March Meet-up Update

Posted by Rhys Goodwin on March 31, 2023 · 3 mins read

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Kia ora folks

On the 22nd of March we held the first official meeting for this fledgling organisation. Thanks to those who were able to attend. There was 10 of us in total. The discussion was quite wide ranging as you might expect for a first meeting, so it’s difficult to capture everything in a succinct set of minutes but some of the key themes were:

• Developing a plan capable of including people across the country was seen as a priority
• A feeling that moderate/middle New Zealanders weren’t being heard amongst the noisy extremes. Inversely, the risk of a ‘tyranny of the majority’ emerging in participatory democracy and the need to mitigate this was identified.
• The importance of including a wide range of viewpoints which naturally means including people with a wide range of experiences
• There was an acknowledgement of both the necessity and the enormity of the task at hand
• Additionally, there was quite a bit of discussion about what our role ought to be in the political landscape and how we might reach people with the ideas we’re generating.

Here is the PowerPoint I presented at the meeting.

Personally, I felt it was a very successful start and the discussions stimulated me to think about new things, and old things in new ways, as did some subsequent discussions with people who couldn’t attend.

Draft ToR in Progress

Based on all the input so far, I’m now working on a draft Terms of Reference for the start-up group which we can pick apart. This will cover some suggestions on how we might build the organisation in a geographically distributed way in what I’m calling “The Meetinghouse Projects’. I will publish this draft ToR in the community forums where we can work on developing it, so I encourage you to sign-up and give us a hand. You will receive an invite link in the TallyUp™ confirmation email. If you have any trouble signing up just ping me rhys@team.oneaction.nz.

Next Meet-up

At the next meeting we’ll aim to bring a bit more focus to the discussions. As above, I expect to have a draft ToR which we can begin developing. I see this as our first article which will guide our start-up. It will describe the nature of our enterprise, guiding principles, the shape of our organisation, and a high-level set of activities.

Get in contact if you’re in Auckland and keen to come along.

You can support the ideas OneAction is presenting by joining the monthly TallyUp™. It takes less than two minutes per month. Once enough people support the idea (as indicated by the TallyUp), we’ll move to the next stage.

Ngā mihi nui
Rhys