Sep 1, 2015: I was recently invited to talk with the Lifehack Flourishing Fellows, who are starting projects to improve the wellbeing of young people in Aotearoa.

Since co-founding Loomio a couple years ago, I receive these invitations fairly regularly, to talk with uni students or activists or start-uppers or social entrepreneurs about starting a project and holding it together long enough to make some positive social impact.

Regardless of the audience, I’ve noticed my advice basically comes down to the same three points. I’ve also noticed they are all really hard!

Here’s a little snippet from the recording of the talk, explaining what I mean by “prioritising the vibe”:

Full video

Here’s the full talk (20min + Q&A) along with a transcription for those who prefer reading to listening. It draws on a lot of the material in my recent blog post about caring organisations, but filled out with lots more personal anecdotes.

Transcript

I was born and raised in the Wairarapa, and then moved over here for high school and have been here ever since.

I live in a really amazing house in Newtown, a big pink house there. It’s a house, but it’s also a community.

I used to stay at Garrett St, which is a house that Mark and Sophie lived in, and that’s the same thing: a community of people that are trying to do something more than just live.

Like Gina said, I’m involved with Loomio, I’m one of the cofounders of Loomio and a member at Enspiral. I’m involved with an arts collective called Concerned Citizens that runs a community space in Tory St…

All of these groups of people are all action-based groups that are trying to do something.

My identity is in the composition of all those groups.

The reason I’m working on Loomio is because there’s something about that group identity thing, and having multiple groups, for me that’s where I get my strength from and my confidence. The reason I have an ability to get up in the morning and do stuff is because I’m held by these groups. The work I’m doing is trying to help people find their group, start their group, do their group thing.

So yeah, the three hard steps:

Number 1 is: find something worth holding on to and hold on to it. For me the way to hold on to it is to write it down. When you write it down you actually have to force the words out, and show those words to other people, and see what they think. There’s a lot of fun and hard work involved in that.

Number 2 is: do everything with fun and love and colour and cups of tea. I call that prioritising the vibe. That means it should feel good when you’re doing it.

Number 3 is: hold on to the first thing that you wrote down, and throw everything else out every single day. It’s about trying everything.

I’ll run through each of those steps in a bit of detail.

The first one: finding something worth holding on to. It takes a long time.

From what I know about Lifehack, a lot of people that come to Lifehack are looking for their thing to hold on to. They know they haven’t found it yet and they’re like, ‘it seems like maybe somewhere down this way there’s maybe my thing to hold on to?’

For me, like I said, I moved over here for high school. Got to the end of high school and I went to the careers advisor and she said to me, ‘what are you good at?’ and I said, ‘maths and science’. So she said, ‘you should go study engineering’, so I said OK and then I went to university and I studied engineering. Then four years later I graduated engineering school with an engineering degree.

It was 2008 when I graduated. That was just when the global economy went nuts and there were no jobs available, especially in engineering in New Zealand. So suddenly I was out into the world, without school, without uni, without a job, without a boss or really anybody telling me what to do.

For the first time I had to stop and think, like, ‘what do I want to do?’

It was a bit weird waiting until I was 24 to ask myself that question, but I got there in the end.

When I’m invited to talk at universities, I’m like, ‘If there’s one thing you do at university, it’s figure out what you’re into. Don’t worry about the grades and stuff like that, that’s totally irrelevant. I got great grades in a degree I don’t care about that has no value to me.’

I didn’t figure out what I was into until after I left.

When I left I was sitting there with time on my hands (that’s the great thing about being on the dole is that you have as much time as you need). Somehow it finally clicked, like: ‘I’m a musician, and I know how to make electronics, maybe I could make electronics for musicians!’

Total lightbulb moment, a flash of the blinding obvious. I just wish that somebody had prompted me to think about that four years sooner, but so it goes.

So I got started making weird noise machines for weirdos that like weird noise machines.

I was really surprised to find that other people really got a kick out of the stuff that I was making. I’d build something, put it online, and then someone would see it and be like, ‘that’s awesome, can I buy it?’ and I’d be like, ‘huh? okay…’

So then I started making a whole bunch of these random weird machines. Eventually these quite awesome musicians would come to me and say, ‘hey can you ____?’ They were trying to commission me to make stuff for them. I got into building crazy machines for people to use on stage. I was working with Riki Gooch and he was like, ‘I’m on stage with a lot of electronic equipment and it looks so lame to be here with my knobs and buttons, I want something that’s more theatrical’. So I made him a device that picks up his arm movements and translates that into his computer.

That’s awesome work. What totally awesome work. It’s a real buzz doing that kind of stuff, to facilitate someone else’s dream and work on my skills. That was really awesome.

From that I got into teaching people about electronics as well.

It’s one of those subjects that is really hard for people to get into, but it shouldn’t be because it’s actually really easy, they just teach it the wrong way. It’s kinda like maths, they make it sound hard but it’s not. They just teach you all the dumb stuff you don’t need to know and divorce it from your real life.

