Karissa McKelvey:  In the 18th, 19th centuries it was thought that property ownership was the only way to protect common resources such as grazing pastures. Garrett Hardin famously put it: “The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers.”

It was thought that communities that only act in rational self interest destroy the common pool resource they are sharing. This is described as “the tragedy of the commons”: that isolated, autonomous individuals will always choose the path best for them as individuals.

Elinor Ostrom introduced a new body of research to challenge this. Over 40 years of research, she was able to prove that Hardin exaggerated the problems involved in managing a commons. In 2009, Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics. She talked about how people actually are able to come to together to form norms and rules that sustain their mutual cooperation. For example, she went to Nepal and studied how people there were managing their own irrigation systems. She found that if communities simply follow eight principles, a sort of blueprint, communities use to self-govern and sustain the resource without depleting it.

What about applying this to the internet? Before her death in 2012 Ostrom published a book with Charlotee Hess called Understanding Knowledge as a Commons. This book laid the groundwork for thinking of digital knowledge as a commons (that is the digital artifacts in libraries, wikis, open source code, scientific articles, and everything in between).

The Internet as a Commons

Looking at the internet as a commons — as a shared resource — allows us to understand both its unlimited possibilities and also what threatens it.

What threatens the internet? Right now, private companies that control large parts of the internet are trying to prevent the internet of commons. If products fail or are deemed not economically viable (for example Vine, Google Reader, etc), the whole suffers. Monopolies, like Google, are able to keep their power by influencing the political landscape. However, in the internet of commons, monopolies are no longer in control, and users would be trusted to self-govern the commons.

Decentralization has been the most recent proposal as our technological means to get away from this and give the power to users. In a decentralized world, users get to control the contracts of the website, can choose to fork that website, re-host data to fix broken links, evade censorship, and overall take ownership of their data. Freedom of expression, privacy, and universal access to all knowledge should be inherent to the web. But right now, those values are not.

Locking the Web Open

Thinking of the internet as a commons allows us to think of different ways we can moderate and grow spaces, allow innovation to flourish, and improve the quality of knowledge and information sharing. As Brewster Kahle puts it, decentralization ‘Locks the Web Open.’

I’m not just dreaming of a new world with Brewster Kahle about the future of the internet. The internet of commons is here today. Peer-to-peer (p2p) applications already exist, are being built, as well as used by real users as we speak — you can build one too! Secure Scuttlebutt, for example, is a completely p2p protocol for syncing data. Patchwork is a social networking application built on top of the Secure Scuttlebutt Protocol. People can join a public server and make friends, then use a gossip approach to find friends of friends. Many early adopters come from IRC and have started using it instead of IRC. It’s immensely successful as a little protocol and you can build something with it today.

Dat is inspired by BitTorrent and built in a similar fashion to Scuttlebutt. It is a decentralized protocol for storing, versioning, and syncing streams of potentially very large datasets. We’re a non-profit, funded by grants and, so far, we’ve operated more like a research lab than a company.

A foundational part of what we’ve been doing for the past three years is to work with university labs, libraries, researchers, and universities to help them manage their scientific data. Scientific articles and their related data are very specific and yet good use case for a commons approach to the internet.

As companies privatize data they create silos or they put up paywalls, and prevent the growth of the commons — another kind of enclosure. This means that certain people with power close the pathways into the commons so that they can profit from it… but it actually detracts from everyone’s ability to use it and also prevents its ability to flourish. Innovation suffers, as fewer people have access to the knowledge and it is much harder to produce contributions that could improve that research. The rationale given for companies to create paywalls is that it is expensive to collect, store, organize, present, and provide bandwidth for the billions of pages of articles and datasets.

Decentralization is a clear way we can reduce the costs of this hosting and bandwidth — as more people come to download the articles and data from the journal or library or university, the faster it gets. The dream is that universities could turn their currently siloed servers into a common resource that is shared amongst many universities. This would cut costs for everyone, improve download speed, and reduce the likelihood that data is lost.

Decentralization of data produces challenges though — just like a torrent, data that is decentralized can go offline if there aren’t any stable and trusted peers. In the case of scientific data, this is an immense failure. To mitigate it, we invoke the human part of a commons — the data will be commonly managed. For example, we can detect how many copies are available in different places, just like a BitTorrent, and compute health for a dat — for example, a dat hosted at the Internet Archive, University of Pennsylvania, and UC Berkeley is probably very healthy and has low probability of ever going offline, while a dat hosted by 5 laptops might go down tomorrow — even though there are more peers. When a dat becomes less healthy, the community can be alerted and make sure the resource does not go down. Decentralized tech and decentralized humans working together to use commons methodology in practice.

