Group formation fascinates me. I invite you to get fascinated with me for a minute: In your imagination, picture a person as an H₂0 gas molecule, floating around in space. The molecule is an unattached individual. Maybe it’s you. You’re cruising through the atmosphere, bouncing off other individuals: maybe high-fiving as you pass, but not embracing. Then something happens, and all these isolated invisible steam molecules change state, transitioning into a big ordered mass of activity called a water drop. What happened? What’s the nucleus that these vapours condense around? What’s the surface tension that holds it together, defying gravity? What’s the membrane that lets some people and behaviours in, and excludes the others?

I’ve been contemplating this picture for years, wandering through different physical and social geographies, observing the phase transition of unattached individuals condensing into collectives. Inquiring about the social physics of these collectives, I keep coming back to this thing called “belonging”.

Belonging changed my life. I’ll tell you about that in Part 1 of this story. Most of my peers agree that there is a crisis of belonging in modern capitalist societies, so we’re busy building new structures for belonging. I believe it’s the most important work I can be doing right now. I’ll tell you about that in Part 2.

But whenever I see belonging, I’m aware of the deep shadow around the edges. Beneath the lovely sense of interconnectedness, personal growth, and shared purpose, there’s a dark current: coercion, abuse and exclusion. I’m not just saying that bad things sometimes happen in community, I’m coming to the conclusion that some of these destructive elements are inextricably tied to this “belonging” creature, just as surely as my shadow is attached to my feet.

I’ve been contemplating this dark side of belonging, and it’s really hard for me to get a grip on. I feel so strongly about the goodness of belonging, it’s really challenging to consider the badness too. In Part 3 I’ll start the unpacking process, but I can’t do it on my own. If you’re up for it, I’d love you to come along and add your sense to mine. (If you’re short on time, go ahead and skip to the end.)

Part 1: A Celebration of Belonging

Put simply: belonging changed my life.

If I could chart my life story onto a two-dimensional graph, you’d see it make a significant up-swing once I found my community of belonging.

I found belonging in stages.

First it was my clique in high school, a “pack of strays” with not much in common other than that we were definitely not the cool kids.

Later on I found a bit more belonging: I learned I wasn’t just a random weirdo building electronics audio devices in my bedroom, I was a “maker”. Makers have shared language, we gathered in maker spaces and we read Make Magazine. This loose affiliation with a wider group wasn’t a major contributor to my wellbeing, but it gave me a little more confidence at least.

Next I found my way into a much tighter collective, self-deprecatingly called the Concerned Citizens. We were a bit like makers, but with a political agenda. We built community around ourselves by hosting creative events, engaging with social justice issues through the arts.

Then Occupy happened. Members of Concerned Citizens joined Occupy Wellington. The embodied experience of building and maintaining a village in the city square bonded me to my fellow demonstrators: the sustained physical, affective and cognitive activity stuck us together like blocks of wood glued and clamped. In our local encampment, my individual identity became fused into a collective identity. I became an “Occupier”. Then something extraordinary happened. As millions of other people around the world adopted this Occupier identity, I felt myself bonded just as strongly with strangers on the other side of the planet. To this day, every time I think of the police brutality against Occupiers in Manhattan or Berkley, I have a full body reaction: nausea in my guts, tight chest, prickling eyes, a visceral cocktail of indignation, rage and sorrow.

After Occupy, we met the Enspiral network, and decided to establish the Loomio Cooperative. At each of these stages, from maker, to Concerned Citizen, to Occupier, then Enspiralite and Loomion, my sense of belonging intensified. I credit nearly all the good things in my life to those collectives. My livelihood, my sense of purpose, my ethical compass, the feeling that my creative power is fully activated, that I’m a deeply engaged citizen of a borderless society — all of this I attribute to those collective identities. This great mass of belonging is like a heavy ballasted keel keeping the ship of my identity upright and stable in rough seas.

I can’t describe for you the enormous sense of relief when I found my tribe! Capitalism is really effective at isolating us from each other, so it is such a joy to discover a group that wants me, not as a consumer or a producer, but as a me, a dignified distinctive complex human being!