I was teaching because it is fun to show people like, hey these things are electrons and you can play with them! Electrons are awesome! Electrons are your friend (apart from if you have too many of them)!

That was fun. I was having fun. I wasn’t really making enough money to live on. I was kinda scraping by, but something in me still wasn’t full. It was good fun stuff to work on but it didn’t really… I was like, ‘do I really want to spend my whole life making products? Do we need more electronic junk in the world?’

It wasn’t quite there. It was awesome, it was motivating, and people liked it, but it just wasn’t quite the whole thing.

Then I met Ben.

Ben’s another person from Garrett Street with these folk. Meeting Ben was a moment where my life turned a bit of a corner. He’s just universally positive about everything. Everytime I see him he’s like, “I just met the most amazing person!” and I’m like, “you mean you just met a person?”

He’s just set with this really high default for everything, it’s really awesome to be around. It kinda rubbed off on me, I pay more attention now to positive stuff when I used to be real cynical and dark all the time.

Him and his partner Hannah and a bunch of others got involved with this thing called the Concerned Citizens, which is an arts collective that was putting on creative events that have some kind of social benefit.

Like, we’d host an art exhibition, raise a bunch of money, and give it to Women’s Refuge or something like that. A really simple format but it was my first taste that there’s something beyond just me and my weird interests, there’s a whole world out there and I can combine my interests with doing some positive impact.

That was really fun. That was hosting events, that was the work. From that I met so many people that were sorta on the same wavelength, like trying to do something good in the world.

From there, we hopped on down to — when Occupy Wall Street arrived in Wellington — Ben and Hannah and Jon and I and a bunch of others, we got involved with Occupy.

Occupy was my first experience of, practically, sitting in a circle with people. I don’t think I had ever done that before. It’s really basic right? It’s a good thing to practice, sitting in a circle.

Not just sitting, but talking to each other. Doing that kind of talking where one person speaks and everyone else listens, and when they’re finished it’s the next person’s turn to talk. One person speaks and everyone listens. I’d never been exposed to that before.

Out of that conversation, not just talking for the sake of it, actually trying to make decisions. Trying to get somewhere.

There are a bunch of people that have for some reason decided to live in the middle of the city for a couple of months, how are we going to operate? How are we going to feed people? How are we going to come up with shelter — our crappy $40 tent from the Warehouse doesn’t actually work for more than 2 weeks when you’re parked up in Civic Square.

We had to make all kinds of decisions together about how to structure our little community and we took it for granted, it was there before I arrived, that there was no boss. No one is in charge, were going to figure it out together. We figured it out by sitting in circles in talking it out until it was done.

There was a minor dash of tikanga to make that work. We had hand signals: ‘I agree with what you’re saying’, ‘no I don’t’, or ‘hell no I don’t’.

That process was the first time I’d seen that happen and participating in that. I said meeting Ben was a little corner in my life, this was like a full U-turn. It totally redirected the course of events for me. It just reset my understanding of what individuals are capable of and what groups are capable of.

Prior to that I’d just seen decisions being made by someone in charge saying ‘Right, you do this, go do that, do that…’ and everyone in the background kinda grumbling like, ‘this sucks, that person doesn’t know what they’re talking about…’

To see people just figure it out together, creating a space where everyone’s voice is actually valuable, noticing that

when you throw in everyone’s voice you can come up with something better than any individual would have had on their own.

…that was totally mindblowing for me.

At the same time as that was awesome and massively inspiring, it was also so frustrating to have to sit in a room — or not even in a room because we were out in Civic Square — to sit around outside in the cold for four or five hours, trying to make a decision sometimes. Sometimes there’s some real complex stuff you’ve got to work through. I felt like this isn’t realistic, like, no one’s going to do this, people have jobs and kids…

So we were stuck with this question, how do we share this experience and make it fit in the modern world we live in? Another flash of the obvious: we should put it on the internet! Make it so that people can have that experience where they can talk to each other, respect the different kinds of opinions and different perspectives and try to develop consensus together, without having to be in the same room at the same time. They can just participate in their own time.

With that idea, we were introduced to Enspiral. We didn’t know what Enspiral was, I still don’t really and it’s been three and a half years. Someone told me they like technology and they want to make the world better and I thought, ‘yep, sounds like us.’

We went to them, “hey, we’ve got this idea: we want to do the Occupy decision thing, but on the internet. Can you build that for us?”

They said, “No. But it’s a good idea, we love the idea and we want that too,” because Enspiral is a big group of people that doesn’t have a boss as well and they wanted to make decisions online too. They’re like, “we’re not going to build it for you, but we’ll help. You build it. You’re going to have to figure out how to build it, but we’ll help you.”

So they gave us some space and connections, they just kept throwing people at us all the time, a consistent stream of people, like Chelsea. Over time, the idea and the space and the people, they stuck. What they stuck around was the purpose. That’s why my Step One is write something down, figure out what your purpose is. That’s the thing that we stuck to.

