mondora is a software services company and a benefit corporation. They care about how their software products are being crafted and used, considering how both people and planet are impacted. For example, they track the paper (and trees) that are saved in the use of their application that allows banks to easily keep digital records.

mondora role models creating benefit for the world and its workers

Their social impact extends beyond outward acts, mondora proposes to change how work is done in Italy by demonstrating a way of working where employees may choose to be as remote as they like and have flexible hours. mondora believes in creating value for their community of workers as well as the world.

mondora was founded with these values in 2002. As they grew from 10 to 60 employees in the last 7 years, they evolved their ways of working to better fulfill their purpose. They have developed a culture of openness and transparency and a flatter organisational hierarchy. They have implemented tools, such as Loomio, so that anyone can share their ideas and everyone decides together.

Loomio helps move discussions to clear outcomes and action

Kirsten Ruffoni, mondora’s Benefit Officer, spoke to a number of the obstacles mondora was facing prior to adopting Loomio. She shared how, “discussions would occur but nothing would happen”. With people working remotely and on flexible hours, it was “hard to move conversation to conclusion”, and, generally, “hard to keep a conversation going as you always run into different people at the office”.

Kirsten reported that they’ve come a long way in this regards, and Loomio has played a role. “Decisions that used to take months now take a week”, Kirsten told me. mondora takes full advantage of the variety of voting and decision tools that Loomio offers, and appreciates not losing messages on Slack and—unlike email—having the ability to indicate deadlines to increase accountability.

Kirsten described a challenging decision that was made on Loomio: making the salaries of mondora transparent to everyone in the company. The CEO had some reservations, but decided to use Loomio to consult everyone in the company. After the input—unanimously in favor—the CEO decided to trust the group and implement the policy. Not only did nothing bad happen, but they were able to do something really positive in the eyes of everyone in their company. They identified, and fixed, a pay gap between women and men, establishing equal pay for equal work. Kirsten commented, “Loomio makes it easier to voice our opinions in front of our boss”. Using asynchronous decision-making tools can make it easier to have thoughtful conversations and hard decisions, whether the team is remote or meeting regularly in person.

Loomio supports collaboration between organisations and across teams

mondora has also been using Loomio to bring customers into the design process to produce better results and strengthen relationships. They involve customers in the process as early as possible and establish open communication between their customer and every person on the team.

Beyond supporting internal communication and decision-making, Loomio allows mondora to invite guest users into specific threads or groups; mondora uses this to improve their interactions with investors and university researchers. According to Kirsten, Loomio supported mondora to “get information they weren’t expecting from stakeholders.”

After acquisition by TeamSystem, a larger IT company, mondora has introduced Loomio as a decision-making tool within TeamSystem’s R&D department.

In their efforts to better the world and cultivate employee happiness, mondora is leading Italy and others into a future of work where there is a new model of employment—a “new employee” where all workers can fully participate with flexibility, remote work, and effective communication and decision-making. mondora leverages Loomio to get better outcomes with less time and effort, supporting every employee to fully participate in all aspects of the business and to deepen their interactions with customers. Want to create more benefit in the world? Look to mondora as a valuable example.

By John Gieryn at Loomio, read the original post here.

The post Leading Italy into the future of work; mondora creates benefit for all appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The book showcases the wealth of transformative ideas that the international commons movement has to offer. With contributions by Kate Raworth, David Bollier, George Monbiot and many others, Our Commons is a political call to arms to all Europeans to embrace the commons and build a new Europe.

Commons Network’s very own Sophie Bloemen and Thomas de Groot worked on this book for almost two years, doing research and interviews, working with academics, policy makers, authors and activists to paint a colourful picture of the commons as the blueprint for a new future, one that is inclusive, ecologically sustainable, equitable, democratic, collaborative, creative and resilient.

Our Commons features reflections on the enclosure of knowledge and the monopolisation of the digital sphere, stories about renewable energy cooperatives and community foodwaste initiatives and urgent pleas to see the city as a commons and to treat health as a common good. Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, the book is first released online as an e-book, free for all to download and share and as a printable PDF. The book will also be available on a wide variety of print-on-demand platforms.

In the next few months, Commons Network will organise a number of official events around the book. Please get in touch at [email protected] if you are interested in hosting a book-launch with the editors and possibly with some of the contributors of the book. Off- and online media that are interested in publishing texts from the book or interviews with the editors and/or contributors are encouraged to reach out to [email protected].

Download the ePub or the print-PDF here and make sure to share this page with as many people as possible, using the hashtag #OurCommonsBook

For all further questions, press inquiries or event bookings, possible citations or cross-posting, or requests for hard-copy printed books, please do not hesitate to reach out to the editors, Thomas de Groot and Sophie Bloemen.

([email protected])

([email protected])

Reprinted from commonsnetwork, you can see the original post here.

The post New Book Out Now: Political Ideas for a New Europe appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This first event of OPEN 2019 covers the ideas behind The DNA of Collaboration and Harmonious Working Patterns to explore ideas which might help all the people, communities and organisations working on creating a new, decentralised, regenerative economy collaborate better to produce more impact.

Panelists:

• Indra Adnan from The Alternative
• Nathan Schneider from the Platform Cooperativism Consortium
• Matthew Schutte from Holochain
• Laura James from Cambridge Computer Laboratory
• Josh Fairhead, author of Harmonious Working Patterns
• Oliver Sylvester-Bradley from The Open Co-op

Follow along with the chat below the video and dig deeper – there are some valuable links to other articles on catalysing collaboration and related subjects.

Notes from the chat during the discussion:

