The book will be reflective of quite a few people’s thinking – a real community effort, coordinated by a strong core team.

It will be mixture of short essays, personal reflections, collective thinking and really practical guides. It’s being written to be relevant for both entrepreneurs, founders and freelancers as well leaders and cultural influencers in larger organisations.

We’re aiming for this project to share our learnings, inspire action and help grow the global movement of people putting purpose at the heart of their work – so we hope has a wide appeal.

We would love your support.

Our crowdfunding campaign is live and you can be part of the special first edition release of the book here.

You can support our campaign here and pre-order your copy of the book here – and we would love all the help we could get to share the word as well!

Thanks so much!

betterworktogether.co

The post Better Work Together – The Book! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

On Loomio we are trying to make decisions about issues which a large number of different people care deeply about. Online. With asynchronous text.

I’m sure people from the future (or their emissaries) will laugh at us from their virtual reality playgrounds. Or they won’t even laugh, they will just smile and wonder at our naive fumbling as we try and evolve better ways of working together.

Either way, most of the conflict I’ve seen at Enspiral has surfaced on Loomio threads. It arises in other forums as well but I’ve found that Loomio can act like a magnet or a sieve which attracts and surfaces bad feelings in the community.

Over the years I’ve developed some informal practices for dealing with conflict on Loomio which might be useful for others.

ESCALATE THE BANDWIDTH

If you do only one thing do this. It’s my workhorse for resolving conflict.

Whenever misunderstanding or conflict arise escalate the bandwidth of the channel. If you’re on Loomio (asynchronous text) move to chat (synchronous text), chat to a voice call, voice call to video call, video call to in person meeting.

I first heard of this from an open source contributor dealing with disagreements online (@searls I think) and if I had to pick just one tool it would be this one.

SUPPORT INDIVIDUALS

The thing about conflict on Loomio is that it is a symptom not a cause. When conflict emerges it is because individuals have needs which aren’t being met. Maybe they aren’t feeling trusted or trusting, maybe they have been triggered by something, maybe they feel like their belonging or livelihood is threatened.

One thing I have seen Enspiral do reasonably well is swarm individuals with support when they are involved in conflict online. It’s more of an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff strategy and the cost of the distributed emotional labour on the community is high (and disproportionately distributed).

Sometimes ambulances are really useful, especially when you’ve fallen off a cliff and this is why community size matters. People in small high trust groups can care for each other much better than large loose ones.

In an effort to provide more support to individuals we have recently expanded the peer to peer stewarding system that the Loomio team use to the core Enspiral membership of ~40 people.

STRONG TEAMS

In the catalyst team Rich has been observing that the people who do the best in Enspiral are usually in one or more ‘affinity groups’ which have a name, a purpose, a consistent membership and a regular rhythm. This could be a venture like Loomio or a working group like the board. I agree and this is one reason the catalysts are investing our energy in helping to form working groups in the network.

Image Credit – Vaibhav Sharan

STRONG COMMUNITIES

The root causes of conflict will never be resolved through an online forum. The right tools are human methods like one on one conversations, retreats, circles, listening and sharing stories together.

A robust rhythm of “support and grow the humans and the community” is essential to use Loomio in a high trust community in my opinion. Enspiral was born of the deep intersection between human methods and digital tools – we are here today due to the facilitators just as much as the programmers.

COLLABORATION IS A SKILL

People often have strong opinions that differ from each other but it takes skill and practice to navigate those differences in an online forum.

We aren’t born knowing how to ride a bike, tie our shoes or make complex decisions in decentralised groups online. Using Loomio well as either a participant or facilitator is a skill and should be treated as such.

We need to learn to listen, to approach difference with curiosity, to express ourselves authentically and leave room for disagreement. We need to practice starting from a position of kindness and care for ourselves, for others and for the community as a whole. It doesn’t just happen, but when it does it is magic.

One strategy for acquiring skill is to just jump in and learn by doing which is what we’ve had to do. Find practices that work in related contexts and adapt them, try them out and see what works. It’s expensive and you’ll get a few bumps and bruises on the way, the trick is to approach Loomio as a skill and intentionally try to get better at using it.

