Problem arises when orgranization grows in size

In recent group discussions and meetings within HXNY, there had been consistent expression of the lack of transparency, many people not knowing what is going on, etc. I would like to propose a perspective and a solution.

In the past few years, HXNY has grown from a “small-size” to a “mid-size” organization. For many businesses this transition would entail large scale restructuring and a significant increase in support staff.

To visualize what is going on, let us consider a toy model of a group of friends making up a community. Suppose each person has time to interact with 10 friends. Then for a group of 10 members, everyone can catch-up with everyone else, and there is total transparency, even if no records or documents are kept for the community. If the group goes to 15 members, then while not everyone can directly keep up with personal details of every other member, one can still keep up with every activity that is formed by several members. One can imagine that even with a group of 50 members, every member can still be somewhat involved in every activity that is within the group, or at least hear about it from one of their direct friends.

When the group increase in size, to 100 or more, we can imagine that suddenly we face a transition, from the “small-size” regime where we feel that we know most of what is going on in the community, to a “mid-size” where we feel the sparsity of information, where we are connected to less than 10% of the community, and even through our direct friends we cannot know half of the activities going on in the other 90% of the members.

This problem of “scaling” to larger membership is a constant problem for any growing businesses and organization. With the wrong perspective, everyone will incorrectly feel left out, ignored, insignificant, etc, even for core members. This will lead to blame, rumors, factions, etc.

When we recognize that the central issue is simply due to the sheer growing size of the community, and the lack of proper infrastructure to offer to everyone information and communication, we can work together toward a solution, and build a stronger synergetic community.

A. Information

Imagine trying to keep up with 100 friends, each using their own modes to inform everyone, whether by hand-written letters, post-it notes, email, voice message, phone calling, etc. It would be impossible.

For a large organization, there needs to be a centralize order of dissemination of important information. HXNY has been doing that well, with weekly email, and a central website for general public information.

However, to enable the functioning of the group, we should have an internal (password protected) members website, (which has been suggested, proposed, and attempted already). The purpose of this should be a clear way for newcomers and old members to access any document, past achievements and decisions, current projects and milestones, code of conduct, rules and regulations, by-laws and interpretations, etc, as well as members directories and personal information.

The existing Google Website Hosting may be a good start:

GoogleDoc is perfect for collaboration in constructing a document.  Once it is done, Wiki's are perfect for documentation.  Furthermore, associated with each subject or document, there should be the feature for discussion (not necessarily a forum associated with each topic. perhaps comments is sufficient.)

So the internal website would offer a hierarchy of categories and channels (e.g. bylaws, or latest events), for people to reach important topics (e.g. weekly newsletter) which may have multiple documents (e.g. current week newsletter), each document allowing comments which would suffice for discussion purposes.

For certain documents, we may prefer the ability for collaborative editing. e.g. Spreadsheet members directory awaiting members themselves to update, or Google Doc weekly newsletter that enables multiple authors to contribute their section.

B. Communication

How should a large group of people effectively communicate and collaborate?

For a small group, it is easy to find a mutually agreeable time and place, and have everyone express their opinions. It is much harder for a large group to meet together at the same place and time. And in the rare instances of such large members meetings, given that everyone has a few opinions they wish to express, it would take all day to listen to everyone. Consequently, we see a few people talking about things we don't care about, and feel that the precious meeting time is wasted on trivial matters. We have seen in recent meetings that large group discussions would not work.

1. Mechanisms for Members gathering

Each large group meeting cannot be for open discussion purpose. We need to treasure these moments, and create a reputation of worthwhile attendance. That means, clear agenda, clear expectation, clear time control, and independent moderator who will govern the proceedings. If you want discussion or Q&A, the topics and questions need to be submitted and judged beforehand.

That means these should be informational presentation, tutorial to help people get started, or decisions maximally prepared so that a large group can vote on important issues quickly.

Essentially, people who have time allotted to speak are a selected group of individuals, (panels, candidates, speaker), who are given a specific amount of time. Any over-time should be decided by a “meeting moderator” who should respect the attendee's time more than the school's interest to prolong meetings.

Given that real-life large group discussions are out of the question, the community could only allow members to participate and voice their opinion via 2 fronts:

• smaller groups
• online interaction

2. Smaller groups:

• discussion via various classes, activities, teams
• let reps report back their ideas and concerns. 

This means we need to improve the infrastructure to encourage comments and suggestions from these smaller groups, and to facilitate reps reporting back how things are going.

I believe that as long as every class (activity class included) have a class rep, the function currently expected of them suffices.

3. Online discussions

Given the busyness of everyone, the demand for same-place (physical meetings) or even same-time meetings (phone conference) are excessive, unless for a focused task-force with clear vision and objective to be accomplished. That means HXNY will need to optimize web-interaction for community building.

Weekly email serves as a broadcasting function, of notifying everyone the important and recent news, as well as possibly simple responses. (via GoogleDoc forms).

However, for more complex tasks and discussions, we need to have a private (members only) web tools that will allow multiple participants to contribute and collaborate.

Current web tools in existence:

• wiki
• collaborative document
• forum
• blog
• CMS web article

In my experience with all these areas, and taking cost into consideration, the only thing less than $500-$1000/month proprietary systems would be the latest Google Website and Applications, which offers FREE to non-profit organizations.

Below I consider the needs of HXNY, and how Google may suffice in meeting them:

a. Online collaborative document generation, for admin teams and other past volunteers to document procedures for doing certain things. Google Docs (word processor, spread sheet, presentation) should suffice for multi-author collaboration, and version control to prevent disaster by rogue member.

b. Discussion forums will likely be useless, (how often you visit such forums?) but google group should suffice, and likely it will integrate with the main.

Instead, we should encourage people to discuss (fall back to G-groups if needed) and present worthwhile topic or results or implementations to have the whole HXNY participate and decide. [check other G-Apps]

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