16:47:37 Nenad Maljković : Interesting article in this context (4 minute read), for later, of course  https://medium.com/enspiral-tales/a-trickle-becomes-a-river-64893418a769
16:52:47 Trevor: Economies of scale and division of labour
Nenad Maljković : This makes very much sense from the permaculture (and living systeems) point of view!
16:57:37 From vivian : To me it sounds more like an argument for free markets, coming from the right of the political spectrum. the first is all about lots of autonomous utility-maximising agents (in an economic jungle) with no overall purpose
16:57:55 From vivian : Some of the interactions in a forest are pretty brutal!
16:59:13 From Nenad Maljković : Any group of humans is complex, adaptive system.
16:59:43 From vivian : Yes but many groups have a “purpose” and can plan together. That’s inherent in a democracy
17:00:53 From Dil Green : Forest participants and humans are different – because humans will always have some conceptually stated purpose (unless they are a zen master).
17:01:01 From Nenad Maljković : Vision, purpose… obsolete in groups that collaborate based on intrinsic values (first hand experience with transition town initiatives on the ground – they don’t waste time on defining purpose or vision
17:01:55 From Dil Green : For me, forests are fine (great!) in and of themselves – because the participants don’t have conceptual approaches.
17:02:40 From Nenad Maljković : For me (with permaculture glasses on) there is coordination >>> cooperation >>> collaboration succesion
17:02:51 From vivian : For me, defining purpose and vision are the most powerful democratic things to do in an organisation. In my experience, in groups where there is nothing like this going on, there’s usually one person or a small group in charge. Others might accept this for a time but it usually breaks down/
17:02:54 From Dil Green : It’s when humans try to act like forests that things get strange – because concepts cannot capture complexity – and complex relationships are what makes forests capable of building carrying capacity.
17:04:34 From Nenad Maljković : @vivian: group / team / organisatiom / network / “platform” / “ecosystem”… all are human systems, but different.
17:08:29 From Nenad Maljković : Oh… that’s not “community”…
17:09:11 From Ben Roberts : Re “Telegram hell:” “The small group is the unit of transformation” Peter Block
17:09:24 From Dil Green : @Nathan blockchain people obvs didn’t read the ‘Tyranny of Structurelessness’ in time…
17:09:58 From Dil Green : @ben nice distillation.
17:10:58 From Dil Green : Drawing appropriate boundaries and understanding that boundaries are spaces of exchange rather than barriers seems key.
17:15:40 From Nathan to All Panelists : @dil Actually at the meeting I was describing they were referencing “The Tyranny of Structureless” to describe their condition.
17:15:47 From Nathan to All Panelists :
17:16:03 From Ben Roberts : If we were sitting together, Matthew wouldn’t be on his phone like that!
17:16:17 From Nenad Maljković : Of course not – any mediated communication is 2nd grade communication… or worse
17:16:40 From Ben Roberts : And I wouldn’t also be working on a Google doc.
17:17:06 From Nenad Maljković : Focus Ben, focus!
17:17:13 From Simon to All Panelists : You think so ! ?
17:17:18 From Dil Green : https://medium.com/@joshafairhead/harmonious-working-patterns-2788d1523106
17:17:24 From Nathan to All Panelists : At the very least distract yourself with FLO software!
17:18:13 From Oliver Sylvester-Bradley : Harmonious Working Patterns: https://medium.com/@joshafairhead/harmonious-working-patterns-2788d1523106
17:19:03 From vivian : @Indra I like your analysis of how people interact with ideologies and the connection you make with concepts of identity. In the present political situation we have a classic case study of how people with insecure identities cleave to apparently powerful “ready-made” ones which are really crude vehicles for manipulation and control.
17:20:21 From Nenad Maljković : Hear, hear… (coming from an oralist)
17:20:50 From vivian : Arguably many externally-defined forms of identity (countries, brands for example) fall to a greater or lesser extent into this category.
17:21:31 From Dil Green : @Vivian Agreed
17:21:44 From Nenad Maljković : By the way, some good practical tips on… collaboration… here (there’s also part 2): https://medium.com/the-tuning-fork/hierarchy-is-not-the-problem-892610f5d9c0
17:22:06 From Nathan to All Panelists : I love that article, @Nanad. Thanks for sharing it.
17:22:06 From Dil Green : @Nenad – great stuff.
17:22:33 From Nathan to All Panelists : A corollary of mine: https://medium.com/medlab/co-ops-need-leaders-too-c78a303cd16ea
17:22:49 From Oliver Sylvester-Bradley : Thanks!
17:22:58 From Nathan to All Panelists : Sorry https://medium.com/medlab/co-ops-need-leaders-too-c78a303cd16e
17:23:19 From Dil Green : Rich and Nat capture something that panellists here are not talking about – which is scale. ‘How many people in the group?’ ‘What is the right size of group for this intent?” seem to me to be very important early questions.
17:25:38 From Nenad Maljković : What Matthew describes is how things work anyway… We are all associated – as individuals – with more then one “organisation”, etc.
17:26:50 From Dil Green : @Nen – I think he is saying that the protocols for collaboration in those forms of org are over-conditioned by the learned cultural modes of top-down hierarchy.
17:27:06 From Oliver Sylvester-Bradley : Cohesion – steer towards average position of neighbours
Separation – avoid crowding neighbours
Alignment – steer towards average heading of neighbours
17:27:13 From Oliver Sylvester-Bradley : https://open.coop/2019/03/07/defining-dna-collaboration/
17:27:23 From Simon to All Panelists : Is this aimed at corporations . . . who pay fat consultancy fees?. Personally can’t we just close them down?
17:27:37 From Ben Roberts : Never mind the GHG emissions associated with in-person meetings!
17:27:40 From Oliver Sylvester-Bradley : lol!
17:28:31 From Nenad Maljković : Extroverts and introverts keep their differences on video too
17:28:56 From vivian : @laura vulnerability is strength! (although I’m conscious I’m just sending text messages and you’re the one on the video! )
17:30:04 From Ben Roberts : So interesting to hear Laura say she “hates video.” The three ways of connecting–in-person, live virtual (video/audio), and asynch/text– each have benefits and limits, and each appeal/repel different people in different ways. Deep collaboration will leverage all three and have them synergize in ways we are still just starting to figure out.
17:30:21 From Ben Roberts : Yay NEC!
17:33:56 From Nathan to All Panelists : Thank you Laura for sharing that.
17:34:59 From Nenad Maljković : If viewer is focused enough on video listening can be as good – it’s a skill to acquire, in my experience.
17:35:20 From Laura James : Great point Indra about tech privilege. Virtual environments, especially without video, can be empowering for people with disabilities whose voices are not heard in the same way in face to face meetings. For scale we need to centre inclusivity
17:35:25 From Nenad Maljković : Live video is not the same thing as watching TV
17:35:29 From Nathan to All Panelists : One board I’m on requires members to stay unmuted on calls to enforce attention.
17:37:59 From Nenad Maljković : @laura: yes, fully agree + what Ben Roberts wrote above: “The three ways of connecting–in-person, live virtual (video/audio), and asynch/text– each have benefits and limits, and each appeal/repel different people in different ways. Deep collaboration will leverage all three and have them synergize in ways we are still just starting to figure out.”
17:41:34 From Nenad Maljković : Voting is out of date. We use consent decision-making (not even consensus, that’s also out of date).
17:44:57 From Nenad Maljković : Re. foking in collaboration – doable even without devices!
17:45:57 From Dil Green : imho democratic tools have appropriate and inappropriate contexts. So that voting can have its place (a quick workplace decision among 50 people as to a wildcat strike), consensus can have its place (a group of three choosing where to go for a meal), deliberative democracy… and so on.
17:49:40 From Nenad Maljković : @laura: thanks for sharing this, very useful!
17:50:49 From Matthew Schutte : Gregory Bateson’s critique of Conscious Purpose:
17:50:50 From Matthew Schutte : http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/Gregory_Bateson.pdf
17:51:49 From Matthew Schutte : And published yesterday: Gregory’s daughter, Nora Bateson’s article on “Tasting Textures of Communication in Warm Data”
17:51:49 From Matthew Schutte : https://medium.com/@norabateson/eating-sand-e478a48574a5
17:53:54 From Matthew Schutte : Nora’s wonderful recent 8 minute video that touches on the challenge that humanity faces today and the different ways of THINKING that may be required to actually surface solutions:
17:53:55 From Matthew Schutte : https://vimeo.com/310626097
17:55:20 From Nathan : Join us later! https://ethicaledtech.info/wiki/Meta:Inaugural_Edit-a-Thon
17:57:49 From Wes, Somerset UK to All Panelists : Really great session, thank you everyone!
17:59:13 From Dil Green : These ‘names’ are nicely captured by the concept of ‘patterns’ – identified recurring conditions in complex systems which are recognisable – although each instance is unique (in space and time), we can nevertheless useful name them.
17:59:49 From Ben Roberts : I’m not with you fully, @matthew. Sure, you can note how any boundary is permeable, or even arbitrary. And yet collectives DO exist in nature and are essential building blocks for its complex capacities for collaboration.
17:59:57 From Dil Green : Pattern languages allow us to trace systems of relationship between patterns that embody the complexity of the interactions.
18:00:13 From Simon to All Panelists : Interesting that Oliver insisted that everyone start by explaining ‘how they make a living’, & that Matthew lived in his car. Progress will be made when we don’t have to make these ridiculous choices. What will that take?
18:00:28 From Ben Roberts : It’s not just about giving something a “name.”
18:02:11 From Dil Green : @ben agreed – understanding a pattern and being able safely to interact with it design it requires a great deal of investigation, learning, documenting, mapping connections to larger and smaller contexts…
18:06:08 From Nenad Maljković : “Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.”
– Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, 1977
18:07:00 From Nenad Maljković : Might work in similar way in social systems… I think.
18:07:47 From Dil Green : Thank you Nenad! Chris alexander student/practitioner here.
18:08:38 From Ben Roberts : Here’s a pattern language for group engagement that I love to use in various ways: https://groupworksdeck.org/
18:09:00 From Dil Green : I am working on building pattern language authoring tools for all sorts of domains.
18:09:47 From Ben Roberts : There’s a new pattern language for “Wise Democracy” too: https://www.wd-pl.com/
18:10:58 From Dil Green : know the group works one, but nice to have this democracy one. Thanks
18:11:08 From Matthew Schutte : An interesting blogpost on Dyads and Triads (similar to some of Josh’s comments) by the co-creator of SSL the most widely used security protocol on earth:
18:11:08 From Matthew Schutte : http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2013/04/dyads-triads-the-smallest-teams.html
18:11:14 From Ben Roberts : One of its categories is Collaboration
18:11:29 From Ben Roberts : I can speak to one version of an answer to Nenad
18:12:11 From Ben Roberts : Cooperation is another C word to include
18:16:52 From Ben Roberts : I can also answer Nenad’s question re the various C-words with a story about what we’ve learned in the Thriving Resilient Communities Collaboratory
18:20:13 From Nenad Maljković to All Panelists : Maybe give Ben a chance to answer my question?
18:20:14 From Matthew Schutte : Yes! We need to give ourselves and one another AUTHORIZATION to show up as full humans — with the complexity of other contexts — not just as our “role” in the organization!
18:20:53 From Matthew Schutte : Nora Bateson has designed a wonderful process called a WARM DATA LAB to foster this kind of experience — and result in transformative shifts.
18:21:57 From Ben Roberts : I’m eager to try a warm data lab with Nora using Zoom (and maybe some asynch tools and perhaps even a network of in-person groups too).
18:22:28 From Matthew Schutte : Nora spoke at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco yesterday. That recording should be on NPR radio stations around the US (and elsewhere soon) and will probably be available online in the next few days:
18:22:29 From Matthew Schutte : https://www.commonwealthclub.org/videos
18:25:10 From Dil Green : Ben this is fascinating – thank you.
18:26:10 From Nenad Maljković : Thank you Ben!
18:26:14 From Dil Green : Is this documented / described anywhere?
18:26:25 From Indra : share your links Ben?
18:26:25 From Ben Roberts : www.thrivingresilience.org
18:26:27 From vivian : Thank you Oli!
18:26:32 From Dil Green : thanks!
18:26:51 From Nenad Maljković : Thank you all + Oliver and Dil
18:27:04 From Trevor : Thanks everyone!