There’s a tonne of personal growth that I only have access to when I’m in the circle, sharing eye contact with my small, tight tribe. I have reliable access to the catharsis of authentic vulnerability — to be seen and completely accepted, even with my incomplete parts.

So far, so good! So why is this experience not more common?

Part 2: The Crisis of Belonging

I am greatly influenced by the Adam Curtis documentary series Century of the Self. Essentially, he argues that 100 years of PR, political strategy, and psychoanalysis have reshaped our view of ourselves: our identities have shifted away from the collective and towards the individual. This campaign of individualisation has produced profitable consumers and docile citizens, which business and political leaders have taken advantage of. The awful consequence is a crisis of belonging: so many people are cut off from all the lovely benefits I celebrated in Part 1.

Most of my peers share the hypothesis that repairing the crisis of belonging is essential to a thriving 21st century society.

Maybe the clearest articulation of this hypothesis comes from Charles Eisenstein. He talks about the “story of separation”, saying we’ll never live in harmony with the rest of nature if we can’t live in harmony with each other.

I know tonnes of people who are involved in this grand reconstruction project, striving to build belonging where it has been absent for so long.

My friends at Enspiral are hard at work, first to produce a community of belonging for ourselves, then to share the benefits with others. There are radical little inventions like the “livelihood pod”: a tight collective of independent consultants who create micro-solidarity through income sharing. You see much bigger narrative-shaping projects underway too, like my colleagues who are working with the NZ Government to convince them that “poverty” has more to do with relationships than material resources.

Beyond my immediate community, I see many other contributors working to repair the crisis of belonging.

Take for example the growing movement towards self-managing, decentralised, “teal” organisations. While we talk about collaboration, innovation, or engagement, I think belonging is the core driver of this movement. People want to find meaning in their work, and share that purpose with others, creating a nourishing collective identity to belong to.

Another trend: maybe you’ve heard of these “transformational festivals”. Burning Man is the most famous, but there are thousands of different versions, some more spiritual, some more hedonistic, some more activistic. I’ve been to a few, and yep, I’ve had major life-altering experiences there. Shared ecstasy, a sense of healing, interconnectedness, profound acceptance. My personal development occurring in the context of 100s or 1000s of other participants provokes the feeling that hey, maybe we really are changing the world here. It’s intoxicating!

For more context about this emerging movement some commentators are calling “neo-tribalism”, check out these articles:

• A New Economic Vision That Mixes Together Occupy, Amish Culture, and Startups by Alexa Clay
• NeoTribal Emergence from the Peer-to-Peer Foundation

Most recently I joined NewKind Festival in Tasmania. Again, I met a bunch of people going through great personal transformation: they’d finally found a community of belonging and they were flourishing!

Because it’s not my community of belonging, it was a great opportunity to contemplate the dark side of belonging, observing from a more objective perspective than I can usually reach. My intention is not to criticise transformational festivals, or Enspiral, or any specific communities. I’m not challenging the hypothesis that belonging is a key that unlocks many or our social crises. But I want to open up the field of view, to look at the dark side of belonging, develop some shared language with other neotribalists, and find some questions or methods that we can use to keep ourselves accountable. I think belonging is a beautiful trap, but I believe we can live inside it without the jaws snapping shut.

Part 3: The Shadow of Belonging

When you go looking, you can find many dark sides of belonging. I’ll just name a couple of them because it is too depressing to consider at length.

Status produces unconscious manipulation

Generally I think “status” is an extremely useful lens for looking at behaviour change within groups. I’ll give a brief outline of how I understand it:

• Some people in a group have much more status than others (they might be known as founders, leaders, elders, visionaries, or just the popular kids).
• In some sense these individuals come to represent the “ideal” community member.
• People with less status mimic the behaviour they see from the people with more status, because of our deep psychological need to fit in.
• Status comes pre-installed with anti-tamper devices: talking about status is taboo. If you want to reveal this taboo, try having a conversation about your own status in a group and you’ll see what I mean. (Please report back.)

So status is a powerful shaper of behaviour, and for many people it’s not visible in their conscious awareness. That is concerning, but it gets downright terrifying when you consider that neurologically speaking, the more status you have in a group, the less able you are to empathise with others. (See Power Causes Brain Damage by Jerry Useem.)

This is an extraordinarily dangerous recipe. Leaders live inside a “reality distortion field”, which is extremely difficult to puncture. They have more ability to influence the group and less ability to see what is actually happening.

People with more status are always changing the behaviour of people with less. When this is performed consciously, we call it “manipulation”. For most of us, this is utterly abhorrent, it’s precisely what we’re organising against. And yet I believe manipulation is happening unconsciously, all of the time.

Take me for instance. Many people in Enspiral regard me as a high status community member (if that sentence makes you cringe, that’s the status taboo operating). As a high status community member with incomplete empathy and self-awareness, I shudder to think how much harm I must have done through ignorance or self-protective rationalisation.

Wherever there is a strong collective identity, with some individuals embodying qualities of that identity more than others, there is a conformity pressure that many of us are barely able to resist.

Sometimes, this conformity pressure has positive effects. People feel that if they want to belong in our tribe, they need to perform the actions that we collectively put a high value on: recycle more, stop eating animals, give more to charity, or whatever it is.

Often the results are not so rosy. At Enspiral, many of our high status members are known for contributing hugely. So naturally, many people perceive this as some informal standard, an expectation of how they should behave. At least, this results in members reporting they feel guilty for not contributing enough. At worst, I’ve watched people sacrifice much more than they can afford to, over-volunteering, neglecting their own needs, extending themselves well beyond their boundaries and getting really hurt in the process. This is profoundly painful for the individuals involved, and it is also counter-productive for the community, as some of our most committed members need to take breaks or leave permanently.

Speaking for myself, I know sometimes my motivation to contribute a lot comes from generosity, that joyful desire to share from abundance. Other times it’s an unhealthy expression of my workaholism and my craving for external validation. So if people see me as having status, what are the negative consequences of them copying my shadow behaviours?

Judgement

When you’re in a community of people and you can see you’re all thriving, it’s really easy to look out at other people struggling without community, and then judge them negatively. Sometimes this is a subtle kind of condescension, like an assumption that those others would want to be more like us, if only they knew how. Other times it is explicitly patronising: it’s pretty common to meet people in these neotribal communities who are on a mission to “wake up” the “sheeple” who are operating with “lower consciousness”.

Othering

Another problem shows up when this “belonging” thing grows like a cancer, when this lovely “us” only exists because there’s an evil, lesser, stupider “them” out there somewhere. The membrane that includes the “right” people only works by excluding the “wrong” ones. Many of the groups I’ve visited define themselves with negative space: you know you’re with us because we are not-them.

The negative space makes it really hard to collaborate. We can’t make a massive network of small groups if we’ve each got a big moat around our tribe. We need drawbridges that are designed for difference, keeping our people safe while we approach their people with wonder, inquiry, and delight.

Perhaps this is other half of the crisis of belonging. First, we strip people of community. Then in our desperate hunger, we find a tribe and get intoxicated by the connection. We cling so strongly to “us”, that everyone outside becomes “less than.” At the extreme end of this spectrum, the “out group” loses its humanity. Holy war, genocide, and fascism are the extreme examples.

So on the one hand, I feel like belonging is the solution to so many of our social ills. But at the same time, it can feed the worst kind of polarisation, appealing to our most primitive instincts. If you want an example, just imagine a “Trump supporter” and tell me how you feel.

Questions to keep us present

Like I said, I find it really hard to look closely at the shadow of belonging, but I have the sense that we can inoculate ourselves from some of the dangers if we pursue this inquiry together. Here’s some questions I’ve been sitting with, I’d love to hear yours:

• how do we make the terrain of status visible?
• how do we keep status moving around so it is not concentrated in one or two individuals?
• how do we make transparent pathways to influence?
• how do we match increasing status with increasing scrutiny?
• if we instinctively mimic each other, can we emulate not just the popular kids, but consciously choose which behaviours we want to elevate?
• how do we foster pluralistic narratives, honouring a diversity of cosmologies and tactics?
• can I identify myself without pushing others away? Can I take delight in us, savour our purpose, our ethics, our distinct set of circumstances and choices, and simultaneously celebrate them for making their choices too?

I am not looking for some final solution: I don’t think we can separate from our shadow. But I believe with gentle inquiry and mutual aid we can learn to see more clearly the razor-sharp jaws of this trap called belonging.

p.s. This story is licensed in the public domain, no rights reserved, i.e. do what you want with it. Html and markdown formats available for reproduction.

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You’ve probably heard of Loomio, the simple but effective decision making software from Enspiral, but what you might not have heard about are the patterns and principles which the founders of Loomio use in their own organisation.

Make no mistake Rich and Nati, who delivered this workshop as part of their grand tour, have been living and breathing this stuff for years. Their pragmatic inspiration shone through the event, like a beam of brilliance from above.

The event took place at the always inspiring Newspeak House, with roughly 30 participants split into groups. Rich warned us he would be delivering a lot of condensed information and I wondered if he would live up to the promise… 4 slides and 20 minutes later I was reeling with new ideas. It’s not that his patterns for working in groups are entirely novel – it’s that he’s thought about it, and clearly lived by the rules he so passionately espouses, I could almost feel his hard-earned acumen making its way from his brain into my own.

Take the first pattern for example: “Intentionally produce counter-culture” which you probably instinctively know is a good idea but what really struck me were the magic words: “belonging is a superpower”. This is something we so often fail to deliver on… If everyone in your group feels the same empowering sense of belonging there’s no limit to what can be achieved. Conversely, if new-comers struggle to find the inroads to find belonging within a group, or old timers lord it over knowledge and do not empower everyone with the same sense of worthiness within the group, belonging can crumble and with it goes organisational effectiveness. We came back to this theme in the second session (see below) but the other patterns are equally awesome.

With pattern 2, “Systematically distribute care labour”, Rich talked about everyone in their organisation being a steward for someone else and a stewardee too – to ensure everyone receives adequate support. Simple, effective relationship building which is bound to reduce conflicts.

Pattern 3 introduced the idea that groups should “Make explicit norms and boundaries” in order to avoid any ambiguity about what a group is, how it works, what it finds acceptable and what it will not tolerate. It sounds simple, but ignoring this step can be perilous.

Pattern 4 addressed the inevitable challenge with the wise words “Keep talking about power”. Refreshingly, Rich recognises that power imbalances are inevitable, citing the public speakers from any group as those that naturally accumulate respect and hence power. The down to earth advice on this one is to make it explicit who has it and to take turns, rotating roles by stepping out and encouraging others to step in. Brilliant advice which might be hard for some egos to hear.

Suddenly I felt myself drifting off – it was gone 11am and I had only had one tiny cup of tea… But before I knew it the inimitable tag-team had switched places and Nati was getting every one up and stretching to boost the oxygen to our brains. The rooms burst into a relived revelry of smiles and stretches and then just as quickly we were back at work.

Pattern 5 “Make decisions asynchronously” is so simple it’s surprising that more groups don’t follow the rule: Meetings are great for bonding and building trust, computers are great for helping us make better decisions – which can be more inclusive and less invasive; timely but not hurried. This is exactly what Loomio was built for.

Pattern 6 address the elephant which lurks in every room by asking groups to “Agree how you use tech”. I’ve never seen it put so simply before and this was a little revelation to me; the vast proportion of tech tools can be split into what Rich refers to as the ‘holy trinity’ for group management: A tool for realtime communication (i.e. chat), a space for asynchronous comms (email or a forum etc) and, a space for static content (a wiki or doc management app). If you can clearly define and agree which tool/s you will be using for each of these three essential areas of group work, your team is bound to be more effective.