Along with this, what we get by design is that links can last forever, no matter what server they are hosted on — using a decentralized network based on cryptographic links and integrity checks allow many servers to host the same content without security risks, a property not present in http.

This concept of decentralization isn’t new. The internet was built upon the concept of it being very resilient, that if a node failed, it’d find another way to get information to other computers. The internet was originally decentralized, but over time it became clear that centralized parties were needed to fund and maintain websites on the internet. The move towards decentralization is almost a yearning for the past, a way to get around this really centralized section of internet history.

Building the Future

A way we’ve been thinking about building protocols for decentralization is looking to how current popular protocols were developed and mirroring those methods. Current very popular modes for transfer were developed by people like Tim Berners-Lee (CERN, www) and Vint Cerf (DARPA TCP/IP) who worked in research labs. They gave away their protocols for free to the public, as products of scientific inquiry. The secret sauce of what they did was to craft open standards that don’t need permission to use and reuse, prioritized usability, and involved no or low barriers to access. Even Google was founded from two folks in a university lab, who published their search algorithm PageRank.

Today, I look at the decentralized landscape in context of what these people were doing back in the day and wonder if we’re continuing their legacy. Ideally, new decentralized protocols could be built into browsers that people already use today. Alongside http://, we imagine dat:// view websites or data from a distributed network (which you can now do with the Beaker Browser!).

I look at initial coin offerings (ICOs) and new blockchain companies that claim to be revolutionizing the way we work on the internet, and I’m not seeing this same model. I’m seeing white papers that are published, and sometimes even implemented in open source. But if you look at what they propose, many offer siloed networks that are privatized, with money being invested into specialized coins that create new enclosures. A big component of these ICOs are trust-less networks, which remove the human elements of trust and social groups from the network.

Decentralization then, is not just a technological problem, it is also a human one. Researchers at MIT have been looking into many of these decentralized tools and are reaching similar conclusions — the technical problems are hard but we must solve the social and people problems if we want to progress: “Decentralized web advocates have good intentions, but there is no silver-bullet technical solution for the challenges that lie ahead.”

To top it off, over $1.6 billion was invested in these ICOs in the past year alone. Where are we going? Is the future of decentralization going to be rooted in paywalls and coins, with the management of those coins and that technology trusted to a single individual or group? Is that really where we want to end up?

With a commons approach to the decentralized web, the most ideal approach is guided from where we came. I am much more excited about creating protocols that are easy to use, develop with, and extend without asking for permission and without paying or having much money at all. That means that they are driven by the community, built for the public good, and given away for free. If the company or organization dies, the protocols should still be usable. Any blockchains involved should not be tied to a particular for-profit company. I should not be tying my data to any one coin or blockchain for fear of enclosure. The protocols should be optimizing for science(broadly speaking, as in developing knowledge) and mutual collaboration rather than optimizing for profit. Let us not recreate the problem we are trying to solve.

Photo by n.a.t.u.r.e

The post Karissa McKelvey on the Web of Commons 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.

We acknowledge the natural, the virtual, and the social environments. Our responsibility is to recognize which resources are abundant, which are sufficient, and adapt accordingly through efficiency.

Technology is simply the means by which we communicate. We use local-first publishing so that each person owns their words and actions. Our solutions are piecemeal upgradeable, replaceable and incrementally improvable. Tending and pruning are not a stranger’s duty, it is through near moderation and free listening that we improve our surroundings. Infrastructure is a voluntary act, multimodal welcoming is how we on-board people via diverse connectivity modes (technological acts of inclusion) as well as with greetings (words of inclusion). No one “signs up” but everyone is invited.

Our community is a web of friendships: relationships defined not by a follow button, but by the flexibility of subjectivity. We cherish the freedom to be independent, but it is this same freedom which encourages – not coerces – us to be interdependent. We know we can at any time fork, but when individually recognizing the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, we tend to develop the collective. We value disagreement when it’s supportive, and see it as generative and bond forming.

Society is not made of homogeneous people, so we must allow pluralism of cultures to flourish. The edges of the social graph must extend to include all people and their diverse values, interactions, and customs. No one of us can build a welcoming place for all groups, because the very concept of welcoming is subjective. Instead, removing ourselves as arbiters of other communities, we must design platforms that are easy to re-design.

Video reposted from Vimeo

Article reposted from Scuttlebutt

The post A Scuttlebutt Love Story appeared first on P2P Foundation.

