Jim will reach out to AERO/ASDE about the possibility of building a database of mentors
3. Update on EVENTS/PROGRAMS
– Book Club (@spacey has taken it over, co-hosted by @Kai, going well)
– Debate Club (@Kai – on a hiatus, switching to a new time/date, Jim will email out)
– Create+Connect (smooth except too many parents signing up kids who don’t wanna)
– a.utono.me (should add the Book Club and Debate Club and more events for teens)
– Q&A with Grown Unschoolers (two interviewees lined up – Bria Bloom and Sierra Allen)
4. Should we create roles and moderators in Discord chat?
Roles are useful, especially self-assignable (like debate club and book club) Roles are applied to any user, can have a name/color/permissions Roles with no permission can act as a ‘tag’ We need moderators to run the server well, conflict resolution We need a few moderators – hold this until conversation conflict resolution.
5. Forming a PUN board of directors.
-What are the responsibilities of board members?
More than warm bodies, we can’t be everything to everyone, they need to develop and focus the vision, showing up for organizing meetings.
At a food co-op some board members apply and are voted on by the ownership and some meetings are open to all and some are for just certain people. Member of PUN are kinda like the ‘owners’, they may not have voting power but they can speak and observe what’s going on. So everyone can attend, only some people vote. And some other cases, only board members attend.
– make a requirement that board members attend the monthly organizing meeting
– Reviewed a draft of a board member application.
– HOW DO WE DETERMINE THE FIRST BOARD MEMBERS?
Initially: application only goes to people who attended an organizing meeting so far, and then we’ll vote ‘yes’/’no’ on it in the next meeting to setup our first board.
Action: Jim will distribute application to all PUN members who have attended an organizing meeting in 2020
– HOW DO WE REMOVE BOARD MEMBERS?
Action: Jim will research common practices for removal of board members
6. Should PUN publicly declare our organizational support of the Academia Manifesto?
Lots of agreement on the statement of the problem with school, and the presenting SDE as a solution. Seems to be concerns about the implementation, specifically it reads like a “top down” approach to implementation, like federal funding would be solving the whole problem.
Action: Walker will continue developing the ‘implementation’ side of things
7. Formation of an Arbitration Council to handle conflict resolution on PUN We want to ensure people can reach out to request support from the Council, without them intervening when not needed/wanted. Action: Kai will continue drafting the council process.
8. Confirmed next meeting:
August 10, 8:00-9:30pm Eastern Time
Tabled issues:
- Disabling of comments on the website?
- Feedback on the new email subscribe form