The post Catalysing collaboration at scale appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I’ve spent most of the past 2 years travelling with my partner Nati, trying to discover what is the most strategic & wise action to take in a world that seems to be accelerating towards collapse. After an enormous amount of consideration, I have a strategy that feels good enough to engage my will and commitment. This document is a statement of intention. All going well, it’s where I want to invest my productive energy for the next 7 years or so.

I’m developing this plan in three phases:

• Phase 1 is a lot of conversation and contemplation.
• Phase 2 is this writing and re-writing process. Writing in public forces me to fill in the gaps in the argument, and to make my assumptions explicit.
• Phase 3 is where you come in as a reader and collaborator. If you feel struck by this proposal, I’d love for you to improve my thinking with your feedback. The best possible response will be for other people to run related experiments in parallel.

The proposal is very simple. But this is, I hope, the simplicity on the far side of complexity. The design elements come from 7 years of thinking & doing in the Loomio Cooperative and Enspiral Network.

I intend to start a new community as a sibling or cousin of Enspiral: about 30 to 200 people supporting each other to do more meaningful work. Our method will focus on getting people into “crews”, small groups of 3-8 people that start with emotional intimacy and get to economic intimacy. There’s a sequence from psychological safety to shared ownership of productive assets. The larger community functions mostly as a dating pool for people to find their crew-mates. The crews support the personal development of their members while doing useful things like providing housing, establishing circular-economy startups, growing food, making revolutionary art, or whatever activity seems meaningful to their members.

That’s the short version: form small groups, share feelings, then share money. In the following few thousand words I spell out the long version. I think modular and open source strategy is much more valuable than charismatic leadership, so I’m documenting my strategy as thoroughly and accessibly as I can. Because it is open source, you can copy it, modify it, and help me to spot bugs.

This article is long, so let’s start with a map:

Part 1. I start by briefly setting context, giving a name to the metacrisis I believe is threatening society as we know it.

Part 2. Then there’s a chunky piece of theory to explain how I think about groups, and groups of groups.

Part 3. With that background established, I can spell out my “microsolidarity” proposal in more detail.

Part 4. Then we get to the counter-intuitive part. I’m intentionally contradicting a lot of received wisdom from progressive and radical politics, so I want to do that explicitly, in the hopes that we can learn from each other.

Okay, let’s go!

Part 1. Collapse

I won’t spend a lot of time on this point because it is a downer, but it deserves a mention: we are well into a major collapse of our biological life support systems. Oops!

Just one data point: the population of wild animals on Earth has halved in my lifetime (source). This is not new information, but we are mostly in denial. Extinction Rebellion, a new climate action movement from the UK, remind us that we’ve known this at least since 2006 when the United Nations (UN) warned us that “humans have provoked the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago”. Yet our response is still piecemeal, uncoordinated and counter-productive.

While the biological substrate for life is disintegrating, so is our social fabric. Democratic populations are electing dictators and buffoons. Fascism is resurgent. Our ability to make meaning is dissolving. Across the political spectrum, people respond to this existential dread by retreating into anxious certainties. Political conversations feel brittle and explosive, one wrong word can trigger an artillery of shaming tactics to shut down the heresy.

This is how I set the design criteria: assuming we are in a major collapse, what is an appropriate action to take? How do we repair our damaged biological and social ecosystems? How do we plan for a future with much less peace, much less food, much less stable governance? What kind of action plan is fit for purpose in the last decade of the Anthropocene?

See, I told you this section would be a downer. But I promise from this point on it’s all optimistic and constructive.

Design criteria for action amid collapse

First criteria: we need enormous courage to persist without a guarantee of a positive outcome. Because I’m plugged into a renewable source of courage, I am a very hopeful optimistic confident person. So where does courage come from?

Second criteria: we need resilient methods for making meaning in the midst of chaos. The shortcomings of the old institutional media and the new networked media are collaborating to produce a freak wave of collective insanity. The popular votes for Brexit, Trump, Boaty McBoatface and Bolsonaro all illustrate the magnificent failures of our sense-making apparatus.

Third criteria: people with life-supporting values need to grow our power to influence the distribution of resources. Just 100 individual CEO’s are responsible for 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (source). The oligarchs are killing us. We need to get our hands on power of that magnitude, but it needs to be much more widely distributed and much more accountable.

So my humble proposal needs to produce limitless courage, make meaning from chaos, and grow enough power to counterbalance the suicidal oligarchs currently in charge. No big deal

Finally, I believe that the core of this bio/socio/psycho/spiritual collapse is a metacrisis of relationship, it’s about how I relate to the different parts of myself, to other people, and to all the other creatures, life, spirit, etc on this planet. If that’s true, then my response must be relational first. This article is written in the first person singular: it’s all I, I, I. That’s a stylistic choice for creative freedom. However, that language obscures the reality that all of this action is conducted in the first person plural: there is always a “we” acting together, me and others.

So that brings us to my theory of groups, which you can read in Microsolidarity Part 2: a Theory of Groups and Groups of Groups. //

Microsolidarity Part 2: a Theory of Groups and Groups of Groups

Definition of terms

For me to explain my theory, I need to invent some language. Unfortunately in English, we are missing words for different kinds of group. When I say “group of people” I could mean 3 people, or 300, or 3 million. These missing words are symptomatic of missing ideas.

So I’m going to propose some new words, to access new ideas. I’m not attached to the specific terms, and this is not a comprehensive map of all the different kinds of group, it’s just a subset of terms that will be useful for this argument.

1: the Self

The first group has only one person, it’s Me (or You). In this article, when I say “Self” I’m thinking of a tight network of overlapping identities who share custody of this body we call Me. Viewing my Self this way invites me to treat all my parts as worthy of respect and compassion. We’re all lifetime members of the consciousness called Richard D. Bartlett, even the ones I try to disown and shut down.

For more on this, Emmi’s article on consent and autonomy is a good introduction to the idea of a “networked self” and it’s implication for your relationships.

2: the Dyad

A Dyad is a relationship of two. If you can forgive the tremendous oversimplification: let’s imaegine society is an enormous Lego structure, but the only building blocks we have are Dyads. And now let’s say a Dyad can only be in one of two states: Domination or Partnership. Domination is imbalance, coercion, abuse, colonialism, the most controlling parent of the most acquiescent child. Partnership is like the balanced and consenting intimacy of two interdependent adults. Could also be a best friend, sibling, therapist, mentor, imaginary friend, spirit guide, etc. Because we learn so much through mimicry, an intentional Partnership Dyad is the best method I know for growth, healing, and development of the Self.

If you want to follow this logic that domination relationships are the root of all injustice, and partnership relationships are the root of all freedom, here are some juicy links: check out ‘NO! Against Adult Supremacy’, an anthology of zines available online & in print; Transactional Analysis is a therapeutic method for understanding interpersonal behaviour as parent-, child- or adult-like; and Aphro-ism is a Black vegan feminist argument that all oppression can be understood through the human-subhuman divide.

I reckon if the old domination society is finally disintegrating, let’s grow the next one around partnerships. I’m talking adult-to-adult, not parent-child relationships, from home to school to work to community to government. Are! You! With! Me!

3: the Crew

A Crew is a group that is small enough to fit around a single dinner table, around 3-8 people. This is about the same size as a nuclear family, but without the parent-child power dynamics. This is a long-term set of relationships with singular purpose, like a co-op, shared house, or affinity group. The size is important, because it is small enough to stay highly coordinated with minimal explicit rules & roles, and large enough that your enhanced impact is worth the cost of collaborating. If you observe many interactions in a Crew, you get many opportunities to learn about different ways of being a Self and being in a Partnership.