Pattern 7 proposed “Using rhythm to cut information overload” by providing clear and well planned times for team members to tell others what they are up to and to find out who needs support. The real gem is to set the right length and kind of rhythms for the right types of sharing i.e. by using quarterly reviews to get everyone out of the office and bonding again (by creating ‘peak oxytocin’ moments!) and shorter cycles for discussing more day-to-day, week-to-week plans, reviews and celebrations.

Pattern 8 encapsulates the overall ethos, that groups should “Generate new patterns together”. Rich and Loomio have clearly learned the value of iterative development, and the power of regular review and reflection. There is enormous strength in continuous participatory change.

For the rest of the workshop they split us out into groups in which we defined a challenge we were facing, worked out a “desired future” and “next steps” to get there together. Our group chose to focus on the process of “on-boarding” and the challenge of empowering everyone, especially newcomers to a group, with the “superpower of belonging”. The ideas we came up with were many and varied and largely inspired by the patterns above and others’ lived experiences. You can see the ideas in the “Next steps” section of our worksheet – hopefully some of them will be useful for you in your groups.

I’d like to send a huge THANK YOU out to Rich and Nati for making this event happen and for delivering such a well planned and designed workshop with such timely content. The more effective we can make decentralised teams the more positive change we will be able to deliver. I highly recommend their future workshops to others, which I am sure will help inspire anyone that attends.

 

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Civilisation trusted databases

It might help to think of blockchain as a distributed database, that nobody owns, and everybody trusts.

Then you think about all the trusted centralised databases that make society work today. I’m thinking basically anything to do with money: transactions, insurance, finance, the stockmarket… and lots of government functions too, like who can vote, tax, benefits, laws, citizenship…

So much of our identities, interactions, prohibitions and affordances are regulated by these trusted, centralised databases.

So people have a good reason to get excited about blockchain: we’ve figured out how to make a trusted database that is decentralised: nobody owns it. Surely this innovation is going to change a lot. The explosion of cryptocurrencies prove we can already print our own money, and we’re just getting started: probably we can write our own laws, hold our own elections, build new markets with new values… basically replace all the old slow corrupt institutions with shiny new ones we make ourselves… yes! all of that is exciting! But…

How can we decentralise power?

If you take a step back from the technology, if you look at the challenges we face in wider society, and you look at the history of social change, if you step back and just consider for a minute: “how can we decentralise power?”, then “build a better database” feels like a pretty weak answer. To me, it seems obvious that some of the most urgent power imbalances fall on gender, race, and class lines.

In the project of decentralising power, blockchain is mostly a red herring, distracting from the real work: dismantle patriarchy, make reparations for colonisation, end wage slavery. (ps. we have to kill fascism again too.)

I’m really excited about how decentralising technology is going to help decentralise power. My challenge to the blockchain entrepreneurs and the funders is simple: if you’re going to claim your project is decentralising power, please explain it to me in terms of justice, rather than just efficiency and disintermediation.

It’s fun to think about how technology can decentralise power at an epic scale. But if you get 10 people trying to work together, you’ll see how power really works.

If we can solve these human coordination problems at a small scale, then I’m much more hopeful that our large scale interventions will bend towards justice and equality. But if we can’t figure out how to share power at the scale of 10 or 100 people, I don’t have much hope that the cyber-institutions we build are going to be any more just or equitable than our existing ones.

Show me the #feminist #blockchain #startup and I'll stop being such a skeptic about how #blockchain will automatically #decentralise power.

— Richard D. Bartlett (@RichDecibels) May 31, 2016

What happens when we empower social movements with fintech?

If you’re working in decentralisation tech, please don’t get me wrong. I’m glad you’re working on these projects, and I don’t expect you to fix all the problems all at once. It’s exciting to imagine how much good could come from reinventing money, law, and citizenship. All I’m asking is, if you are serious about decentralising power, please make friends with some folks working on decolonisation, workers rights, feminism, or other social movements, and see what you can learn from each other. Imagine if #Occupy or #IdleNoMore or #BlackLivesMatter or #WomensMarch graduated from a social movement to an economic movement.

Decentralisation tech projects that are designed to decentralise power

In this public Facebook post I put out a call, asking for pointers to any decentralisation projects that are explicitly justice-oriented or commons-oriented. Here’s the list I’ve gathered so far, please suggest additions:

• faircoin: cryptocurrency w/ cooperative, social justice, democratic, ecological ethics
• osm-p2p: mapping tools supporting indigenous resistance to extractive industry
• scuttlebutt.nz: gossip platform w/ great community
• economic space agency: for commons-oriented decentralised programmed organisations
• social.coop: democratically governed microblogging
• redecentralize.org: community + app directory
• duniter: cryptocurrency with built-in Basic Income

Thanks to the P2P Foundation Wiki for tracking projects like this 

p.s. If you want to encourage me to keep writing: please recommend this story, and if you’re able, give me dollars on Patreon or Bitcoins on 1G6ab4aiYA42zauY4jBJDWY6xz64CepKrE 
p.p.s. This story is in the public domain: you can do what you like with it. Different formats are available on my website.

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Originally posted by Loomio.

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Loomio is a fascinating project. The web and the internet have fundamentally altered how people around the globe network and share information, but up until now these technologies have not much changed how people make democratic decisions together. Loomio is a new online tool that aims to fill that gap.

Loomio was created by a group of Occupy activists, social entrepreneurs, and software developers who met at Enspiral. Their aim was to create an open-source tool that would allow disparate networks of people to communicate, and then to turn that communication into radically democratic plans for action.

As such, Loomio might be an interesting tool for worker-owned start-ups who need an online space to communicate and to make decisions, but Loomio is also of interest because it is being developed by a group that is itself a worker-owned start-up, one that is structured as a radically democratic, horizontal cooperative.

To learn more about this cooperative and how they organize themselves, I spoke on the phone to Rich Bartlett, one of the founders.

Tim: So the first question I have is about capital. Raising capital is one of the central problems for new worker cooperatives. You’ve raised capital for your business in a number of innovative ways. In the beginning you held two successful crowd funding campaigns and then more recently you raised half a million dollars from investors using redeemable preference shares.

Rich: Yes, that’s right.

Tim: I’m specifically interested in that second financing instrument. Could you explain a little bit about how these shares work and maybe talk a bit about the risks involved in this type of financing with respect to preserving worker ownership and control, and also how you try to mitigate those risks?

Rich: Sure. It’s one of the most important questions, right. The way that we have approached the capital question is in keeping with the way we’ve approached every question about how we structure ourselves and our business model. Being the kind of personalities that we are, we have a reflex to reject everything that already exists, and then to start from a blank slate, to ask: if we could do everything with a pure commitment to our ethics, how do we do it? Then we go on a research journey and try and balance our idealism with some pragmatism and come up with something reasonable.

That process last year landed us on the redeemable preference shares, which I had  never heard of ? I don’t know much about investment ? but when I actually got talking with people, it turns out they’re not so rare. They have a long history and people were more or less familiar with them. Obviously, they’re not super common in the start-up financing world, but in co-ops they are. I’m not an expert, but as I understand it, here is a handful of people who have invested in us, in a social mission that they care about deeply, and in a group of people that they trust to be credible, a group of people with a track record that makes them think that we’ve got some shot of delivering social impact in future.

In mechanical terms, it’s basically a very generous loan, a loan on very generous terms. There’s no trading of investment for governance rights, so the governance is still 100% with the workers, and the risk remains with the investors. If we default for some reason, then the risk is on them. It’s extraordinarily generous. As for the risk of losing ownership, losing worker control, this is a relatively small financing round as far as they go. To some members, I think it’s probably a ‘getting to know you’ kind of loan. The investors might be up for some more in the future, but I would expect that they would only be up for more if they can have more of a stake in the governance. We’ll design that relationship according to our principles and balancing idealism and pragmatism when we get to that. We’ve got a constitution that is pretty explicit about putting our social mission ahead of any other kind of mission, so we feel pretty confident about that.

The other component is that the product we’re building lives in the commons, so it’s open-source software. The decision to put the software in the commons really says, “look if at any point in the future the community feels that we’re not doing an effective job of stewarding this product, then anyone else can just take it, fork the code and do their own version.” This creates quite a strong incentive on us to maintain our ethics.

I can certainly imagine at some point in the future that we might do a different kind of investment or we might change the terms in some way that gives the investors a seat at the board or a role in some other kinds of decision making spaces. We will just have to design that in a way that is in alignment with our principles. It is a never ending challenge of being an enterprise that puts social impact over financial impact. You’ve just got to continuously be evaluating the impact you are having in the world and the resources you need to get there and try to make your best judgement calls about designing systems that work for you and still make progress every day.

Tim: Excellent. I think it would be worth it at this stage asking a second question, and that is, from the beginning, your business has had a radically horizontal structure based on direct democracy and consensus. Could you talk a little bit about the benefits first of this type of organisational structure and also about the challenges this structure presents and how do you work with those challenges?

Rich: The benefit would be … it’s a long list. Because we have a central organising principle that no one can tell anyone else what to do, we’ve excluded force from the equation. That creates a fundamental shift in what the organisation looks like in practice and it’s quite a big thing. It’s hard to just summarise into a bullet point, list of five benefits or something like that. When you exclude force you immediately get to the question of what do people want to do and why do they want to do it and how do we align what we each want to do into something that’s actually more or less coherent, and productive and progressive? As far as I know the only way to do that is for the individuals involved to actually care about each other. So our organisation sort of requires people to care about each other in a way.

I mean there’s a real emphasis on care and it’s just a lovely place to be. It’s tremendous for us to be in an environment where everyone really cares about each other, where your feelings are legitimate information that is taken into consideration in decisions. Compared to any other job I’ve ever had, it has fundamentally changed my quality of life to go to a place where I’m expected to feel fairly good most days. In previous jobs the expectation was that work sucks but that’s why they pay you for it: a trade-off that me and most of my friends were not happy with but we just sort of conceded that’s just what work’s like. But to be in a place where you’re deeply engaged with the work and deeply engaged with each other and doing it due to intrinsic motivation, not extrinsic motivation, doing it because you believe in the outcome and you’re surrounded by people that you trust, actively working for your goals, that is really an incredible work environment. It’s quite remarkable and I attribute much of that to the decision that we’re going to organise without force.

I think ? and this is a hypothesis ? but I think that in the long run it’s also a more resilient and a more innovative way to work. When you include the widest perspectives in your decision making, you tend to develop decisions that are better than the decisions any individual could develop their own. That’s the core hypothesis that we at Loomio are testing. Right now I can report that it feels really good! In the long run, we’ll see whether it actually delivers results. It seems like it delivers results just in terms of the amount of the impact that we’ve had compared to the resources that we’ve put into it. Because people are so engaged, they really give an awful lot more than the meagre wages would account for, because they’re engaged with each other and engage with a mission that they actually believe in.

It gives us a kind of resilience as well that’s been quite remarkable. This kind of work of starting a cooperative it’s stressful and difficult like starting any business is stressful. We’ve had times where say one of our key people had said, “Look I need a little rest; this is too much.” Because we’ve got quite a high degree of overlap between the different kinds of work people are doing, we can handle it when someone says, “I need a rest.” We can rearrange and cover it. Sure there is some specialisation and there are some people that would be harder to replace than others, but no one is completely irreplaceable because we’ve got an emphasis on distributing power and influence around which means we’re distributing context around and distributing relationships around. Not endlessly, but there’s always a couple of people that know more or less what needs doing in any job. That gives us a kind of long-term resilience that I hope will pay off. It’s early days for us but I think it will pay off in the long haul.

As for the challenges then … man! It’s incredibly challenging because for one thing we’re inventing everything from scratch. I mean, we do our research and try and not reinvent the wheel, but the process of bringing, well now it’s 13 people along for the ride of: “Okay what would a good investment structure be or what’s our conflict resolution process going to be?” All that sort of stuff. We have systems to delegate work out to different small working groups, so we don’t have to get full consensus every step of the way. We’re quite fluid and dynamic in that regard. But still it’s a lot of work. You spend a lot of time in communicating and then synthesizing diverse inputs and hopefully in the process coming out with stronger outputs but still the work of synthesizing is complex. It requires emotional intelligence and I’d say probably political nous.

