Is it better to be organised or inclusive?

In a democratic group, activity is directed democratically and not by who can spare the most time or energy to be active. I prefer a democratic group to a cadre group.

Voluntarist organisations.
And organisations should also take into account that well-known tract 'Tyranny of Structurelessness'

http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

The characteristics prerequisite for participating in the informal elites of the movement, and thus for exercising power, concern one's background, personality, or allocation of time. They do not include one's competence, dedication to feminism, talents, or potential contribution to the movement. The former are the criteria one usually uses in determining one's friends. The latter are what any movement or organization has to use if it is going to be politically effective... So if one works full time or has a similar major commitment, it is usually impossible to join simply because there are not enough hours left to go to all the meetings and cultivate the personal relationship necessary to have a voice in the decision-making. That is why formal structures of decision making are a boon to the overworked person.

my emphasis

The solidarity-network guide touches on SeaSol's experience with this: "we’ve always wrestled with the fact that there have been dramatically unequal levels of involvement between different people in the group. In principle we would prefer to have everyone participating equally. However, this doesn’t seem to be possible in a volunteer-based organization. We will always (if we’re lucky) have some people who want to spend half their waking hours on solidarity-network organizing, while others only want to receive an occasional email, and the rest are somewhere in between. SeaSol has decided to accept this unevenness as a fact of life, and to develop a structure that makes room for different levels of involvement. We try to make it as easy as possible for people to move from one level to the next."

"Half their waking hours" is probably an exaggeration. But some people may only be up for participating for an hour or two per month. So do you restrict everyone to that low level of involvement, in order to keep things equal? If you did, the group wouldn't be able to accomplish anything, and you'd end up with no one participating at all.

By the way, the amount of time people put in doesn't always correlate with the amount of free time they have (as they say, "if you want to get something done, ask a busy person"), although if you have literally zero free time then of course you can't participate.

I'd agree about the importance of having formal decision-making structures to keep things as democratic and inclusive as possible despite the inevitable unevenness.

On the one hand you don't want an informal power structure where those who contribute the most time decide everything, on the other hand if I only had an hour a month I'd probably not want to spend it in a meeting, I also think it wouldn't be particularly fair for people to decide things that they wouldn't actually be doing, I also think that would be unlikely to be effetctive.

I think it is hard to strike a balance and the best way to do this is with communication. If there is a clear decision-making process and clear frameworks for putting those decisions into practise then people can decide on what they wish to participate in, whether it is admin, actions etc.

It's a good question. A lot of people drop out of being involved in stuff when they have less time (kids, full time work) partly because we have ways of doing things based on people being able to be hyper-active for a few years when they are young. Developing ways of making sure people can stay involved when they can't make lots of meetings would help create a healthier and more varied political culture.

I was in a group years ago which had loads of people involved, that wouldn't draw a line under decision making. You would spend hours making decisions and then people who hadn't been at that meeting would come next week, be annoyed with all these rubbish decisions you made without them, and change them. That was destructive and definitely not a model to follow.

Things that would help people with less time, based on experience:

Some kind of little report about what's been going on, that you send out to people occasionally, for people that can't keep up with a massive email list.
Invites to things like banner making or leafletting sent to people you haven't seen for a while
Picnics and barbecues that members can bring kids to
Generally communicating with people, as Jeff says, and being supportive about how people can make a contribution with limited time
Not being guilt-trippy about things all the time

Yeah it's a difficult question and I'm not really sure. As all of our efforts of people volunteering their time, I don't think we should never do anything to stop people doing stuff (as long as they are not putting themselves at risk of burning out)

Just speaking from my personal experience in the libcom group, some of us have more time to spend on the site than others, and that changes over time as people's circumstances change, have children, get new more demanding jobs etc. But we basically still have full membership for everyone who wants to still be in the group, and full participation in decision making which is done online with communications circulated to everyone. So far I think this has been working for us.