4: the Congregation

There’s another crucial size somewhere between 30 and 200 people: small enough that most of the members can know each other’s name, big enough to support many Crews to coalesce. Coordinated impact at this scale requires some formal rules & roles, but mostly you can hold coherence just by putting a bit of extra effort into the relationships. In my experience the best way to find your Crew is to spend some time in a Congregation. Coordination gets a lot more complicated beyond this point.

If you use my language for a second, you can think of Enspiral as a Congregation of Crews. We fluctuate around 200 people, all supporting each other to do more meaningful work. We have a big annual gathering, a coworking space, a participatory budget, and many experiments in developing systems for mutual aid. Loomio is one of about 10 or 20 stable Crews in the network, each one focussed on a specific purpose, like fixing the diversity problem in the tech sector, or providing accounting services to social enterprises, or building an intergalactic communications network.

The Crews and Congregation are in reciprocal co-development. I can absolutely say Loomio wouldn’t exist without Enspiral, and Loomio’s success has made major contributions to the development of other Crews. So my proposal is to work at both of these scales simultaneously.

5: the Crowd

There’s probably a couple more useful distinctions beyond 200 people, but for the purpose of this map, all human groups bigger than Dunbar’s Number get lumped into this one category: the Crowd. This includes corporations, neighbourhoods, regions, nations, multitudes, swarms, and many different kinds of networks, conferences, festivals, etc. All of these groups share some important characteristics. Only a minority of people can expect to be recognised in a Crowd. To develop and maintain trust, peace, coordination & coherence over time requires a lot of infrastructure: formal articulation of rules and roles, enforcement of norms, and checks and balances to ensure the just application of that enforcement.

There’s an empty space between Self and Crowd

From where I’m standing, it looks like contemporary neoliberal urban westernised society is mostly designed for Selves and Crowds. There’s a little space for Dyads, and almost no room for Crews and Congregations.

Anywhere you look: government policy, media narratives, conferences, employee performance management, UX design, the healthcare system… in all these different fields you will usually hear people being treated as either individuals or anonymous mass populations. Check any story in today’s newspaper and you’ll see what I mean. Climate change will be fixed by “you recycling” or “government policy” or “a social movement”.

That’s what individualism looks like: the vast majority of our conversations are about individual people (you, me, a public figure, your boss or lover), or about very large groups (Americans, progressives, women, programmers), which are so populous that the individuals have lost their distinct identity. Individualism is a metaphysical virus that allows us to only see trees, never the forest. This virus leaves us poorly equipped to work in groups.

Over the past 7 years of working with people who are trying to make the world a safer, fairer, healthier place, I’ve concluded that membership in a good Crew is a critical success factor. People enmeshed in really great Crews are most resilient to the psychological cost of doing social change work, and therefore the most able to think and act strategically. It’s at this small scale that we decontaminate each other, recover from the individualist virus, and start to learn a new way of being together.

So this brings is the core of my experiment: can we create the conditions for many excellent Crews to coalesce?

Read all about it in Microsolidarity Part 3: The Reciprocity Game…

Microsolidarity Part 3: The Reciprocity Game

Crews: when they’re good they’re really very good

Around ~5-8 people is a sweet spot of high impact and low coordination cost. Our little Loomio co-op is one example: we’ve raised more than $1M in ethical financing and supported 1000s of groups to be more inclusive and more effective in their governance. This is a scale of impact that I cannot possibly have on my own.

A good Crew is not only super efficient. It can also be a potent site for personal development. In a Crew you can experience human difference as a resource, which is our best antidote to bigoted tribalism. It’s a place to practice multiple Partnerships simultaneously, a rich source of belonging, acceptance, recognition, and accountability, a place to start coming out of my traumatised patterns of behaviour. My Crew is where my values gain nuance and complexity. One example: I only learned the crucial distinction between fairness and sameness by practicing a tonne of collective decision making around money.

In my original design criteria I said I want to work in a way that produces courage and meaning. You begin to see how Crews play such an important role when you view courage and meaning as social phenomena.

Simply, I believe courage is developed when we encourage each other, with our enthusiastic listening, praising, challenging, cuddling, gazing, regarding, acknowledging and reminding. It’s a fucking discouraging world out there! I need almost constant deposits of encouragement to maintain a positive balance in the courage account.

Meaning, too. I make sense of a phenomenon by considering how my peers respond to it. If I know them very well, and I know myself well, I can interpolate the meaning of an event from the scattered data of my peers’ reactions. My stable membership in a few Crews gives me great confidence in my ability to make sense of this chaotic world.

Unfortunately, Crews are often dysfunctional

Because we’re infected with individualism, we lack the techniques, behaviours, language, beliefs, ideas, tools, and nuanced values required to thrive in multiplicity. As a result, many small groups suffer common ailments: mini dictatorship, hidden hierarchy, too much consensus, not enough consensus, toxic culture, unresolved conflict, repetitive trauma, equal power dogma… We can easily get stuck in the triangular domination patterns, or the circular design-by-committee patterns.

Nati and I have spent the past 2 years helping groups to recover from some of these dysfunctions. I’m writing a book of practical solutions for the common failure patterns of collaborative groups. Hopefully these ideas can help a little, but what’s needed most of all is practice.

I’m curious what happens when we start new groups, already inoculated against the most common strains of the individualism virus. So in 2019 I plan to start a bunch more Crews so I can learn how to start them well. Here’s the first draft of the experiment I intend to run. I’m already looking forward to coming back here in a year to discover which ideas were totally misguided. Yay, practice!

A Sequence to Crystallise new Crews

The first step is to start a Congregation localised to one geographic region (I’m starting in Western Europe). Nati and I will invite about 20 or 30 trusted people to a first gathering where we can co-design the minimum viable structure to govern our community.

As a starting point I suggest our purpose could be something like “people supporting each other to do more meaningful work”. That is, peers mobilising our diverse strengths to look after our peers, not institutional, paternalistic, or condescending support. “Meaningful work” is intentionally subjective, inviting a complicated amalgam of different purposes: planting trees, raising kids, writing software; if it is truly meaningful to you, it’s probably worth doing. And “more” is ambiguous in a good way: maybe you need more meaning in your work, or you’ve already found your meaningful work but you want to do more of it, or maybe you want to shift the whole global system of work to be more meaningful. All the options are good!

If the 20-30 people subsequently invite 1 or 2 more, we’ll have a first cohort of up to 90 people, which should be a big enough dating pool for complementary Crew-mates to find each other. Hopefully we can immediately launch a handful of new Crews and run many micro-experiments in parallel.

I suspect the first thing to do within a Crew is to establish psychological safety, a space where all the parts of your networked Self are welcome to show up. From there, the job is just to respond to the needs in the group.

Most of the people we plan to invite have already got a sense of what work is most meaningful to them, but almost all of us are financially precarious. So I’m interested in moving quite rapidly from emotional intimacy to economics. An easy place to start would be to disrupt the money taboo and expose our financial parts to each other: how much income do you earn? Where does it come from? What lifestyle would support you to be at your best? How much does that cost? If you need to earn more, are there some creative new tactics you can try? If you already earn enough, are there opportunities for you to get the same money with less compromise in your values, or more freedom in your time, or with more social impact? If you have a surplus, what needs to be true for you to want to share it with your crewmates?

Personally I’m interested in building economic solidarity, because I think we can do more good when we’re in a position to be generous. But maybe the rest of the Congregation will have different priorities. Mostly I’m interested in experiments that produce deep deep trust.

The Reciprocity Game

Building trust is not rocket science. It’s mostly about reciprocity i.e. building a track record of doing each other favours. Here are some versions of the reciprocity game I’ve tried. If you know some more, please share ‘em!

Level 1: Listening

Sit in a circle. One at a time, someone says something that is true for them right now, e.g. “I’m excited about x” or “I feel sad because Y”. All you have to do is pay attention, listen to each person in turn, then eventually you say something that is true for you. If everyone listens to everyone, congratulations, you all just earned 1 reciprocity point.

Level 2: Money

One person talks about (A) the work they do for money, and (B) the work that is most meaningful to them. Discuss together how they might bring A and B into closer alignment. Now, anyone can make a small gesture to help make this happen, e.g. share a new perspective, offer a design process or productivity improvement, make an introduction, encourage them to keep trying even though it is hard. If you offer something: hooray, 5 points for you. If you asked for something you need, hey! 5 points for you too! And BONUS! you both get an extra point for talking and listening with mutual respect and positive regard.