In the last three and a half years of working on this software, now ninety thousand something people have used it in a hundred countries in thirty-two languages. So many decisions have been made along the way, to navigate to get to that point, and all the way through, when you get to a hard decision, we just look at what we wrote down in our purpose: why are we here? Then all the decisions make themselves, when you go back to ‘why are we here?’

You’ll find it’s the guiding light, it’s the navigator. We don’t need a boss, we got a purpose.

said these are hard steps. Finding your purpose is super hard. I notice that my purpose actually keeps evolving all the time and I have to keep checking in on it: what am I doing now? what am I doing now?

It’s number one for a reason, it’s the most important thing.

Point number two. Step number two. Do everything with fun and love and colour and cups of tea. I’m a big believer in cups of tea. The whole thing for me, I call it prioritising the vibe.

The thing about the vibe, when I walked in, well before I even walked in actually, when I got off my bike at the gate, and started walking up the hill I thought, ‘hmmm, this place has got some vibe’, y’know.

And then you come around the corner and you can see this incredible building and you’re like, “Wow, that building has got some vibe! There’s some real vibe in there.” This is DIY fortress architecture and I love it.

Then I stepped in the door and I could see — I was a bit early, people were still in there working — and I could see there’s some vibe getting cooked. Everyone’s putting their thing in the room.

It’s such a privilege to have that experience. It’s awesome that Lifehack can host that kind of experience for people. The Lifehack crew, I couldn’t imagine a better crew to be cultivating that vibe for people. You know it right: it feels good. In your tummy, it feels good to be here. You can keep that good feeling, pretty much all the time, if you pay attention to it.

You have to pay attention to your tummy. I’ve got my head brain, my heart brain, and my tummy brain, and the tummy brain tells me when the vibe is right.

What that actually means in practice: it means that,

In our workplace, we respect feelings. Feelings are legitimate information.

Emotions for me, they’re like, they’re just inarticulate expression. Your emotion is trying to tell you something, and maybe you haven’t got an awesome way to say it yet, but it’s like “arggh I’m real stressed out about something!”

It’s really critical information, if you’re trying to work together as a group to achieve something, you need to have that information in the room with you. You can’t pretend that it’s not there. In a lot of workplaces you try to pretend like:

“I haven’t got feelings. I left them at home!
I’m at work now and I have my special uniform on that says No Feelings.”

We’ve said, nah, we’re having your feelings. Please bring your feelings, all your feelings are welcome here. We’re going to do what we can to make space for them.

It’s real simple stuff. You will have already practiced it here I’m sure: just sitting in a circle and hearing from everyone. It doesn’t have to be major, it doesn’t have to be an amazing speech or anything. Just hearing people’s voices. Hearing the quality of the voice, oh there’s a little shake: this person is nervous, they’re anxious…

It gives you so much information to just hear each person one by one by one.

Little practices like that, really simple stuff that allow people to arrive fully, and allows you to have full context about what they’re doing.

We do that all the time. Any meeting at Loomio, whether we’re talking about the business model or the capital raising or the software development, we’ll start with a check-in.

It’s really important, if someone’s got some strong feelings, you need to know about that. If it’s like, ‘my dog got run over’, that’s still relevant information, maybe you should take the day off! If it’s like, ‘I’m actually feeling really anxious about the cashflow’, that’s really important feelings to bring in, because then we can fix the cashflow.

We’ve seen it happen over and over again at Loomio. It’ll be just a mundane regular meeting, we start by hearing from people, and someone will say something… they can’t put their finger on it, “I just feel a bit uneasy. Don’t know what it is. Don’t worry about me, I think I’m having a weird day or something.”

Then they’ll sit back and the next person will be like, “I’m the same, yep, yep. Kinda anxious, kinda, doesn’t feel real good. Vibe’s not right.”

Then they sit back and the next person will be like, “I’ve actually been thinking,” they might have a bit more detail, like, “that strategy that we signed on to two months ago, it was awesome at the time, but I’m starting to really question it. It doesn’t seem right.”

As we go around the circle, by the time you get to the end of the circle you realise that work we did where we planned out where we’re going, that was wrong. No one feels good about it. We’re only doing it because everyone else thinks that everyone else thinks it’s a good idea.

By having space for people to be inarticulate, and not be awesome and make a really compelling argument, you get to the heart of the matter real quickly. You don’t have to wait til you get to the end of that plan and realise it was a dumb plan. You can just say “this doesn’t feel right.”

We respect the tummy brain as well as the heart brain and the head brain. They’re all good brains.

Then number three, the third hard step: hold on to that first thing, the one that you wrote down, and throw everything else out all the time. Keep throwing it out, keep throwing it out, keep throwing it out.

Because…

Most of your ideas are not very good. I’m really sorry about that. Same with mine, most of my ideas are not very good either.

In software development land, we’re lucky because we’ve got users. Like I said, there’s ninety something thousand people using the software, so we don’t have to worry about what our ideas are, we just listen to their ideas. When they say, ‘we need this’, then we say ‘ok we’ll make that.’

We’ve got all kinds of process and structure around how we “try everything.” We want to try lots of different stuff, we want to hold on to our purpose and throw everything else out and try and try and try and try. You need some kind of system.

There’s 17 people in co-op now, and if you have 17 people all trying different things it doesn’t work, you need to be systematic. We’ve got a lot of different containers, like, “For this three month period, we’re looking at this area, this is what we’re trying. This week, we’re going to try this part of this problem.”

We break it down and say, we’re going to look at this part. We try to hold loose to our own ideas, to our hypotheses. It’s like, I’ve got a hypothesis, how am I going to test it?

It’s funny, when you say, “I’m just testing this idea out”, somehow it frees you up. It makes it easy. You don’t have to be arguing your case and saying “this is what we need to do”. Instead it’s like, “I think this, this is my reasoning, and this is how I’m going to test it to prove whether or not it is a good idea.”

That’s an easy way to get a group of people to think together and learn together and point in the same direction together. Quite often, different people are going to have different opinions. So you can design the experiment together: okay I don’t agree with your hypothesis, this is how I’m going to disprove it. That’s fine, that’s really productive.

The way that we can hold that kind of space for that productive tension, is because we prioritised the vibe. That means everyone is quite capable of communicating to each other, and holding a different opinion.

It’s ok that your perspective is different from mine, which is different from yours, and different from yours and yours. It’s ok, we’ve all got a different one. We can hold them together.

We have this baseline, we’ve got our purpose. All of our feet are like old roots of a tree grown into that purpose. We’re like an old married couple of 17 people. They’re all grown together. We’re all playing footsies under the table, we can be disagreeing with each other up here, but down there we’re all knitted together, because that’s the thing that pulled us together in the first place.

So those are the three hard steps to do anything.

Q&A

[Question] How do you define your purpose now?

[Rich:] That’s actually going through a little process at the moment, but the one that we agreed to, that’s on the wall is ‘we’re here to make a world where it’s easy for anyone to participate in decisions that affect them.’

Each of those words means a lot to me. ‘Easy’, ‘anyone’, ‘participate’, ‘affect’: there’s so much work under all of those words.

It took a crazy amount of work to get those words agreed. Lots of different workshops…

I shared my story about how I came to my purpose. Then you’ve got all these other people, with their own totally different story. To find words that you can find the overlap between everyone’s core motivation comes from, that’s hard work and you’ve got to prioritise it. It takes a lot of time.

I think in the first stages of a new collaborative project, you can kinda get away with it, without having it written down, without being too specific. You’ve got enthusiasm and lots of vibe and that will get you through, but before the enthusiasm runs out you’ve got to write something down.

So what happens when the vision is set by 6 people and then it keeps growing?

[Chelsea] I can share because I was one of the not-6. I was probably #8 or #10. It was largely an experience of walking into the room, reading the wall, and going ‘cool, I’m home.’

So you buy into the vision that’s been set?

I guess every single person that’s shown up since, has gone on their own journey to realise the same thing, and then they’re like, ‘oh those are the words, yep.’

[Rich] It wasn’t like 6 people went away and wrote it down as well. It’s the product of a lot of conversations with a lot of people.

Can you talk about the stewardship model?

[Rich] Sure, yeah. I’m glad you asked, because I had a note to say that and I didn’t.

One of the things about the vibe is that we pay attention to how everyone’s feeling. We make it our job to make sure people are feeling as good we can make them feel. Sometimes there’s shit going on that you can’t fix, but…

Because we don’t have a boss, sometimes that can get tricky, not having a boss. A boss is a really good person to turn to if you’re having a hard time, “Boss, I need some time off. My dog ran over my girlfriend.”

So we haven’t got a boss and instead we have this thing called stewards. Up until recently, Chelsea was my steward, I was Alanna’s steward, Alanna was MJ’s steward, and it goes round in a circle. So if I have an issue, I can go to Chelsea and be like, “Chels, I’m freaking out!”

Or, more frequently actually, if some kind of conflict comes up, because that happens all the time, people have productive conflict. It can get a bit sticky, like I don’t want just you and me to nut this out, I want some support. So Chelsea would be the one that would come in and support me. Her job is just to support. She doesn’t have an opinion about the argument, she’s just there to make sure I’m ok.

That’s awesome. It’s really awesome to have that there and it’s awesome to be that for someone else as well.

As far as organisational structure stuff goes, that’s the number one for me.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been involved with some really hard work. We had a pot of money and we had to split it up between a bunch of people. There’s more people with claims on the money than there is money to go around. It was me and two others that were in charge of deciding where the money should go. Because there were more claims than there was money, that meant some of them were going to get disappointed. It meant I had to push back on people a little bit.

In the work over that two weeks, I realised that I’m not prepared to push back on someone, unless I know that they’ve got someone behind them, catching them. My first job for the first of the two weeks was to make sure everyone had someone standing behind them, and then it’s like, ok, now it is time to push.

We pushed, and we got to a place. At the end of it, everyone goes “this is a good result, we all agree with the process, yes I’m personally disappointed but I’m also personally supported.” Instead of it being like, some boss turning up and being like, here’s the decision, go deal with the feelings. We made sure the feelings were looked after first.

What’s your views on the size of a group that all these things can work with?

There’s a lot of people will tell you a lot of different things about group size. So far I haven’t developed a strong opinion about any of them, other than that I don’t trust any of them that are like ’15 is exactly the number!’

What ever processes you use, totally have to be context-specific. You have to realise what size group you’re working in. The difference between collaborating with 7 people and 9 people is totally different. Totally different.

That’s why there’s no recipe that you can just get online, like, how to run a group of 7 people. It’s so context-dependent.

That’s why we prioritise the vibe. Pay attention, is this working? No it’s not, so let’s change it.

Our structure and our processes have changed so many times. It makes it really hard when someone turns up for the first time, like ‘what the?’

It’s kinda why Enspiral is so hard to explain as well, because it’s changing so much all the time, but it’s changing because it’s growing. Adapting to the position that it’s in.

Have you ever lost the vibe?

The vibe comes and goes, right.

We just had this workshop on Wednesday, about stress and stuff like that. There was a comment that really highlighted for me how that works.

Like I said, in the last two weeks I was doing this really hard work. I was super stressed, I lost the vibe, hard-out. I was dark, wasn’t sleeping properly, like, “there’s too much expectation on me, I can’t carry this, it’s too much.” Just really exhausted, “why should I have to deal with all this crap”. I was losing it, like:

“I’m not the one for this job, I’m just making it up, we need a professional!”

The way that the vibe got saved was that my colleague Ben was like, “Rich you look stressed, do you want to go have a drink?” Just the offer, for starters, that was half the problem was fixed because someone else has noticed, there’s someone looking after me.

Yeah, each of us loses the vibe all the time, that’s why you have a group. They look after you like, ‘hey I think you need a few days off’, or, ‘let’s go climb a tree’, or whatever you need.

As we’ve gone through this, over all this time, I’ve got a pretty comprehensive diary in my head of everyone’s stress triggers, how they respond when they’re stressed, and what to do to intervene. You build up that catalogue in your head, when you get to know people in a deep way.

I know that when I’m stressed, I’ll try to take over. Do things my way because it’s a lot easier than trying to negotiate. When Ben’s stressed, he gets into a state where he can’t make decisions. So when I see Ben being stressed, I’ll go work with him and we’ll make the decisions together. I can go round the whole 17 people and tell you what the recipe is. We’ve just learnt that by paying attention to each other.

The post How to do anything in 3 hard steps: sustaining a project with purpose, care, and humility 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.

Excerpt:

“I’ve always had an ideological critique about Facebook; the privatization of profit, and the socialization of all the effort, the value exchange there is really off, and I think that there’s major abuses of power. I think there’s lots of things that I don’t like about the Facebook business model. But, sort of around that Occupy time, I made a commitment like – look, it’s really popular to hate Facebook, and with people with my sort of values, we’re all proud of saying how Facebook sucks, and we’re so much cooler than that. But, I made a commitment to be, like, look, almost everyone that I know, all of my friends are here, and – if you’re at a party and all your friends are there, and you’re having a bad party, that’s kind of your own fault. If everyone’s there, then surely we can do something fun, and creative, and constructive with it. So, I really put a lot of effort into it, for a few years, trying to create a positive experience on Facebook. And it’s quite strange but I would actually have quite a few people mention to me, in person, they’d say, “Rich, I really appreciate what you’re doing on Facebook.” They’d give me this strange compliment, that I’m hosting kinds of conversations and bringing insight and drawing in sources of news that no one else is paying attention to, and so on – and quite intentionally doing it.

And then, it was January (of this year). We were really starting to pay attention to the abuses of Facebook, where it’s not just about ad selling, it’s now about vote selling…where the algorithms have really made a significant impact on the way that our democracies are functioning. And that, to me, was just a bridge too far. I felt like, instead of what I was trying to create – a bubble of positivity within this kind of shopping mall – I just crossed the line. I said, look, I feel like I’m actually propping up a really toxic and abusive place. So, I pulled out. I’ll come in and comment from time to time, but I’ve just stopped posting altogether. Which was a major shift for me, I was putting a lot of energy in there for a long time…but more and more, my energy is going into Scuttlebutt, because it’s constructive.”

Rich’s personal site: richdecibels.com/
The Hum: www.thehum.org/
Thread on Reinventing Organisations: www.facebook.com/stephenreid321/posts/2175422099199363

My personal site: stephenreid.net
Follow me on Facebook: facebook.com/stephenreid321

Photo by RAVEfinity

The post Podcast of the day: Rich Decibels on Teal, Scuttlebutt and Solarpunk appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In the lead up to the Open Coop 2018 conference, Richard Bartlett and Natalia Lombardo (Loomio, Enspiral, the Hum) will join me in hosting an action-oriented workshop on Commonspoly at Newspeak House, London.

Commonspoly is a hacked version and critique of the game Monopoly, where the goals are to first re-municipalize private goods and then turn them into Commons. Rather than compete against each other, players must overcome ingrained training and ‘rational’, self-interest maximizing behaviours and instead learn how to cooperate to create a commons-oriented locality. It’s also great fun to play and a good challenge.

We’ll be playing with several boards simultaneously, which will make for a lively game. Apart from enjoying a fun and thought-provoking board game, we’ll also be chatting about commoning, radical politics, collaboration and much more in the context of the game.

The workshop is free but places are limited!

Please sign up by simply commenting on this post or writing to contactATp2pfoundation.net.

It will be held on Sunday the 22nd of July at 1:30 PM at:

Newspeak House, 133 Bethnal Green Rd, London E2 7DG, UK.

Also at Newspeak house: Join Richard and Natalia the previous day (Saturday July 21st) for a Masterclass on Decentralized Organizing.

Want to learn more? Watch the video or read the text below, reposted from Commonpoly’s website:

About Commonspoly

Hi there, we hope you had a safe journey, welcome to Commonspoly’s utopia!

Commonspoly is a free licensed board game that was created to reflect on the possibilities and limits of the commons as a critical discourse towards relevant changes in society, but to do it playfully. This game is an ideal device to introduce commons theories to groups in a pedagogical and enjoyable way. But it’s also great for boring, rainy afternoons!

And another thing, Commonspoly is an attempt to repair a misunderstanding that has lasted for more than a century. Back in 1904 Elizabeth Magie patented The Landlord’s Game: a board game to warn about, and hopefully prevent, the dangerous effects of monopolism. Years later she sold the patent to Parker Brothers, who turned the game into the Monopoly we know today: a game that celebrates huge economic accumulation and the bankruptcy of anyone but you.

Commonspoly turns the basic features of the traditional game upside down in an effort to imagine a possible world based on cooperation instead of competition. But is it possible to play a board game where the players have to find ways to work together, not beat each other? Well, the cycles between financial crises are shortening, global unemployment rates are skyrocketing, ice caps are melting, and we all have that hard-to-explain, creepy feeling… In this game, it’s a race against time and every player’s help is more than welcome! It’s not all bad news – we have some powerful, community-based tools to use in this struggle against the apocalypse. Let’s get down to business: we have urban, environmental, health and knowledge-based common goods to preserve!

We are working on a new version, which is going to be available this summer. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions: [email protected]

The post Learn to Play Commonspoly: London, Sunday July 22nd @ Newspeak House appeared first on P2P Foundation.

If you’ve read any of my writing, you will have guessed I have some opinions about how we could do large scale governance differently. But the tool we’re building is designed only for small scale: If you’ve ever used Loomio, you’ll see that it’s designed for groups of up to a few hundred people, max. There’s a big gap between the decision-making context of a grocery co-op and an entire country.

So I was really pleased to be invited to make a presentation at The Direct Parliament conference in Florence last week, where I could connect the dots between the large scale and the small.

The conference was coordinated by Marco Deseriis, who studies networked society with a cultural/political examination of Internet-based activism. The Direct Parliament came at the conclusion of his 2-year research project Scalable Democracy. I was first introduced to Marco when he interviewed me back in 2016, looking especially at the mass adoption of Loomio in the early phase of Spain’s Podemos movement-slash-party. I have really appreciated following along with his research blog, which is full of excellent interviews like this one with Miguel Arana Catania from the Participation Team of Podemos, revealing the tensions between the social movement’s manifestations in the streets and in the institutions.

The day-long conference was all live-streamed, so you can watch videos of the presentations and discussions here. My talk starts 13 minutes in, there’s a direct link here. If you prefer reading to watching, I’ve included an approximate transcript below.

I usually avoid speculation about the large scale because I often see it distracting us from more immediate local concerns, where we can actually have tangible impact. But people keep asking me what I think we should do about governments, so I’m starting to develop some thoughts on the topic. I’d love to hear what you think. Feedback welcome

Transcript: Everyday Governance with Loomio

Thanks for the invitation to join this conference. I’m grateful to be here, and looking forward to learning with you all. I come from New Zealand, so sorry about my poor English. I co-founded a technology company called Loomio. I think technology is quite boring though so I won’t talk too much about it.

software is an artefact of values and beliefs

I think software is an artefact, a by-product of our values and beliefs. So I don’t want to spend much time telling you about the software we built; I think it will be more interesting to share some of my values and beliefs, rather than telling you all about our software platform. Bear in mind I’m one of many co-creators of Loomio, so my subjectivity is only a limited slice of the pie.

First I want to share some of my personal experience so you know where I’m coming from.