Another strategy is to find people who have the skill and learn from them. The stories and guides on the Loomio blog are a great place to start. You can contact the Loomio team if you want to engage the growing pool of Loomio facilitators and consultants.

Neither strategy will work by itself and as an old martial arts teacher said to me the way to learn the fastest is to have someone you are teaching, someone you are learning along side, and someone you are learning from.

Cross-posted from Joshua Vial’s blog

The post Some learnings on resolving conflict on Loomio appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is part of a series exploring the sociological and technological ramifications.

I call it “The Medium is the Message: Cypherspace Edition”.

Speaking at a recent re:publica conference, my friend Rich Bartlett voiced his lack of faith in blockchain as a solution for all that ails us. Specifically, he threw this challenge:

“If you’re going to claim that your project is decentralising power, please explain it in terms of justice, rather than just efficiency and disintermediation.”

This got me wondering how our project Scuttlebutt, a decentralised social network, is any different from other hype. Most pressing was the question, “Can we guarantee that people will be safe from bullying and abuse?”. If we can’t build a community which is free and open for everyone to participate in — if it’s a space where some people are sexually harassed, or receive threats of violence — then we’re wasting our time.

Our decentralised architecture certainly makes global spamming attacks hard, and data only flows along lines of trust. But it’s still technically possible for people to abuse others within our community, particularly if they have a lot of friends in common. In our history to date, we’ve only had a few incidents of behaviour and communication that run strongly against the community culture I want to support.

So how have we dealt with abuse?

Just kick them out

On corporate platforms like Twitter, Youtube, or Facebook, there’s a single central organisation with (essentially) a single data storage system. In that context, it’s easy for the owners of the system to delete content or users — in fact it’s their prerogative and, some would say, responsibility to do so. Most platforms have a “report” or “flag” feature which marks content or users for review/exclusion. This can be good, but also results in endless arguments about these rulings, since policing and judging fairly is expensive and difficult.

Companies like Reddit get around some of this overhead by being a platform for community-moderated ‘subreddits’ (channels for specific topics). Sometimes Reddit admins will still step in and ‘moderate’ user content, like when their CEO messed with Trump posts , which was simultaneously funny and pretty troubling.

As a federated network, Mastodon takes this a step further — communities self-host their own ‘instances’ of the platform, meaning there are many self-governing fiefdoms. Each sets their own rules and can kick content and people off their instance. It’s great because there’s no corporation shaping your experience, and you don’t need one policy to cover all the people in the world. The challenge is you have to be fairly organised as a group to set up and pay for the infrastructure, and to actively govern your space.

Scuttlebutt goes even further: it’s fully decentralised, with no single central organisation or federation of fiefs. There are only fully autonomous peers, each running the software on their local computer and making their own choices about how they want to interact.

There is no owner of any shared physical space or hardware from which you can kick a person.

This is the double edged sword of p2p social networks — it’s a space safe from authoritarian interference and it’s harder to assert boundaries.

Have a strong culture

As described above, this decentralisation might sound like total anarchy.

It is, but maybe preconceptions have coloured your expectation of how this might pan out. In practice, what emerges is not that different to other networks — people migrate toward and away from conversations and people they want to interact with. We see ‘islands’ or ‘domains’ of community, which might be distinct, overlapping, or totally disconnected. It’s similar to the dynamics of Twitter, but while Twitter’s global space leaves it open for witch hunts and hashtag storms, Scuttlebutt is more localised and stable.

What is culture in such a fragmented space?

I can only talk about the parts of the Scuttleverse I interact with. It’s filled with open-source programmers, communists, vegans, feminists, sailors, and mycologists — and not capitalism or trolls.

The community space around me has something like emergent governance. When someone presents rough behaviour, it’s common for one or more people to intercede and apply some combination of:

– polite inquiry and clarifying questions

– assertion of what sort of interaction they’d prefer

This costs time and energy, and it’s totally worth it.