Level 3: Consistency

It’s pretty easy to do something nice one time and have a momentary surge of good feelings. If you really want to excel at the reciprocity game though, focus on consistency.

Either in a Partnership (2 people) or in a Crew (up to 8), practice meeting once a month (virtually or in person). Reflect on where you’ve been and envision where you might go next. (You can do this during or before the meeting.) Take turns to share your reflections.

Everyone gets 1 point for the first meeting, 3 for the second, and 5 points for every meeting after that. 5 points deducted for missing a meeting.

If you want a little more structure, here are some documented processes you can try:

• Feelz Circle (3 processes for sharing emotional care between friends/ comrades/ lovers)
• Care Pod (personal-and-professional development in small groups, a new practice in development at Enspiral, based on Intentional Change Theory)
• Stewardship (peer support system for Partnerships)
• The Elephants (long term personal development for Crews)

Level 4: Conflict

Now we’re getting into the harder levels. Conflict is a great way to strengthen ties. It goes like this: you do something thoughtless, or miscommunicate in a way that upsets somebody you care about. They get hurt. Then you apologise, take responsibility, and attempt to make amends. They listen and forgive. Woohoo! You transformed your conflict into greater connection: 10 reciprocity points each! Careful with this one though, because you lose 20 points each if you don’t find a mutually agreeable resolution.

Level 5: Co-owners

After you’ve played a few rounds of the earlier levels, you might be ready to play Co-owners. Start with an idea, maybe it’s a new tech platform or a community project or a commune. Maybe it’s a savings pool or lending circle or livelihood pod for sharing credit, income or savings with your trusted peers. Whatever the idea, find some people who want to work on it with you. Now, when you formally incorporate as a company or an association or co-op, whatever, share the legal ownership with a few people. Congratulations, 100 reciprocity points! Whatever happens, this relationship is going to form a part of your life story.

Okay that is all fun and cool and optimistic, but if you’re reading with a critical eye you’ll notice that there are some parts of this proposal that run against the grain of a lot of progressive and radical thinking about social change. In the next part of this article, I’ll name some of the ways this recipe is unorthodox. Then y’all can help me discover if I’m the good kind of heretic, or the very very bad kind.

On to Part 4. An Unorthodox Recipe For Social Change…

Microsolidarity Part 4. An Unorthodox Recipe For Social Change

There are many components of the microsolidarity proposal that are out of step with the prevailing currents of progressive and radical thought. I’ll name five of those attributes here. I intend to acknowledge the risk of travelling off piste, and start the process of building accountability. This is a very exposing piece of writing, so please assume positive intent and check in with me if something triggers you.

1. Exclusivity

One of the most striking counter-intuitive parts about the microsolidarity proposal is that, if you’re reading this and we don’t know each other personally, you’re not invited. I invite you to start your own Congregation, but you’re not invited to join mine. That’s a bit shocking, eh!

Most progressive social change actions start with inclusion as one of the top priorities. For this action though, we’re prioritising trust far ahead of inclusion. Actually there could be two barriers to inclusion: first to join the Congregation, then an even higher threshold to join a Crew.

I want to look around the circle at our first gathering and see 20 or 30 people with a specific set of traits. I’m thinking of people I can count on to contribute to the psychological safety of others, people with high emotional intelligence and good boundaries. We’re going into experimental and challenging territory, so folks need to be extra-tolerant, open to different ways of knowing, being and doing. My people know how to DIY (Do It Yourself) and DIWO (Do It With Others). We call each other to develop the highest parts of our Selves and to embrace our incomplete parts.

All of this exclusion is necessarily going to select for people with specific privileges, so it’s not a comprehensive plan to erase oppression and injustice in the world. Our collective has many responsibilities to the commons, beyond our own artificial borders. It’s critical that we use our increased resilience, resources, and opportunities to serve the needs of people outside of our tight circle. As a minimal gesture, I commit to continue doing the work of documentation, translating everything I learn into terms that make sense for people outside of my context.

But I’ve learned from long exhausting experience that there is no such thing as complete inclusion: the more permissive your entry criteria, the more you include people whose behaviour excludes others. So the question is not “should we exclude people?” but “which people should we exclude?”

2. Not for profit but with profit

Here’s another zinger: we’re going to deal with money, so that means we’re going to have to deal with people’s money traumas. I’m hoping Tom Nixon can join us at least in the early days, to help us renegotiate our relationships with money.

Most of us are clenched when it comes to money, because of the stories and experiences attached to it. This seems to be especially true of people who are committed to making positive social impact with their work (me, for instance). We see the harm done by wealth inequality and corruption, so we conflate the wealth with the inequality. Anticapitalists conflate the marketplace with capitalism. We treat money as if it were dirty: I handle cash with my left hand while my right hand pinches my nose shut against the dreadful smell. It’s as if money is a pernicious acid that is just waiting to dissolve my values. Taboos prevent us talking about it, asking for what we need, and offering to help when we can.

I’ve tried being broke, and I’ve tried having enough to be generous, and I know which one is better for the planet.

When I was 21, after reading Small Is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher’s powerful short book on meaningful work, I immediately wrote a blog post publicly declaring my rejection of bullshit jobs (if you follow that link, pls don’t read anything else on that blog because it’s super embarrassing ). I didn’t grow up with easy access to capital, so it took another 7 or 8 years before I started to earn a minimal wage on my own terms. (Note: this is not a “bootstraps” story though, as I certainly did enjoy the privilege of New Zealand’s social welfare system to pay my rent when I couldn’t.) Now I’ve co-founded two small worker-owned businesses which pay me to do my most meaningful work (Loomio & The Hum), and pay to taxes so the state can do things like running the social welfare system.

These companies are not built for profit, but with profit. Generating our own income means we have the freedom to chart our own course. I think it takes money to do something ambitious, and it takes freedom to do something radical. So I want to be in community with people who are growing their financial resilience and co-investing in each others’ commons-building companies. I know the marketplace can be distasteful, but the situation is urgent, we need to be super effective.

3. Do Better Than Good

A lot of political strategy aims to change people’s behaviour because it is the right thing to do. If you want to be a “good” person, you’ll recycle, give to charity, and stop saying sexist things.

I’m more interested in strategies that can outcompete the “bad” option. I’m a feminist not because it’s the “good” thing to do, but because my quality of life improves as my relationships come out of patriarchal patterns. I absolutely believe we’ll all be better off without patriarchy, it’s not a tradeoff between winners and losers.

So I propose to outcompete individualistic consumerism with microsolidarity. I mean, how hard can it be to do a better job of meeting people’s psychological and material needs than this shitty 21st century gig economy? How many people have I met in the past few years who lack meaning and stability in their work, or who lack a sense of belonging? That’s our opportunity! Belonging is not a binary, like “yes” you’re connected or “no” you’re isolated. Belonging is a fractal: I have distinct needs for connection at each scale, from my Self, to my Partnerships, up to my Crew, Congregation and beyond. So do like the Emotional Anarchists do, and find freedom in the interpersonal.

4. Decentralised governance with not a blockchain in sight.

‘Nuff said.

5. Design for smallness.

In a world obsessed with big and fast, I’m designing for small and slow.

If our Congregation gets much bigger than 100 people, it’ll be time to start thinking about how to split in two. I’m starting “an independent sibling” of Enspiral rather than growing Enspiral to include more people, because I think the size is a critical success factor. I expect to be in this project for years before we see great returns.

In the past few years I’ve learned another important reason why “small is beautiful”, beyond what Schumacher wrote: our intimate peer-to-peer relationships have an extraordinary capacity for ambiguity and complexity. A high trust group can be very coherent and effective even with very low levels of explicit agreement about our state, direction and norms. It’s impossible to maintain this level of trust and connection beyond one or two hundred people. As organisations grow in size, they are governed less by interpersonal relationships and more by formal written policies, procedures, and explicit agreements. The written word is intolerant of ambiguity, and can only ever capture a tiny subset of reality, so groups that are governed by text are much less able to cope with complexity.

If you want to be agile and adaptive in a complex and rapidly changing environment, you must move as much decision-making power as possible into groups that are small enough to be governed by spoken dialogue, not written policy.

(For more on this theme, see my article The Vibes Theory of Organisational Design. If you want to go deep into the difference between written and spoken records see also Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy. For case studies demonstrating the relationship between performance and small-scale autonomy across many different industries, see Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux and Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal.)