 —  hey squiddo, I can’t remember if we talked about Scuttlebutt yet. are you familiar? just a good one to have on your radar, v cool people with excellent tech and zero hype and bullshit

 — Hmm interesting, is Scuttlebutt running in production for something yet? It’s like a service to run other things on, no?

 —   secure scuttlebutt (ssb) it’s a very low level protocol. works like gossip: messages spread between peers. uses the internet if it is available, but doesn’t need it: local wifi, bluetooth (coming soon), or USB sticks are enough.

identities have logs. log = a sequence of messages. they’re cryptographically authenticated so you can guarantee who said what. identities can follow each other. you replicate the logs of your peers. no central server, no off switch, no delete. so if you want to find me, you need to find one of my peers first. creates peer-to-peer archipelagos of friends and data connected by their relationships.

data can be of any type. apps decide what types of messages they pay attention to. e.g. Patchwork is a social media app, with a few hundred daily active users. other apps: a chess game, distributed github clone, soundcloud clone, blogging client, events, calendar, loomio clone, etc etc etc.

it is exciting because there is a steadily growing community, like great new developers showing up every week or two. and it is the only decentralised tech project I know of that is populated by really gentle, caring, community-building, good politics, critically aware but having fun kinda people

 —Aha very cool, I’ll dig into it more and start following what’s going on. Sounds like a very interesting concept!

 —  its dooope. still bleeding edge in many places, so let me know if you get stuck on the way in

but it is getting to the point now where it is more than just my ultra nerd friends in there having a nice time. e.g. here’s a web view of a newsletter summarising activity in the scuttleverse this past week.

 — So if you were to think about applications to what we’re doing with our festival community, what would they be?

 —  think of all the apps you currently use, but imagine they work offline-first

I think it could be a cool on-site mesh network for the festival, to start with, and then people will be delighted to find they can still stay in touch later, because it uses the internet if it is available

 — How does it work, with regard to timing, when it cannot be ensured that messages are received in order?

 —  that’s right, you can’t guarantee order, there’s a lot of little weirdnesses like that which pop up in a purely subjective universe. messages always reference messages before them, so you can infer order

but yeah sometimes in discussions you will see “oh sorry I didn’t have your message when I wrote my comment”. but actually so far that seems mostly to be a feature, a constant reminder that you are just one subjective agent, there is no official arbiter of truth, everyone has a different experience of the world.

you’d be surprised at how much uptime there is when you have a few peers in a web of tight relationships, there’s nearly always someone online. so you don’t notice it much

you also will see missing messages, like, ‘someone wrote a comment here but they are outside of your network so you can’t see it’

which again, sounds like a bug, but I experience it as a feature. it’s very subtle but you keep getting these reminders that there is no single source of truth.

 — Hmm right, so you need to have done explicit individual authentication with each every other party?

 —  some of the peers are special, they’re called “pubs”. practically the only special thing about them is they are guaranteed to have much higher uptime than your average peer and they can hand out “invites”. If you redeem an invite, that means you follow them, and they automatically follow you back. they work a bit like servers, but not much

so if you connect to a pub that I’m connected to, you’ll be able to find me

then you’ll see a list of people that I’ve followed, and you can choose if you believe the name and avatar is who you think it is

there’s not an emphasis on real world identity verification, but it could be done. most people use real names but a decent fraction also enjoy pseudonyms

 —Ah right, and if a pub sees your activity, and I’m connected to the pub, I see your activity?

 —  yep, but there are people who follow no pubs, and they have a fine experience too, so long as there are a few friends of friends

 — Gotcha. Yeah, there are definite interesting advantages of this, for sure

 —  you can also extend your range, they call it “hops”. by default hops is set to 2, so when you follow me, you replicate my feed, plus all my friend’s feeds. in Patchwork you can see the “extended network” which will show you everything public from your the friends of your friends.

My tech knowledge is pretty patchy so I might be misrepresenting the details. I’m not the official source of truth. (there isn’t one.)

when you get deep into it, the main advantage i see is that it is agent centric (people, relationships), rather than location centric (documents, websites). so I have built up a web of relationships and content on my identity. When I move from Patchwork (social media) to Ticktack (blogging) to GitSSB (github clone), all my relationships and data come with me.

solves one of the common headaches of running online communities: you define the group once, and bring that definition with you to any app you want to use. seriously reduces onboarding friction

which means you actually have competition for social media interfaces, there’s no walled garden that owns your social graph

so the geeker types don’t use Patchwork, they use Patchbay, which has the same people and content, but a different interface that sacrifices some UX niceities but gets you closer to the code

 — Right, but that also means that you become a carrier for a lot of messages that someone else with the right key could decrypt, ensuring more redundancy and coverage of data

 —  so long as you keep your secret key, you can lose your computer and rebuild all your past data based on the copies your friends are keeping for you

as one of the ‘butts said, your friends are now the data centre.