In 2011, I joined the Occupy Movement. I had no experience with activism or social movements before then. I had just been watching Occupy Wall Street online and I thought it was interesting. I saw all these people saying that society is in crisis, that we face enormous environmental and economic challenges, and that our institutions are not capable of coming up with good solutions. In retrospect, I think Occupy was an opportunity to get firsthand experience of the challenges of democracy, and to start prototyping alternative institutions.

When the Occupy Movement made it all the way to Aotearoa New Zealand, I went down to our Civic Square in Wellington to observe: who are these people, what are they going to do? Very quickly, I changed roles, from observer to participant. I found there was no way to stand outside, I had to be involved.

For the first time in my life, I met with citizens in the city square. We talked together about our hopes and fears, sharing, learning, debating, connecting. It was tremendously inspiring, and shocking, like, why have I never met other citizens like this before?

On the first day, somebody decided he was going to stay the night in the square. Two weeks later there were 100 tents, a whole village had appeared.

The amazing thing about this village was that nobody was in charge. We made decisions together: everyone needs to eat, so how are we going to organise food? We made a kind of free university, so what kind of education programs shall we run? All these people want to stay in the square: how can we make shelter for everyone? TV cameras keep visiting us, what should we tell them? Nobody was the boss, we had to negotiate and improvise.

Now nothing in my education had prepared me for this. I’m trained as an engineer. As an engineer I was taught an approach to problem-solving that was all about being right. I did research, I made simulations, I built electronic circuits and tested them with careful measurements. I was trained to be objective, detached, outside of the system, an expert observer with a brilliant intelligence.

In the assembly at Occupy, I discovered these skills are not very useful in deliberating with others. In the assembly I learned that my empathy is much more useful than my intelligence. 

Negotiating with other people, trying to find agreement about how we should organise our little village, I learned the most important thing I could do was to listen. Not just listening to rebut — listening to understand, where are you coming from? what do you believe? what do you value? why do you think like that?

When I truly understand somebody’s position, then I can make a proposal that they can agree with. It’s not about being very clever, having the best ideas, or the best ethics, it’s just about listening, being flexible, and looking for solutions that satisfy as many people as possible.

So, there we are in the city square sitting in circles and making consensus decisions, it’s very picturesque and inspirational.

It was also kind of a disaster, right? In my opinion, the Occupy camps all over the world ended for basically two reasons.

Some camps were destroyed by the state. Violent, brutal, armed thugs paid by the government to vandalise and dismantle these flourishing communities. The other camps collapsed under the weight of consensus. We learned how difficult it is to govern a public space, especially when you’re making decisions with random people, some of whom are drunk, or they are just passing through and sharing an opinion without any commitment to the community.

Actually maybe these two reasons demonstrate the same thing: governance is very difficult. The state does stupid things like pepper spraying students at a peaceful protest. And we activists do stupid things like spending 6 hours in a consensus meeting that brings us no closer to our aims.

So, as our camp disintegrated, my friends and I were left with an enormous question: what next!? It felt like we had come so close to a dramatic evolution of how we govern society, and then it collapsed. So what do you do after the revolution fails?

Being the kind of people we are, we decided to make some software about it. We thought we could help activists organise more efficiently with software to support inclusive decision-making.

So Loomio is a discussion forum like many others online, but the unique piece is the facilitation tools which are designed for productive and efficient deliberation. It’s not an endless conversation, the process is guided towards an outcome. E.g. you can poll people so see which options they like, then test for agreement with a proposal.

When we started we were just thinking of activists. But immediately we were swamped with interest from all parts of society, in many different countries. Now we have tens of thousands of groups using Loomio. In Wellington, the city government used Loomio to involve citizens, experts, and officials in policy making. Co-ops use Loomio for governance: approving new members, approving funding applications, debating about constitutional bylaws.

My favourite example right now is social.coop: it’s a social network very similar to Twitter. But instead of selling advertising, the platform is funded by users paying a small subscription fee. In return, users are invited to participate in governance, in a Loomio group: what kind of censorship should we have on the platform? where should we host the data? what code of conduct should users adhere to? It’s wonderful to see a digital platform being governed like a public utility.

Loomio is very simple software: you have discussions, suggest proposals, and people can say what they think about the idea. There’s no magical automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or decision-making robots, it is a very human process. I think it contributes at least two very useful innovations to the problem of deliberation, which can be generalised to other tools and processes.

1. asynchronous deliberation

First, Loomio breaks the tyranny of time. Usually, when you want to include people in a decision-making process, you do it in a meeting. These days we have video-conferencing so our meetings can extend into multiple spaces, but still, we need everyone paying attention at the same time. This is a fundamental constraint of deliberation: you need to organise a meeting, get everyone to pay attention simultaneously, and there’s a pressure to make all your decisions before the meeting ends.

With Loomio you can involve people in decisions, without coordinating a meeting. People participate in their own time.

I’m travelling through Europe with my partner. Back home, we’re negotiating about a new investment round for Loomio, and potentially restructuring the cooperative. We’re on the road, in a different timezone from the rest of the team, but we can participate in these very important decisions in our own time. We call it asynchronous decision-making, I think it is a very profound breakthrough, even though it is quite mundane!