Ok, there are a bunch of other reasons why the microsolidarity proposal could cause alarm, but I’m feeling sufficiently exposed now so I’m ready to see what I learn from pressing “publish”. One last thought before I do:

The Assembly of Congregations: A Decentralised Autonomous U.N.?

For now I’m going to stay focussed on starting this 2nd Congregation, but it’s fun to imagine what might happen at the next order of magnitude. Here’s a fun metaphor, which I gratefully borrow from my Enspiral-mate Ants Cabraal, after he shared it on Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast:

The United Nations (U.N.) is currently our best effort at global governance. There’s 190-something nation states chipping in to fund a staff of about 40,000 people trying to make the world safer and fairer. Imagine if we mobilised another 40,000 people to work on global challenges, but instead of the traditional centralised organisational structure of the U.N., with its hierarchies, department and managers, imagine if we were organised in small, decentralised, self-managing, commons-oriented, future-proof, complexity-capable networks. After all, 40,000 people is just 200 Congregations of 200…

Are! You! With! Me!

Postscript

It’s been a couple days since I finished this major writing effort. For a moment I felt ecstatic: one part of my Self enthusiastically congratulating the other parts of my Self for being so confident, articulate and clever. But before I got a chance to publish, some of my other parts started speaking up. My confidence disintegrated as I listened to the voices of my uncertain, disoriented and timid Selves. They’re quick to point out that this essay is far too X or it’s not nearly Y enough. I think I’ve reached the limit of how long I can hold a monologue before I reconnect with my crewmates, check in, and add their sensemaking to mine. So I’m looking forward to improving this proposal with the thoughtful consideration and spirited dissent of my peers. Time to leap and trust the net will appear.

I’ll keep documenting what I learn along the way. Follow the #microsolidarity hashtag if you want to stay up to date, and support my Patreon if you want to free up more of my time for writing like this.

The post Courage Before Hope: A Proposal to Weave Emotional and Economic Microsolidarity appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this interview, Claire Milne, Inner Transition Coordinator for the Transition Network, discusses the addictive qualities of digital technologies, how we can make peace with them in our own lives, and how to repurpose these technologies for the transition to a more just, caring and ecological future.

On 20th November, Claire will join Gaia Trustee Philippe Sibaud at 42 Acres Shoreditch in London to launch Gaia’s new report Wh@t on Earth: How digital technologies are severing our relationship from ourselves, each other and our living planet. Book now!

Tell us about  your role at the Transition Network?

The Transition movement is about celebrating the wealth of our communities; it is a community-led global initiative to achieve spiritual growth and ecological, social and political change. I am both the Inner Transition Coordinator and I hold a role called Nurturing Collaboration. My roles are basically around the inner dimension of Transition and designing for collaborative culture.

Your work is in large part collaborative and reaching out to external organisations. Is there a place for digital technology in your work in Inner Transition?

I feel like although it [digital technology] plays a role in eroding deeper relationships I also feel like it’s playing, in some respects, very positive roles in connecting people at levels of scale that would otherwise be very difficult, if not impossible. So being able to collaborate beyond the local level – at the regional, national and international levels – is very helpful.

Like with anything, if we are able to be in full choice we can have a healthy relationship with digital technology and it can play a healthy role in our life. Then it starts to get more complicated because, you could equally say that hard-core Class A drugs are not wrong, because at the end of the day it’s about our relationship with them. But what we know about Class A drugs or even technology is that the way they interact with our neurobiology [has] the potential to be hurtful at the physiological and psychological level. Then it becomes more complicated because what we’re being asked to do is recover from addiction.

What part does technology play in the Transition Network’s ideal envisioned future?

I find it really helpful to ask the question: ‘is the world that I’m longing for and that my life is dedicated to in part creating screen based?’ The answer is really clearly no.

But another a part of me recognises that at the stage that we’re at, there is a need for some degree of that relationship with digital technology to enable that scale of change that is required in order to bring about transformation. And at the same time to have the depth of psychological and spiritual transformation that’s needed for us as a species, to survive, there is equal need for us to have times in our lives that are free from digital technology.

That comes back to the reality that technology has this addictive quality and therefore the creative tension that we’re all being asked to navigate at this point in history is how can we relate something that is so crucial to the transformation of our world in a way that doesn’t fall into encouraging that addiction.

And the degree to which we’re addicted to technology is seriously high, and plays out to the identity politics that were already there. The degree to which we are addicted and to what we are addicted to is correlated to the ideas we hold about what will make us lovable and feel like we belong and feel like we’re good enough. Technology just completely feeds into that, and that’s why at a psychological level it’s addictive.

In identity politics at the moment, there are certain aspects like the ‘work ethic’ that plays a big role in burn out. This core belief within us, seen as the capitalist protestant belief, that for us to be good enough – for us to be accepted by the tribe, for us to be loved – we need to be productive and we need to be good at stuff. It’s very clear that technology feeds that. It feeds this idea that we can be superhuman, we can get even more done, we can work 24/7. Social media feeds into identity politics, around what we look like and celebrity status and all the phenomena around getting likes. This is all about that addiction to looking good that feeds into these identity politics.

And I say this with compassion because it’s very easy to slip into a sort of persecutory tone, but the reality is that these are deep wounds and they’re painful and we develop behavioural strategies to protect us from feeling the wounding of believing we’re not lovable and don’t belong. These behavioural strategies have been really amplified and codified by technology.

We are at a tipping point in terms of the ecological damage that humans are causing to our living planet. We have so much knowledge about our impacts, but are arguably more disconnected from Earth than ever. Do you think digital tech is playing a role in that? Can we revive that important connection with the Earth in time before our crises totally overwhelm us?

On a good day I’ll feel like that’s possible and on a bad day I think that that’s just an absolute joke. And I don’t think anyone has the answer.

It comes back to that question: is the life I’m longing for screen-based? And I realise that’s not answering your question. I think that maybe what is important is being able to sit with the not knowing. Too much is unknown to know whether that depth of inner change is possible.

Because we cannot control what is happening, we can make a difference and make interventions. So whatever happens, we need to learn how to navigate challenging, precarious situations in the physical world. So the greatest privilege, and I think human right, is access to support around inner resilience: education around emotional intelligence, and inner resilience.

If we can be in choice around how we respond to things and in choice around how we respond to addictive substances like technology, then we have freedom. For me, the inner dimension of change and the inner dimension of transition are all about liberation from the ego and the superego, and the destruction of patriarchy and capitalism.

So ultimately, the future of the Earth and our interdependence with the other-than-human world is dependent on us liberating our egos from patriarchy and the conditions that then leads to the destruction of the Earth and other beings, because it is leading us to this state of disconnection, disillusionment and separation.

Do you see a correlation between technology and patriarchy?

I think it’s really important to look at the role that our relationship with technology is playing in coping with trauma. Because I think for a lot of people, connecting via technology enables us not to have to feel that trauma.

Connecting through technology really colludes with that dissociated state that comes with trauma. If we’re not in our bodies and in our hearts, then we can’t meet other beings from that heart-felt, emotional place, we’re just two heads meeting.

That dissociated state is what is very characteristic of a lot of society because there’s this sort of low-level trauma that’s just across the board, and I think that technology really speaks to that. A lot of the population are sort of drawn to connecting via technology because it protects us from feeling the pain and limitations around relationships.

Is there any practice that you employ to feel that reconnection with the Earth?

Well, an interesting one for me is the sit spot. And I work with the sit spot in two ways. There’s the kind of well-known sit spot where you go out and you find your spot in nature and take your attention 50% with yourself and 50% with your peripheral vision, which as a regular practice just allows this deepening of connection to the other-than-human world.

But the tune-up on that would be the inner sit spot. So bound out into the world to find your sit spot, and then practice the inner sit spot, whereby you go in to your inner world. It could take the form of a body scan or all sorts of mindfulness practices, but there’s something really beautiful about the combination of that classic sit spot out in the world and then combining that with an inner sit spot to make sure you are in connection with yourself as well.

Join Claire Milne, Philippe Sibaud and Gaia to launch the Wh@t on Earth Report and delve deeper into these reflections on 20th November, at 42 Acres Shoreditch, London.

Photo by docoverachiever

The post Is the world you long for screen-based? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Welcome to Refugee Phrasebook. Together we are building an open collection of useful words and phrases for refugees who just arrived. The Refugee Phrasebook is a multilingual tool that provides basic useful vocabulary related to the most common immediate needs. The phrasebook is created in a set of google doc sheets, with the help of volunteers from Berlin and all over the world. Everyone is free to adapt, print and distribute the phrases to support refugees.