As individuals and as a group, we get the opportunity to:

– check our assumptions, and (maybe) build connections with new cultures

– clarify our beliefs and who we are

– role model what respectful conversation and good boundary setting looks like

Our conflicts have advanced us individually, and as group we have built stronger relationships and are more skilled and articulate. I absolutely believe this is the fundamental and unavoidable work of community, and that community is integral to any human ecosystem.

This is all really cool and cerebral, but does this stop rape threats?

(Hasn’t happened yet to my knowledge, but it’s a decent question.)

Information flows in a peer network

Block them

This is the feature I’ve just finished building. Applying culture only gets you so far — it can’t necessarily protect you from a malicious actor.

In an extreme situation, the things I want you to be able to avoid are:

1. being contacted by someone
2. being stalked by someone

The first one is easy to implement — you can just tell the interface to not show anything new from that person. What I’ve built actually goes further, by ceasing propagation of that person’s data to friends of yours not already connected with this person.

The second part is harder. We’re a p2p network, where messages are gossiped — how do you say things publicly and have them not get to that person?

You tell your friends that’s what you want, and they respect your decision!

In programmatic terms, a ‘block’ is just another type of message which is gossiped. As soon as a peer receives it, their local setup effects the change and stops passing information about you to the person you’re blocking.

In a p2p context, being blocked means you have fewer connected peers, because the number of people gossiping your messages is reduced. Highly abusive characters might find themselves enjoying just the freedom of their own speech, alone.

The Medium is the Message

Marshal McLuhan coined this iconic phrase, and I’d summarise it roughly as, “The physics of your medium determine what is possible in that medium, and so ultimately the message.”

Given Scuttlebutt is a cypherspace (a space whose foundational physics is cryptography), what is the nature of the medium that is different here, and what is that message?

The underlying cryptography is what makes it possible for people to be totally autonomous agents in this social network. It affords a level of freedom from coercion that is probably unprecedented in a digital space. It also removes all responsibility for governance or custodianship of a space from any particular entity and devolves it to the level of individuals making choices. So far in the Scuttleverse, I’ve seen this lead to a lot of personal responsibility and growth.

It’s also fascinating to watch how the lack of dependence on shared hosting infrastructure means that we can have a multiplicity of overlapping communities. A recent example was when I found a user, who calls themselves Johnny Null, in the #dads channel (which I started because I’m going to be a dad soon, and wanted to talk about that with other crypto-dads). I was surprised, because I had experienced a lot of antagonistic threads with this person, leading to some of my friends blocking him, but I hadn’t yet.

In this new context, I wasn’t seeing unproductive abuse from him. We found another way to connect on a really human topic. I was surprised to learn he was a dad, and to receive encouragement and offers of support from him. It was such a sharp contrast from previous interactions. The diversity of approaches available made it possible for some people to block him, but he wasn’t banned from the network, leaving open new possibilities. I don’t know where that will go … but perhaps we could still have a chance at understanding each other.

I see alignment of the physics of p2p space and the physics of everyday in-person space. It feels poetic that the way we’ve implemented a block in Scuttlebutt is through communicating boundaries and asking our peers to respect them. That’s how it works in offline spaces, too. I see this pattern a lot in what we’re building — p2p interactions mirroring human interaction — and it’s the heart of what I want to communicate by invoking The Medium is the Message.

Building systems with peers means the tools we build might be just a little more human, and make space for adaptive communities. My hope is that this space will help us re-learn some of what we’ve forgotten in society, and that maybe this will make a difference in the rising challenges we have to face.

If you’re an excellent human with a rad project you’d like to collaborate on, our little tech coop would love to hear from you. I’m at [email protected], or you can join the Scuttleverse from scuttlebutt.nz

The post Personal Safety in a P2P Social Network appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I recently published a new feature for Patchbay — an open source project I maintain. It allows you to easily @-mention people in the scuttleverse(a p2p social network). This isn’t straightforward because it’s a decentralized space where identity is subjective — many people have more than one use-name. (I gave a whole talk on subjectivity here).

I mention Mikey by a name that people in our coding context will be familiar withFoto tomada por: dinosaur

Why is this significant?

I’m proud of this feature, but the more important parts of this story are the open source and the cooperative culture making this possible.

Open source

Over the next couple of days, I’m going to generalise this code into a module called patch-mentions. Then I’m going to propose changes to Patchbay, and a sister project called Patchwork so that they use use this new module.

That way everyone gets the new functionality, and when we find bugs in what I’ve done, we’ll all benefit from the solution. I’ll also be able to use this in subsequent contracting work — a massive speed and reliability boost for myself and for clients.

I’ve actually already done this with a couple of other modules patch-profile (an easy profile editor) and patch-settings (which manages client preference settings).

If you’re talking to a programmer about what excites them about open source, this is probably the heart of it. Every time someone generously shares their work, we save hours / days / weeks of work, and are able to channel these savings into things that matter — like making more accessible interfaces, or building a feature to flag abusive actors (next on my todo list).

Cooperatives

Protozoa is a worker owner cooperative. While I’m writing this, Piet and Dominic are hard at work on different things — contract work, and forming collaborations with other decentralised projects (we’re currently crushing on the Economic Space Agency a bit).

For us, contributing to the commons is an important part of our work — it makes all our future work better, and helps build working relationships with other excellent humans.

Here’s an example of that:

Tableflip are a UK based tech coop we’ve been working with. We met them through the scuttleverse and this is a calendar invite to a catchup planning more work in the future. By working together, we’re able to work on bigger and more exciting projects with the confidence that we can expand to support each other.

The cal invite here is another tool we built is called gatherings. It’s a module Piet and I made to enable more community interaction. Other gatherings I’ve seen in the past week in include: “Art~Hack Wellington: decommidify your creativity”, “Westhaven Car Boot sale”, and “Bad Ukulele Club”.

It feels amazing to have been able to support more connections between people, and to be doing business in a values aligned space — I honestly don’t know TableFlip’s email addresses…

If you’re an excellent human with an rad project you’d like to collaborate on, we’d love to hear from you. I’m [email protected], or you can join the scuttleverse from scuttlebutt.nz

Photo by Picturepest

The post Coop-source: building decentralised open source with Protozoa appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This article is based on a presentation given at Disrupting the Disruptors Platform Coop conference, 9 September 2017, Toronto.

Chloe Waretini: You might have heard the saying ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ It’s the idea that we can put in whatever strategy and structure that we want in our organisations, but culture will always trump it if it isn’t aligned.

I preparing this talk, I sat with the question of ‘what is the wealth coops are uniquely placed to create in this time in the world?’

When we look at the disruption companies like Uber and AirBnB have generated and the cost on society, how are coops best placed to respond? What is the missing ingredient in these companies that stopped them making life better for everyone?

I’d argue that it’s the culture that lives in their organisations.

Wait, what? Isn’t the problem that they were in a profit-maximizing structure and had no care for the industries they disrupted?? Yes, AND where do these come from? What is it that makes this ok, even celebrated? It’s the cultural paradigm that we’re in, reinforced by the culture of what is ‘success’ at work.

“Uber didn’t come out of nowhere, it came out of a culture and networks. We need to build the alternative.”

– Nathan Schneider, Platform Coops Conference 9 September

These organisations are set up with the vision of success as ‘getting ahead’. The one who claims the best territory and holds it wins. This goes for both the company and the people in it. Individuals are a fractal of the values of the whole. The ones who ‘get ahead’ are the ones willing to dominate, coerce, compete and fight. It pays to be out for yourself, distrustful of others and protective of your territory.

If you’re not someone willing to play this game, then your powerlessness is reinforced.

Credit — Kira Auf der Heide unsplash.com

“Toxic leaders aren’t just a bunch of bad apples in a barrel that need to be tossed out. They are employing a social strategy that works for them, given the institutional structure of the U.S. Army … The current institutional structure breeds toxic leaders … The only solution to this problem is a change in the institutional social environment.”

– David Sloan Wilson, Why Groups Fail

Credit — Benjamin Child unsplash.com

The humans we become at work

Think about how much of our lifetimes we spend at ‘work’, how this culture shapes us — our sense of self, how to relate to others, what is possible in the world.

Cooperatives were developed to address inequality, poor working conditions, create democracy and fairness. But without creating a strong cultural foundation of collaboration and humanism, they can get eaten by the predominant ‘dog-eat-dog’ work culture.

