TZM Decision Making Protocol

A few years ago TZM had a decision-making protocol: Decision Making Protocol | TZM Chapters Portal (last snapshot available, from 02/15 /2018)

Since the tzmchapters site is no longer online, the protocol text is also offline. As far as I know, this text is currently not on the official sites. Whatever the reason tzmchapters went offline, it seems to me necessary to bring that protocol back online, as the decision-making method should be the starting point if we want to get organized. :handshake:

The TZM Chapters Guide v2.0 mentions the relevance of establishing guidelines for decision-making within the group process: «Most volunteer groups do not give adequate attention to how they work together. Decision-making methods are not determined….».

I open this thread in case anyone has information about what happened. Perhaps the protocol was simply left aside due to forgetfulness or lack of time to put it online.

In the event that this protocol is no longer in force, it would be relevant to know what method was obtained to reach the conclusion that it had to be stopped, and what method replaced it.

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Awesome! I didn’t know about this. I’ll read it in a few hours when I’m in the train. I made the co-initiatives method a few years ago to apply the RFC type of decision making to TZM in combination with NVC. With the assist of the forum features to facilitate this. My intent was to limit personal attacks this way and let people be objective and problem-solving oriented and seek general consensus. It’s also something that’s applied to the Internet community to develop open standards. So in a way it may be a similar method used in an RBE society.

It has never been used though, but it’s only intended to be used for decisions that affects everyone. Such as a new chapters guide, removing the term chapter and perhaps coordinate global ZDays and make that more transparent. Decisions should allow participation of everyone. We now use real-time meetings for this, which doesn’t facilitate participation. Only for those who can attend those meetings. Important decisions need to be asynchronous, so that no matter your timezone and schedule, you can join the process. Of course a meeting about it is fine, but it shouldn’t be the only method.

I’ll comment again once I’ve read that webpage. :v:


I’ve just read it. This is really great and could integrate very well into the Co-initiatives method. Do you know who wrote this? I want to republish this as a #wiki. It’s well written, and as a wiki we can update it as a community and track/discuss changes.


Another edit, here is the wiki I just published:

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I find the initiative to publish the protocol as a wiki very useful. :100:

I don’t know exactly who wrote the protocol. The first snapshot of the protocol that I found on archive.org is from 2014. I remember having learned about the concept of Rational Consensus through TZM, in its early years. It was always the way we avoided the leadership and the problems of traditional democracy.

There were other protocols, but the decision-making protocol is the most important because it is the one that gives the guidelines for reaching new agreements between members (regardless of the form of organization that TZM adopts):

https://web.archive.org/web/20150317070919/http://tzmchapters.net/complaints-procedure

https://web.archive.org/web/20150327031621/http://tzmchapters.net/project-approval-protocol

https://web.archive.org/web/20150317082136/http://tzmchapters.net/chapters-protocol

https://web.archive.org/web/20150317074132/http://tzmchapters.net/coordination-protocol

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I’ve promoted you to trust level 3. You were on your way to promote yourself, but it’s not mandatory to go through that whole checklist of course. With TL3 you can promote your topics to a #wiki. Feel free to create these wikis yourself. Then we as a community can finetune the details, if needed of course :slight_smile:

Here’s how to do this: