Community Board Club
CBs have been an unpleasant time since 1975. It's time for that to change.
Most community board members do not know how community boards work, and they have no easy way to learn. This has negative consequences all throughout the community district layer of NYC government.
Community Board Club, by Open Community Board, will host regular meetings beginning in March to remedy this problem. If you’re an abundance-minded community board member (or you’re curious),1 come and learn how your community board is supposed to work, and how you can bring it closer to that ideal. Read on to find out more.
The problem, part 1: no training
Community boards are bound by state and city law, as well as their own parliamentary authorities. In practice, they often disregard both legal requirements and their own bylaws, but few members are empowered to right the ship.
Fundamentally, this is because they do not understand parliamentary procedure, the rules by which community boards (and our City Council, and every other deliberative assembly) operate and self-govern.
Many community boards provide a one-time, brief training on parliamentary procedure. But as anyone who has sat through one of these knows, they’re generally useless and boring.
Good parliamentary procedure training cannot be done in one sitting, and it’s best delivered via live governance games—not a lecture with a Q&A. If you are on a CB, you have likely never experienced proper training.
The effects of lack of training
Members do not understand their rights, their powers, and their privileges. Longer-serving members of the board generally aren’t able or willing to get new members up to speed, especially if they are new.
Community boards are governed by the made-up rules of their officers, which often directly violate the board’s own bylaws and their members’ rights. Members are not empowered to tell exactly when this happens, or how to effectively challenge these violations.
Meetings are a procedural mess, and take hours longer than they need to. Many people will blame parliamentary procedure for elongating meetings, when in fact it’s the lack of proper parliamentary procedure that makes them especially painful. But again—most community board members haven’t been trained well enough to know the difference between good procedure and bastardized procedure.
Community board business isn’t dispatched quickly or competently.
CB members have a bad time. This is a grave tactical error, and via social evaporative cooling, it ensures that talented people tend to stay away from CBs.
The list could go on much longer, but you get the idea.
The solution, part 1: learn via governance games
During each Community Board Club meeting, you’ll be given a governance game to play with the other attendees. You don’t have to study or prepare beforehand. Just show up as you are, and you’ll be assigned a role based on your experience. These exercises will be tailored to the people in the room, and will get more or less sophisticated as necessary.
Governance games will generally be a set of things you have to achieve in a meeting governed by Robert’s Rules of Order, the parliamentary authority for NYC’s community boards. Your performance will be judged and graded, and you’ll debrief after your game is complete. The more club meetings you attend, the better you get. The better you get, the more you will be assigned officer roles in the governance games (like chair of the meeting!).
At any time, you may also take a series of parliamentary knowledge tests. These will be displayed on a public leaderboard on this site. You can choose to leave your name off of your scores, but your CB number will be displayed. Each CB will also have an aggregate score. You can take (and retake) exams as much as you like. Let’s see which CB takes the lead!
And, at the end of the day, this is about having a good time. Learning about government should not feel boring, or like crawling over broken glass. You should meet cool people, feel a sense of accomplishment at mastering technical procedure, and generally feel better about life.
The problem, part 2: disintegrated, not decentralized, government
There are 59 community boards in New York City, and they all have different ways of doing things. The problem? There is no central clearinghouse that highlights the best practices found throughout all community boards, and explains how to solve the common errors found throughout them. Most CB members are on their own.
But CB members should have access to a central knowledge base that aggregates best practices, and highlights common problems. No need to reinvent the wheel if another CB has!
The solution, part 2: centralize knowledge
So Open Community Board, as a part of Community Board Club, will be publishing regular digests of questions, comments, and concerns from CB members throughout the city.
In addition to our own research, CB members are invited to:
Ask questions about parliamentary procedure,
Share best practices,
Report problems, and
Ask questions about the city charter and CBs.
Many of our policy problems are the result of enforced scarcity, where we would otherwise have abundance. Being abundance minded means: You want to remove bad laws that block NYC’s progress. You want NYC to grow and evolve to accommodate the many people here, and the many people who will keep coming here to chase their dreams. You want to build enough housing to end our supply crisis, and keep building housing so that we never have a supply crisis again. You want a superior multi-modal transit system. You want to have a pro-social culture. You want to understand government concretely, down to the brass tacks. And you are charitable to others.