Hi again all and thanks to those who engaged - great to see your responses :) Apologies to those who missed the poll deadline, you're welcome to throw in your vote as a comment too! Perhaps 1 week isn't long enough...

General consensus seems to be that the politics of food is a priority for discussion, which is exciting, plus a number of strong responses for more practical/action-enabling threads: knowledge sharing, brainstorming alliance actions, a directory of food action groups and a few others like story-telling. It also appears that we have decent support for some of the existing threads continuing, specifically: whakawhanaungatanga/intros, one for hui/online meetings, and collective decision-making. Will be great to see these all get up and running.

However, I'm not quite sure how we progress from here. The questions are many... Do we just throw all the threads with votes open? Or pick a couple? In order to make the space more 'approachable', are they opened by the more "neutral" AFAA account itself (held by Aaron I think, who has shared the log-in and pw for this purpose)? Or do people who want to progress a specific thread open it themselves - this requires admin privileges but is an easy hurdle to overcome – allowing for a more organic start than 12+ threads kicking off and really making it hard to keep up... how organised do we want or need this loomio space to be? Are there ways to avoid an avalanche of email spam? And to avoid doing things twice, should we wait til we've figured out if we're staying in this part of loomio or opening a different space?

It's been pointed out to me that online polls are a poor form of democracy as they miss out on a proper space for deliberation and input; something I've tried to balance by sourcing the previous suggestions in our first call, and having an option to make your own suggestion too. This has perhaps opened more questions than it has closed, and certainly takes me beyond a space I'm comfortable in, so in the interests of me shutting up, I'll leave it to people to voice their own preferences for steps forward.

If there's strong enough interest (and remembering our agreement towards consensus amongst those choosing to engage), perhaps we can reach an agreement online - anyone is welcome to frame up and start a poll or comment thread suggesting a pathway; that is what this particular 'collective decision-making space' is for. Alternatively, we can discuss options verbally during the next online call, which is in two weeks at 7pm on October 20.

That's it from me; hope this cold snap hasn't been too disruptive!

Best,

Dan