In any organisation, regardless of the structure, you’ve got those kinds of challenges: How do we structure ourselves? What policy makes sense? What strategic decision? That’s always difficult. But it’s definitely made more difficult because our structure is less common. Consider the ludicrous start-ups in the United States that get funding at the drop of a hat. If you’re willing to structure yourself along traditional corporate lines and fund yourself with traditional venture capital funding, there are doors that open a lot more rapidly than if you choose to do things like: “Well we’re not a charity but we’re not a traditional profit-maximising company either. And, ah yea, by the way, the thing that we’re building: that lives in the commons, and oh yes, we live in New Zealand… Yes, we’ve got a pretty much iron-clad commitment to ethics over everything else.” It really does make it harder than if we were willing to play it by the traditional set of rules.

But it’s not really a choice for us. If it weren’t for these ethics, we wouldn’t be doing it. It’s just a reflection of who we are. So it’s a huge challenge but it’s also so rewarding. The sense of solidarity is it’s unparalleled. I’ve had a little bit, not a lot, but a little bit of experience with different activist groups and the solidarity there is pretty amazing. When I was participating in the Occupy movement, that was my first taste of solidarity, where I was part of this collective identity called Occupy, and then I saw these people on the other side of the world that shared that identity, and then their struggles were my struggles. When I saw them getting beaten by the cops that affected me in my guts. It was like, “OK, this is what solidarity feels like.”

It was a tremendous experience, but it expired. That collective identity expired. With other activists projects that I’ve been involved with, the community so often expires because it’s up against such a huge foe and it’s always coming out of people’s volunteer time and surplus energy and what they can manage to squirrel away from the boss or whoever. So people are forever burning out because you’re relying on people volunteering. So to have an enterprise that is on track to sustainability means that we get that sense of solidarity in participating in activist project that is mission driven. We keep getting to do that day after day after day. That sense of solidarity is deepening to an extraordinary degree, that I know that these people deeply care for me and can turn that care into really practical support when I need it.

Tim: Excellent Rich, that was really inspiring answer and we’ve spoken for about 20 minutes. If it’s okay I’d rather keep the interview relatively short and on those points that you raised. But I wanted to also ask, before we end, if you have anything else you wanted to add or if there was a question that I should have asked that I didn’t ask, that you wanted to answer.

Rich: The question that’s on my mind at the moment, is about scales: so Loomio was one co-op that is a member of a collective of companies called Enspiral. There’s about a dozen different companies that are siblings and we are mostly based in New Zealand and we’re now exploring how to scale out across the rest of the world. One of the tracks we’re exploring that seems most promising is not for us to expand our collective identity globally but actually to just make good friends with the others, to find others and connect with them.

I guess really a simple question is: I’m really interested to hear what’s happening in your hemisphere that you’re finding it exciting or that’s got some promise or is worth connecting with. I’m on a mission at the moment of connecting with all the interesting people that are trying to invent this new economy and supporting each other to do so.

Tim: Maybe it’s a question for readers of this blog, is that fair?

Rich: Yes. My sense is that we’re trying to do something very challenging, to invent an economy that’s based on ethics. One of the ways that we can increase the likelihood of success is by supporting each other’s work. We’re all so busy doing our thing that it’s hard to get our heads up sometimes and pay attention to what else is happening. So I’ve just in the last couple of months sort of opened my ears a little bit to hear what else is going on. So yes, a question for people reading the blog is a great idea.

Tim: Excellent. Rich, thank you so much for taking this time to talk to me.

Rich: It’s a real pleasure.

For more information on Loomio, see:

Loomio.org

Wired: Out in the Open: Occupy Wall Street Reincarnated as Open Source Software

How a Worker-Owned Tech Startup Found Investors—and Kept Its Values

The post Richard D. Bartlett on financing worker coops and organizing without hierarchy appeared first on P2P Foundation.