Following up on our December update, we prepared a 2 minute video to highlight current challenges and plans for the project. Thank you all for your support!

Refugee Phrasebook is an open collaborative project to provide important vocabulary to refugees. It assembles important phrases from various fields and encourages designers and experts in the field to improve on the material.

While the first collection of phrases was still limited to a closed document with a narrow use case, volunteers quickly migrated the data to an open table in Google Sheets and significantly increased the number of participants with their network. This step also emphasized a commitment to transparency and openness by publishing the data with a Creative Commons license (CC0), reuseable for refugee aid projects everywhere. Due to translation requests from helpers, the length of the tables has more than tripled since August.

The phrases now include a broad range of topics, from a simple “Hello” to “ I need to see a doctor”, covering a general set of phrases as well as sentences for juridical and medical needs.

Local initiatives are welcome to adapt, print and distribute all contents of this page(→FAQ) to support refugees in all regions. It currently contains vocabulary in 28 languages:

• Refugee Phrasebook (orientation / multipurpose)
  currently >561 items in >44 languages
• Medical Phrasebook
  currently 150 items in 28 languages, ca. 80% translated
• Juridical Phrasebook
  currently looking for lawyers to contribute

Do you want to support the project and distribute copies to refugees? The current printable versions (wiki + pdf) can be found here. You can also create a custom version.

We currently prepare the following datasets:

• Short version
  including phrases for general orientation (>180 items)
• Phrasebook for Orientation
  including phrases for general orientation (>600 items), phrases for helpers (>150 items), short version (>180 items)
• Medical Phrasebook
  including medical terms (>150 items)
• Juridical Phrasebook
  including juridical terms (>150 items, experts needed for translation

To display a different language set, select “Languages” and confirm with “Apply”. To print a custom version of Refugee Phrasebook : How to create a printable version (step by step guide for LibreOffice)

The project is noncommercial, the books will be available for free and provided without further political or personal branding. The content is freely available under a Creative Commons License (CC0) and can be reused by anyone everywhere. (→FAQ)

For questions and feedback, contact us at [email protected]

The post Project of the Day: Refugee Phrasebook appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A series of Collaboration Incubator workshops are being put out into the world to gather like-minded people to combine forces for building global grassroots democracy. I am Philine Krosse, a ‘transformation architect’ from the Netherlands, who was following links one morning and stumbled upon the website of Vanilla Way.

Without a second thought, I enrolled for the Berlin workshop from 5 to 7 October 2018.

I felt I needed something of a different order to grow further’

Yet after enrolling, I thought, why would I want to contribute to this movement? Why did I feel so strongly that this movement was something through that I could develop myself further. Also, I have never considered helping building a global democracy? For many years, I had been pondering, searching and diving into the deep of the big questions. I learned a lot from different people, literature and by designing and developing initiatives for communal healing and transformation to make collective sustainable development possible. Since a while, I felt I needed something of a different order to grow further and improve my work.

I had an inspiring talk with Manuela Bosch, one of the initiators of the Collaboration Incubator  about the intentions and drive that lead to this program. She explained to me, that this program isn’t about building a global institution. It is about finding creative and innovative ways to address local issues that impact us all globally – issues that cross borders and therefore can’t be resolved solely by one institution, one country or the existing global institutional governing bodies.

What if everything we ever tried were only prototypes of democracy? What if we don’t actually know how real democracy could look like? This thinking by Otto Scharmer (Theory U) inspired the tagline of the Collaboration Incubator: “Momentum building for global democracy”.  Within the Incubators, different existing local initiatives and movements are called to work on a vision and potentially also projects for a democratic society across boarders. Boarders not only in a geographical sense, but also in sense of sector, culture, class and any paradigm.

the required solutions are already existing, but there is a lack of cohesive effort

Participants of the Incubator in Berlin in May 2018 are putting their names up on the collaborative projects they want to support.

Facilitated through social technologies like Dragon Dreaming, Evolutionary Work and Social Presencing Theater, we are learning to maximize the knowledge, tools and resources that are available, to connect with others and organize change.  This is particularly powerful when combined with the increasing awareness of the importance of a more conscious lifestyle whether on an individual, community or organizational scale.  Our assumption is, that the required solutions are already existing, but there is a lack of cohesive effort that can only come from stepping out of our comfort zones for interdisciplinary organizing. This is what the people from the Vanilla Way network believe they can help to facilitate: connecting people with shared intentions and addressing issues that can’t be coordinated from top down with tools made for collaborative grassroots organizing.

we can only be as global as the reach of the network is

Enlarging the pool of diversity among the participants is one of the highest goals and greatest challenges.  Diversity comes for example by bringing people together from different socio-economic-religious-political backgrounds, but also from the wealth of experience an individual brings from their work and field of interest. The diversity topic is challenging, since first: we can only be as global as the reach of the network is; secondly: Diversity is dependent on our financial resources, too – this is why we i.e look for patrons for one-on-one scholarships and other ways of independent funding; and thirdly: Levering diversity depends more than ever on our own leadership capacity to deal with race, gender and inclusivity topics.

Through her work as trainer for the collaborative project design framework Dragon Dreaming, Manuela experienced that workshop participants are connecting fast and deep, but after meeting in a workshop focused on skill learning, it’s difficult to keep collaborating, even though good intentions are there. “There needs to be a reason for people to keep reconnecting. The activists and leaders I am speaking to, seem to have no more time to waste in workshops. At the same time people do want to network, connect on a deeper level and learn. Why not use the combined intelligence of a diverse group of people coming together interested in the collective change processes that are necessary? When we make time to travel and meet over three days, let’s work on the pressing question of what we can do for global issues! Could it be possible to work on a collective dream and also not let it’s realization be left to chance, but intentionally work on it? There is no guarantee to come to conclusion on this over the three days, but it’s worth to try!”

find good ways to use the resources we have wisely, plus all of our creativity

There seems to be an opening now, a commitment to come together and collaborate better. This program is contributing to what is already happening on so many levels and places. And, there is still so much work to do. Many active in organizing societal change feel there is no time to rest! Therefore another main goal of the incubator is about inspiring for self-care, so that we don’t burn out on the way. It is so important to find good ways to use the resources we have wisely, plus all of our creativity, to make sure that our power and energy endures all the way. The way of activism this Incubator supports is meant to be straight forward and honest, yet unexpected and joyful.

In the recent Collaboration Incubator in May 2018 in Berlin the participants learned through a Social Presencing Theater 4D Mapping Report to May 2018 Incubator experiment about the importance of borders. We learned, they are not only separating us. They really help us to collaborate better across our fields and different stakeholders. If we look at borders that exist in the natural world, for example the zone between the river and the forest, this is where the most biodiversity can be found. In permaculture this zone is called ecotone. Also personal relationships provide a classic example. Maybe others experience this, too: When we put too much attention onto another person, trying identifying with them and their actions, we are faster questioning whether we agree with them or not. The possibility of conflict can become greatly increased.

connect with many people, interdisciplinary and diverse, with less resources or effort!

When we focus on the third identity, though, the in-between or intersections that exists between A and B, our collaboration can be more effective, lighter and even deeply strengthen both individuals or fields. We don’t have to agree on everything, yet accept each other as the mutual partners and siblings in a global family, that we are. Each with our own skills, strength and knowledge to work on collective solutions. This way it might become possible to connect with many people, interdisciplinary and divers, with less resources or effort. It is the art of connecting through the heart in seeing and acknowledging each other and at the same time staying focused around our own work, own needs and shared vision.

Beyond envisioning and planning, practicing collaboration by creating a shared piece of tape-art in the Incubator in May 2018 in Berlin.

The program can be called a success, when every participant has been able to take away at least one key learning or key link to a resource crucial for their current work or life. The contribution to global distributed democracy can be a side-effect and will keep building its momentum through continuous commitment of many over time. “If we are going to support the creation of a giant collaborative field, will depend pretty much on the participants and outcomes of the Incubators and especially what will happen between the ongoing workshops. If the Collaboration Incubator is helping unleash the connections between the existing movements, so that they can better recognize their own qualities and give each other direct help, we will move into this direction”, the organizers of the Collaboration Incubator hope.

the wisdom and spirit that is already in our bodies, heads, hearts, souls can come to the surface more easily’

To share the knowledge and keep developing and integrating internet based technology to coordinate our efforts and make our network power visible is important. As an underestimated addition to this I believe in connecting people and their visions on a deeper level face-to-face. The wisdom and spirit that is already in our bodies, heads, hearts, souls will come to the surface more easily. After writing this article I know that this is my motivation and intention to participate.

