Establishment of a [Celtic Burn / Scottish Regional] Consent Council

This is something that I think needs to be approached very carefully.

There is a rock and a hard place here and I recognise that. Soft social consequences and decentralised intervention don't work with people who have decided to be predators (or are similarly lost in their own stuff).

At the same time this is a very real and distinct line to cross with regards the nature of our organisation and spaces. With this we would be codifying giving some people power over others. This would create a specific power structure. It would be tempting to think this community would be immune from people abusing a power structure set up for this purpose but, really, it's no more immune than from people acting in a way that makes it seem necessary.

One thing that I would caution against is this group being self selecting and self confirming. I've seen that pattern before and seen it lead to not great places.

If we're going to do it I suggest we do it properly and somehow write it into the Northern Regional legal entity. That way, the processes, policies, and membership of this group can have the right transparency and accountability on them.

I'm trying to think of alternatives with softer touch but, yeah, I can't think of anything that doesn't require:

. people taking ownership of it
. a shared and agreed basis for exclusion of people who need to be excluded
. a shared definition of consent and of a consent violation (the recent conversation on Telegram clearly indicates we don't have that yet).
. some kind of tracking of information over time
. the buy in of the community as a whole

@Sandy Ryalls Thank you Sandy. I think you're quite right in that it should be approached quite carefully. Do you have any thoughts on how to avoid it being self-selecting and confirming?
I don't know enough about the legal side of things but might not be a bad idea to incorporate it into Northern Regional legally somehow...

Hey @Sandy Ryalls

Thanks for your response.

I agree - this needs careful thought. But also - it's something that literally every other burn has. Microburn ✅
Burning Nest ✅
Nowhere ✅
London Decom ✅
Borderlands ✅
Afrika Burn ✅
Midburn ✅
The Nevada Regional ✅

It's worth noting that the authors of this AP have been working in a do-ocratic basis as a consent team since Celtic Burn, so we're proposing to swap out a do-ocratic unofficial team with one with community buy in.

Your comment where you make the statement about "people who have decided to be predators (or are similarly lost in their own stuff)." is super interesting as it points out that many of these people are not just people actively choosing to be predators, but implying it's people who's values are out of line with the consent first approach that the community cherishes.

I think your idea about codifying it into the Northern Regional burn is interesting and I'm supportive of it.

I'd love to stop it being self selecting too, but the reality is that we're not likely to have dozens of people stepping up, so likely there will just be 3-4 people that agree to take on this burden for the community.

In case of confusion, please note that Rachel Roberts posted this (thank you Rachel) and not me 🙂

I fully support this work both as a community member and one of the directors of Northern Regional. As the actions of this council have legal implications, I wonder if it would be wise for the directors to be included in the final decision on action level, as it would be us that had to defend the action should someone make a legal complaint. I have some experience defending such cases. btw.

@Tom Allen Thanks Tom! That makes sense to me and it seems your experience would be invaluable in the forming of the council.

@Tom Allen - Thanks for the support on this Tom & I agree that directors should be somehow involved with decisions that have potential legal consequences - It's only fair on you given the responsibility you're shouldering for our community

Thank you Rachel, Sophie and Sue who worked very hard on this . This is great start.

@ermias worku Thanks Ermi.

First of all, thank you so much for your hard work on this, guys! It’s so important. Yes, it is a really knotty issue to have a consent process within a nominally decentralized community, and I think one good way to approach it is to have a council of people who have the spoons and perspective to discuss these issues and give a fair approach to them. I have a few ponderings:

-          The order and manner in which a consent incident at CB is shared with the centralized network needs to be handled very carefully, because it feels like escalation and also could come across as abdication of our community responsibility/right to resolve the issue ourselves. It seems very easy for an incident to be passed on to the CN and then our community just sit on it and await instructions, so I would want to encourage (as I’m sure do you) us taking the lead on investigation and resolution first of all, and leaning on (or reporting to) CN second, depending of course on how severe the incident is. Presumably we would need policy about that. It also immediately becomes a colder and less human way to deal with it, by passing the issue to an “authority” who does not necessarily know the parties involved, nor the nuances of the situation. So while it definitely has its place, let’s discuss the bounds and particulars of that.

-          Whenever there is a consent issue, there are multiple levels of discussion at once. There is the personal: the feelings and needs of those who were hurt or triggered and those who erred, who may also in turn be activated by the situation. There is the legal and ethical: where do the boundaries lie, what needs to be done about it in response? There is the systemic: how did this incident come about, what are the systems/communications/community agreements in place or not in place that factored into this happening in the first place? How do we address these so that it is more difficult for things to go wrong in future?

I think it would be good to clarify which levels of the conversation this consent council would be dealing with. Certainly the systemic stuff needs to be part of wider community discussion, I would think, and it would be good to explicate that. Perhaps, with issues of lower severity, mediation and healing also needs to be something that the community at large participates in, rather than something that is passed off exclusively to the proposed council.

-          This is a more general thought that I’ve been having recently, but I would love it if we as a community took a calling-in-first approach to things, or at least to lower-level and more one-off incidents. We all fuck up sometimes and what matters is how we respond to that, take on feedback, and grow. We can’t expect our community to get better without allowing and encouraging our people to get better, which means we need to let our people fuck up once in a while without consigning them to the flames. I would love a values-based approach where we encourage respect, consideration, personal responsibility, conscientiousness and empathy amongst ourselves, and take into account that we are a group with a very high proportion of neurodivergence, trauma, and “still-figuring-it-out-ness”.

It’s a learning curve for all of us to work out how to define, communicate and maintain these boundaries, and co-create an ethos and environment that we want to be part of. It can feel quite unsafe to think that if you make a mistake, you will be harshly judged and dealt with, and this can lead to resistance or defensiveness, both in terms of agreeing policies and in receiving uncomfortable feedback. Perhaps we need a wee manifesto on that, or it needs to be something stated clearly and included explicitly in this consent council process. I'm not at all saying that you guys or any consent council WOULD take a punitive or harsh approach - more that we need to make sure that the opposite is front and centre from the start.