threshold reflective – consensus reached?

we talked about a lot of different topics in our may 2009 reflective and so i’m going to use a few posts to summarise the discussion so far and to enable further online discussion.

this post is to cover points on which we seemed to have consensus:

• we like the imperfect creativeness of our reflectives and wouldn’t want to lose this aspect of threshold.
• we all like the outlook of a group which doesn’t require commitment and we want to keep this, even though we are actually committed to the group.
• we agreed that there was a difference between the emotive use of the word ‘commitment’ and a more pragmatic understanding of our capacity to do things. all of us are committed to the group but our capacity to contribute may be limited by various things (childcare, geography, work pressures, health issues etc).
• we thought that there are two ways to respond to limited capacity: attract new people to increase capacity or do less so we are functioning within our capacity (which leads to discussion about our meetings, for a separate post, as well as:)
• revisiting the dilemna of non-evangelism vs sign-posting. it seemed to be agreed that we needed to do more effective sign-posting and that we weren’t in danger of becoming evangelical about threshold! we decided to try to improve the website, update our description on spirited exchanges and explore opportunities for targetted advertising (such as facebook advertising vouchers). we gave each other permission to use our initiative in terms of promoting the group as long as we clearly wrote from our own perspective or using standard text. we discussed designing a new poster/flier that could be understood outside of a greenbelt context.
• we agreed to keep the decision making structure of consensus and no leadership, but this didn’t mean that we couldn’t take leadership in an initiative sense (suggesting new ideas, doing some publicity for the group).