Lead photo, Celebratory activity during Collaboration Incubator in Berlin in May 2018. All photos, ©Momo-C.Gumz .

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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

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Can FOSS stem the tide towards the commodification of agricultural knowledge?

Gabriel Ash: Acting against the grain of current economic and political structures and offering both valuable access and inspiring ideas about collaboration, the sharing of ‘the commons,’ and the future of work, these FOSS-modelled schemes are unlikely to be the last of their kind. But if they are to realize their full potential, it is essential that both the lessons of the history of FOSS, and differences in context between IT and agriculture, as well as the impact of the quarter century that separates the two moments in time, become subjects of reflection.

The reality of FOSS is significantly more complicated that the simple distinction between open and proprietary. In many products—the Android phone, for example—‘open’ and ‘closed’ elements co-exist, and tiered commercial projects with an Open Source base and proprietary additions are common. Furthermore, ‘open’ itself is a continuum, with various licensing schemes offering a range of different degrees of control. If FOSS models become widespread, forms of accommodation between open and proprietary technologies are likely to emerge in agriculture as well, which could further advance the interests of agribusiness at the expense of farmers. It matters therefore how and to what ends FOSS schemes engage and mobilize users and producers.

Blueprints for agricultural technology and machinery can be found on websites like FarmHack or Atelier Paysan (CCO)

The history of the evolution of agricultural knowledge is also more complicated than a simple binary between proprietary and public. The Green Revolution replaced the informal, tacit knowledge of farmers with formal, scientific knowledge that was nevertheless organized as public knowledge, primary through institutions of research and higher learning. This phase of development elicited resistance and criticism for both the damage to farmers and ecosystems, primarily in the Third World, and for the denigration of centuries of accumulated local knowledge. This conflict was instrumental in the emergence of agroecology as a discipline[1] as well as in a range of efforts to foster better interactions between scientists and farmers.[2]

A second process that began shifting funding, control, and eventually the ownership of knowledge from the public to the private sector occurred later. In contrast to agriculture, software development never had the equivalent of farmers, and FOSS emerged purely out of resistance to the second process. This difference implies that FOSS-inspired schemes in agriculture could be more complex and resilient, and potentially more effective alternatives. But it also opens more room for misaligned interests and internal conflicts.

The ideas of unfettered collaboration and democratic creativity that FOSS schemes invoke are not external to the development of the privatized knowledge economy and its attendant intensification of intellectual property rights. Workforce creativity, technological innovation, intellectual property rights, and economic growth are widely perceived today by policy makers as linked.[3] By advancing ideas of knowledge as common and knowledge production as free, FOSS-inspired schemes expose some of the internal contradictions of a model of economic growth premised on profiting from immaterial labour and the control and selling of knowledge. But they will not buck the trend towards privatized hi-tech agriculture alone.

Agriculture, however, may offer unique opportunities for linking FOSS-inspired schemes with other forms of engagement and mobilization on issues such as environmentalism and farmers’ and peasants’ rights, and the different ways each of the latter raises the question of the commons. Let these projects be the early shoots of a wide wave of reflection, experimentation, and mobilization around these questions.

Read part 1 of this series here.

[1] Gliessman S.R. (2015) Agroecology: the ecology of sustainable food systems, 3rd Ed., CRC Press, Taylor & Francis, New York, USA, p. 28.

[2] World Bank (2006) Global – International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) Project. Washington, DC: World Bank http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/753791468314375364/Global-International-Assessment-of-Agricultural-Science-and-Technology-for-Development-IAASTD-Project , pp. 65-68.

[3] See Barry (2008), pp. 42-43.

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Experimentation with radically open and collaborative ways of producing knowledge and material artefacts can be found everywhere – from the free/libre and open-source software movement to citizen science initiatives, and from community-based fabrication labs and makerspaces to the production of open-source scientific hardware. Networked digital infrastructure – including ever-faster internet access in far flung places – makes these experiments more possible.

Though diverse, these initiatives have important things in common: they create or recreate knowledge commons, and attempt to get a broader array of actors involved as ‘agents’ in innovation.

In a new working paper, ‘Open and Collaborative Developments’, researchers in STEPS America Latina, the STEPS Centre and SPRU reflect on what these emerging practices might mean for helping to cultivate more equitable and sustainable patterns of global development. For many commentators and activists such initiatives promise to radically alter the ways in which we produce knowledge and material artefacts in ways that are far more efficient, creative, distributed, decentralized, and democratic. But can open and collaborative approaches fulfil this promise?

Challenges for open and collaborative practices

The key to answering this question is a set of challenges about the knowledge politics and political economy of the new practices. What depths and forms of participation are being enabled through these new practices, for instance? In what senses does openness translate to the ability to use knowledge? Will open and collaborative forms of production create new relations with, or even transform, markets, states, and civil society, or will they be captured by sectional interests?

Sharing and sticky knowledge

To take one example, a key assumption underpinning many open and collaborative initiatives is that knowledge and information can be shared, then used, modified or further developed, among actors who are far apart from each other (either geographically or institutionally). In effect, this is a promise to radically redistribute access, power and agency over the way that knowledge and materials are produced.

For those in the global South, this is an intriguing prospect. Many developing countries are characterized by acute knowledge dependencies, very narrow production structures, and constrained scope for innovation. In many cases, global firms have control over the frontier of knowledge and technology. So sharing knowledge openly and collaboratively across nations ought to give more options for innovation and participation for people in those countries.

The problem is, though, that knowledge is ‘sticky’: it is immobile, or at least costly or difficult to move from one setting to another. There are several aspects to this; each of which complicates further the challenge of ensuring widespread, equitable internet access and digital information flows.

One aspect to knowledge stickiness is that knowledge possesses important tacit dimensions, particularly in the form of skills and competences. These are most readily shared and learnt in apprentice relationships and through social practice, they often take years to develop, and they are extremely difficult to codify or render explicit, and so are not easily shared through digital networks. Tacit knowledge and the skills to put knowledge to material effect in development are, however, critical to producing and utilizing any and all forms of knowledge. Even successfully using databases of codified information requires skills to select, interpret, and practically use what is relevant.

Some areas of open and collaborative production cope more effectively with knowledge ‘stickiness’. For instance, absolutely central to the success of the open and highly collaborative international Green Revolution in plant breeding (albeit in pre-internet days) were long and intensive international exchanges and field training of thousands of young scientists.

More recently, community-based makerspaces have managed to combine digitally shared, non-proprietary knowledge platforms, with collaborative physical spaces that enable shared learning by doing and using locally. They may, as a consequence, manage to get around many of the problems posed by the immobility of tacit knowledge and the need to re-interpret appropriately and re-embed codified knowledge in local practices.

But other practices, such as citizen science initiatives or the sharing of scientific information via open access repositories may struggle to overcome these kinds of challenges without analogous developments locally. In such circumstances, meaningful access to knowledge and the ability to participate effectively in its (re)production and use are likely to remain very limited.

The obstacles are not necessarily insurmountable, but they do require careful attention to how sharing and collaboration is practiced on the ground, and to the development and distribution more generally of capabilities in knowledge production and use.

Three challenges

Our paper as a whole highlights three sets of challenges in the emerging field of open and collaborative production.

One, as in the example above, concerns the ways in which important attributes of knowledge itself limits aspirations for a more democratic innovation culture.

A second concerns the operation of power internal to the process of producing open and collaborative knowledge. Can open and collaborative production transcend existing hierarchies, asymmetries in the distribution of resources and capabilities between collaborators, and wider patterns of social privilege and structure?

A third concerns the nature of political and economic power within the wider settings and structures in which initiatives in open and collaborative production are situated. Put somewhat crudely, will the new practices constitute ‘novel inputs for existing processes’ or ‘novel inputs for transformed processes’?

None of these three challenges is insurmountable, as we conclude in our paper. But they do imply that any promise in the open and collaborative practices will be realised through accompanying, wider developments. These must be attentive to issues of local capabilities (material and social) in diverse contexts, and include the capability to grapple with issues of relative power and autonomy.

The authors of this blog post are co-authors of the working paper ‘Open and Collaborative Developments’(STEPS Working Paper 98). You can read the abstract here and download the paper (PDF, 900KB).

Photo by Gexydaf

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