Imagine, if instead, the social environment in our organisations bred a different kind of culture? One where co-generation trumped individual genius, where you could safely assume that everyone else was thinking and acting in the interest of the whole, the difference between us was a creative resource instead of something to be managed, and compromise is a thing of the past?

Sounds pretty utopian huh? But it’s what a group of us have been prototyping for the past six years in New Zealand and around the world. This experiment is called Enspiral.

We started off as a freelancers collective dedicated to working together to more easily win highly-paid work so that we could spend the rest of our time working on stuff that really matters. We defined core values of collaboration, autonomy, transparency, diversity, entrepreneurialism, non-hierarchy.

As our numbers swelled, so did the complexity of our endeavour. Instead of being one company, we were over a dozen — linked by a central foundation. There are currently over 200 people in our organisation, all of which have open access to participate in our decision-making and financial management.

To cope with this complexity, we developed tools like Loomio for collaborative decision-making and Cobudget for participatory budgeting. Other groups became interested in operating like us and adopted our tools, structure and processes. But a strange thing happened. They still often didn’t collaborate well. There was something missing. In 2015 I was given the job of finding out what that was… It was the enabling culture that they lacked.

Credit — Chloe Waretini & Nanz Nair

How collaborative culture gets created

It’s easy to understand how to build software and structure, but how does culture get made? What was creating the particular social behaviours and norms in the society of Enspiral that was giving us the collaborative advantage?

“Enspiral believes solutions to humanity’s biggest challenges demand a new way of relating to each other”

– Enspiral Member

In studying Enspiral vs other groups in North America with similar ideals, some differences became evident. We had particular practices in the way we went about our work which paved the way for a different cultural mindset [Read here : 10 ways to make groups work better].

Through these practices and cultivation of a collaborative mindset, we each became different humans — re-cultured if you like. Work became a practice-ground to become the kinds of people that we need to become to create deep solidarity, dismantle inequality and toxic power dynamics. In essence, together we developed the human abilities required to make the paradigm shift the world is crying out for :

• Systems literacy (embracing the complexity of reality)
• Non-naive trust (assuming that your collaborators want to build you up)
• Flexibility and response-ability (adapting in dynamic realities and constant change)
• Collective intelligence through inter-subjectivity (letting go of the construct of objective truth)
• Surrendering control (actually the group is smarter than you are)
• Deep empathy and ability to use emotions in service of what we were creating together (yes you can bring your feelings here)
• Naming and navigating power dynamics (no there is no such thing as a flat power structure)
• Dancing between autonomy and collaboration (self-leadership and shared leadership)
• Lifelong learning (continual experiments and prototyping, insatiable reading)

Credit — Enspiral

This was especially evident at our Members gathering in February this year. There were a number of us who had been journeying together in Enspiral for 5 years and the amount of personal development was astounding — each of us knew that we would not be who we are today without Enspiral.

Credit — Matt Seymour unsplash.com

Coops as cultural platforms

This conference is about technology platforms and the disruptive impact they can have on society. But I urge you to also think about the cultural platform we’re building, and pay as much attention to this as the technology we develop.

Donella Meadows writes succinctly about the 9 most effective places to intervene for systems change. Number 6 is material flows (e.g. money), number 3 is the distribution of power. Coop structures can attend to these. But number 1 is ‘the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises’.

Can you identify the mindset your coop is operating from? Is it of the same paradigm that got us into this divided world or is it one that transform society to create solidarity and regeneration? Is your coop eating culture for breakfast or are you being eaten?

Read:

• Transformative principles and practices to make groups work better — Chloe Waretini
• Enspiral Tales on Medium
• Why Groups Fail (Hint: For the Same Reasons that Nations Fail) — David Sloan Wilson, Evonomics
• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System — Donella Meadows, Academy for Systems Change
• Reinventing Organisations — Fredrick Laloux
• An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization — Robert Kegan

Thanks to Susan Basterfield and Peter Jacobson.

Republished from Medium

The post Culture eats coops for breakfast appeared first on P2P Foundation.