Intentional Society: A meaningful and permeable membrane
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As we loosen the requirement/commitment boundary to be more inclusive in the definition of Intentional Society membership, the juiciest question floating around our design space has been something like, "Should there be a minimum participation requirement?" for what it means to be in IS. I can't point to many other split opinions regarding our now-accepted proposal, but it makes perfect sense that the main question about "moving the boundary" might be "to where exactly?"
On the one hand, there's a "don't make a rule, rules are dumb" argument — which I'm not poking fun at; I agree! Rules are dumb to the extent that they are hard or inflexible and there's an inherent flattening of trying to partition a complex space with a single line. The more zig-zags get added to the line to capture nuance, the more you lose the simplicity benefit of having a rule in the first place. Plus, extrinsic motivation/coercion is generally bad because it displaces internal motivation, and we're all about avoiding coercion as a practice.
On the other hand, there's a "but it has to mean something" argument - which I also agree with! If you don't set the bar somewhere, then the bar itself can vanish and with it, the trust that comes from sharing in common some level of commitment. Also "what's the point?" of wanting to be a member if one is deterred by the prospect of partaking of the access it provides?
There are some partial integrations available from deconstructing further: One can declare an expectation but not enforce it, for example, to try to get at "commitment without coercion." But it's also worth asking, "What outcome is this rule/metric a proxy for?" Do we care, for its own sake, whether someone "near the edge" of the community comes to 0 vs 1 vs 2 events, for its own sake? Nope! Participation is a proxy for belonging, for being known and knowing others, for trust... and I'd like to quote a phrase from Ben that I especially like, the quality of being "able to hold the group's field."
The "relational field" we've been cultivating and more aware of lately is the precious essence of this community, and heck probably any really good community out there. Someone could be away for months and then slip right back into holding and contributing to that field as if no time had elapsed (as some BFFs do). Or someone could attend week after week for months without clicking into cohesion with the whole. I think the question of who we trust to show up at any event at any time comes down to how we relate to that field, what it takes to "hold" that field in the presence of difference or conflict, and what norms we have re what assumptions we can rely on when we see a face we don't recognize.
Thus in the draft of the Membership Agreement text that will serve as our ritual of community membrane-meaning, there is no "I commit to attend X amount" checkbox. But it does contain our mission, our values, our interaction agreements — these are the things we really know we care to align on. And it also does contain a "How do you foresee yourself participating" question — for awareness and learning, to see if that question is a good proxy of anything. Because of course we'll continue to iterate and improve, season by season, the cycle of our organizational awareness, like attending to the breath.
Cheers,
James
(Oh, and brand new folks will still need to attend one session before becoming members. That just feels right for that context, ya know?)