That’s just one of my favorite lines from Futurama—it’s the leader of the Neutrals calmly reacting to the beige alert.

Anyway, I want to further examine the ideas put forward in the early vision post. My point in this is to establish some talking points about the organizational part.

I’d like to talk about those organizational things first, even with a goal of a community center lurking around. Before we jump to our building, or at least in parallel to that conversation, I’d like us to have a conversation about the basic framework in which we’d tackle projects of that scale.

What we’re talking about here is a neutral ground, comprised of experienced leaders of fan-run organizations.

• Establish a basic requirement of tenure as exec, director, or other leader in a fan organization (could set additional organizational requirements too)
• Set a limit on number of board representatives from any one organization
• Experience and “sweat equity” would be critical components
• Maybe invite a non-affiliated at large member as an adjunct (the way many boards often have community leaders as participants)

What does neutrality mean in this case and why does it matter? Each currently existing organization that has people in it who are passionate about these ideas has its own focus and must be responsive to its own constituent members.

There’s a lot of crossover—or if not actual crossover, a lot of similar interest. But in general, participants in and leaders of MISFITS have different fundamental directions than participants in and leaders of ATC, to cite two obvious examples. For that matter, sometimes the conventions that share organizational structure with these bodies have slightly different aims!

Anime Detour and CONvergence are both charged with putting on a great convention, in part to fuel fundraising for their associated organizations which do additional activities year round. So their mandates are community support on the one hand and a great show on the other. (One obvious place where those goals intersect is in something like space needs, not to put too fine a point on it).

Well it would be disingenuous to expect every attendee to want to participate in a wider “visionary goal.” Some will, some won’t. Some attendees of those cons and members of those organizations would be actively opposed to their leadership spending a significant portion of their time on a project of different or greater scope than the con or community group they lead. On top of that, some of the participants actively don’t want to “take order from those Others” for any number of valid and invalid reasons.

Well, instead of all that, let’s take both a) the mission conflicts and b) the whole “who’s in charge?!” question off the table.

That’s part of the reason for the representation limitation, also We need this to be a trusted neutral partner, one that represents our community, but does not “overrepresent” one aspect of it. Instead of turning over the control of organizations to another layer of leadership, let’s ask the organizations to relate to each other in an affiliation/partnership way. And let’s make that affiliation be on neutral ground. That neutral ground would have a mandate to do its own thing but would have the responsibility to serve those affiliated groups. And that the league-style organization be contractually unable to direct the internal/original affairs of participating organizations.

So why the proposed experience requirement? And what about the sweat equity thing? Well, some elements of this are negotiable. But what I want to see is people who have executive or community organizing experience. These are people who have had acknowledged roles as leaders for their respective communities. They have experience working with the group(s) and have developed personal networks that can facilitate getting things done. It would be very easy to set this up with a group of non-leaders and just hope that people would flock around it. But pardon my saying so, hope is not a strategy. Such a vision requires a certain amount of tested talent and ability to contribute through others.

The sweat equity component comes direct from my CONvergence experience, and I would prefer organizations retain their operational autonomy. One essential key to that is that leaders of organizations have a stake in their own direction. That people only be allowed to be partners in this league structure if they are also active/recently-active leaders in the participant organizations. It is an organization of organizations and therefore could not tolerate too much outside input from someone who doesn’t come from the communities.

Outside board members? This is also negotiable. I’d like to see our community be able to participate in The Whole Community. You know, like mixing with “the mundanes?” Seriously, it is very common for executive-level leaders or community activists to take part in a wide array of non-profit boards. I think it would expand our organization’s social and professional network to invite at least one outside voice (maybe even one at most) to serve in an advisory or participatory fashion. I’m not saying we need a Steve Jobs (some guy who works for Apple but also serves on the Disney Board) but it would help us to connect with the rest of the world, and to add to our vision. I just don’t want to make it someone who sucks, of course.

My next post is planned to examine the next parts of the initial vision. I’ll look through the lens of the “participation is not mandatory” idea which many of us believe will be key to the evolution of this project.