2. visualise positions

The second innovation: visualising people’s positions. It’s very common for deliberation to get stuck in a very frustrated state. Essentially, everyone is simply arguing for their preferred option. I think we should do this. Well I think we should do that. No we should do this. Often what is happening here is that people are advocating for their preferred option, simply because their preference hasn’t been acknowledged. I get louder and louder describing the benefits of my proposal, because nobody has demonstrated that they understand my idea. So it really accelerates the deliberation process when you can visualise everybody’s position. First, everybody needs to be heard. Then they are much more willing to negotiate and make concessions.

So with a Loomio decision, somebody makes a proposal, and then you can visually see where everyone stands. People agree or disagree, and they share a short summary explaining why they feel that way. so you can quickly focus in on the concerns, and evolve the proposal to respond to them.

Again, it is quite simple, but also a profound breakthrough. We use the same technique in face-to-face workshops and meetings to deal with difficult decisions. In this case, the graphic is used to visually distinguish preference (I love it) from tolerance (I can live with it):

I want to share a bit more about my beliefs, some of the thinking behind the software.

This shows you how I understand social change. The chart keeps going up to the right, with bigger and bigger scales: cities, states, the planet, all of life, etc. Many of us are motivated by large-scale change, I expect that’s why we’re at this conference: we want to rebuild the economy for equality, or reimagine politics, or repair the division between humans and the rest of nature. Big big change. But social change is very complex, and non-deterministic, it’s not a straightforward system. I don’t know how we re-wire society, but this picture shows my intuition. I believe we need to consider many different scales at once.

For example: I want to change the system called patriarchy. It seems to me a very urgent challenge. But if I just focus on the large scale, trying to dismantle the system, I may miss a lot of insights that are down at the lower end, much closer to me and my immediate experience. Down here there are some questions just for me: how do I support patriarchy, how do I benefit from it? or, how do I reproduce patriarchal dynamics in myself, how do I dominate myself? and then one step up, looking to my relationships: am I in equal partnership, or in domination relationships? Then I can examine my teams: are we treating each other with respect and equity, or does one person dominate the rest? To me it is very important to have integrity and alignment at all scales. So yes, I will join a social movement against patriarchy, demanding a change in how we distribute power in society and how we run institutions. And also I need to work at the very small scale.

This is what is in my mind when I am using Loomio. I believe it is very important to practice deliberation at the small scale. Learn how to share power, to negotiate, to listen, to make concessions, to empathise, to let go of demands, to find creative solutions. Simply, I believe the practice of small scale democracy makes me a much more capable citizen.

I’m not sure about the large scale. I think we will have much better ideas once people have more opportunity to practice at the small scale.

Right now, the best large scale example I know of the is in Taiwan. My example is 4 years old, but still most people don’t know about it, so I guess I will be the Asia-Pacific representative for this conference and share the story again.

In 2014, the Sunflower Movement occupied government buildings in Taiwan. They stayed there for 23 days, demonstrating how to run a transparent deliberative democracy process to renegotiate a trade deal with China. After the movement, many independent politicians won seats in government, including the premier of Taiwan and the mayor of Taipei. That is, they are there to represent citizens directly, without the mediation of a political party. Since then, there have been many experiments in citizen participation in law making.

The vTaiwan project uses a tool called pol.is to involve thousands of people in opinion gathering, which like Loomio, creates a visualisation of people’s position on an issue. Once the opinion groups are clear, then representatives of each group come together for an in-person deliberation. This is broadcast publicly for anyone to watch. Then, having understood the perspectives of the different stakeholder groups, citizens are invited to suggest statements that they believe everyone can agree with. In the end, the government agrees to implement every consensus point generated by the process, or to provide detailed rationale for why it is not feasible.

This is incredibly inspiring to me, and I hope more people in the Western world will pay attention to the developments in East Asia. And I will say, the technology is useful, but more important is the political strategy and the facilitation skill of the activists driving this change.

I’m not sure if the government of the future is going to use pol.is, or Loomio, or LiquidFeedback, or whatever technology. But I hope as more people have access to a kind of everyday democracy, we’ll be much more able to work together creatively, efficiently making great decisions that work for everyone.

So if the question of this conference is “how do we reclaim our vision of democracy?” I think the answer is very straightforward, and very difficult. How do you get better at anything? With practice. I propose we should practice democracy more-or-less everyday. In our schools, in our homes and workplaces. Learn what democracy is composed of, in our own intimate experience, and then we will be more equipped citizens, less naïve, less easy to manipulate by demagogues and propagandists. I imagine children and teachers collaborating to govern their schools. Workers coming together to self-manage their workplaces. Citizens working together with city officials and experts to develop good policy.

Most of all, I imagine what extraordinary breakthroughs we might discover if more of us learned to listen to the people on the opposite side of the political fence. What if we could hear the values and beliefs beneath their position, rather than just dismissing them as stupid or evil?

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