 — Ah. Yeah. Got it. That’s a huge advantage.

 —  Can I have your permission to publish this conversation?

 — Absolutely! If it’s useful to have my identity attached to the conversation, you have my permission for that too

 —  thanks. i think i will recast you as a sweet emoji friend

 — Yeees! Haha

The post This Machine Eats Monotheistic Meta Memes appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Internet didn’t quite deliver on its original promise and today we’re talking with people who are fixing it.”

We’re very glad that Andrey Salomatin, creator of Code podcast (see original post here), got in touch to let us know about this recent podcast on what’s happening lately in P2P decentralized web development. If you’re interested in the history Scuttlebutt (a decent(ralised) secure gossip platform) and how it works; or you want an introduction to the Dat project (a nonprofit-backed data sharing protocol for applications of the future); and a “vision for the decentralized future”, Andrey and his five guests share their experiences and reflections. This is certainly more technical than most of the material we share on the P2PF blog, but there is plenty of food for thought here for anyone interested in the future of the decentralized web.

Andrey Salomatin: Slack servers are down and work stops. Facebook sells users’ personal data to third-parties with no negative consequences to the company. Turkey successfully blocks citizens’ access to Wikipedia. Those are all results of peoples’ decisions of course, but there’s also something else at play. Our mainstream technology stack makes execution on all of those decisions ridiculously easy.

The Internet didn’t quite deliver on its original promise and today we’re talking with people who are fixing it.

Guests

• Jon-Kyle Mohr
• Zenna Fiscella
• Mathias Buus
• Christian Couder
• Mikey

Outline

• 00:07 Introducing the topic
• 01:57 Limitations of centralized systems
• 04:57 Introducing Jon-Kyle
• 05:57 Introducing Zenna
• 08:23 Introducing Mathias
• 11:20 BitTorrent and scale
• 14:19 Multiple versions of the truth, version control systems (Jon-Kyle)
• 19:16 Introducing Christian
• 20:08 Git internal structure
• 22:03 Benefits of Git architecture
• 27:03 Why is Git not decentralized
• 32:23 How Dat started, tech description of the protocol (back to Mathias)
• 45:28 Dat usecases (Mathias and Jon-Kyle)
• 51:42 Future of Dat (Mathias)
• 53:54 Introducing Mikey
• 55:07 History of Scuttlebutt
• 56:22 How Scuttlebutt works
• 65:30 Usecases for Scuttlebutt
• 69:29 Vision for the decentralized future (Zenna)
• 71:39 Final thoughts on the topic, summary, thanks

Find us in P2P networks

• This episode in Dat:
  dat://084e8ceae2fd1012e5368a70908acdb7aa92c3f5de0c62d14ef5beacbf19295d
• This episode in IPFS:
  QmVVjxxitJrhNoRkTe3nJ2SztWMx9tYnpURuAVAY3Dx75y
  cheat through a https gateway
• Andrey in Scuttlebutt:
  @RP01FOdcs/QABLmMxTGe1U9myUfSLN/5ItlXQcp7oWQ=.ed25519
• Zenna in Scuttlebutt:
  @3ZeNUiYQZisGC6PLf3R+u2s5avtxLsXC66xuK41e6Zk=.ed25519
• Mikey in Scuttlebutt:
  @6ilZq3kN0F+dXFHAPjAwMm87JEb/VdB+LC9eIMW3sa0=.ed25519

Links

• All things Decentralization / Open Source / Fabrication from Zenna
• Website peer-to-peer-web.com
• Article Achieving Scale in the Decentralized Web by Paul Frazee from Beaker Browser
• IPFS

Links: Git

• Git
• Git LFS
• Video of the talk “Git From the Bits Up” by Tim Berglund

Links: Dat & Beaker

• Dat Project
• Beaker Browser
• Enoki
• peer-to-peer-web.com

Links: Scuttlebutt

• Scuttlebutt.nz
• Scuttlebutt grants process
• Collection of articles Scuttlebutt stories

Episode was produced by Andrey Salomatin.

Music by Mid-Air!

Code Podcast is about ideas that shape the way we build software. It’s like Planet Money for developers.

Each episode we interview people with different views on a single topic. We break down complex ideas to present why and how they are used to build modern software.

Photo by duiceburger

The post Code Podcast: P2P, People to People appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This week I was asked why one of my stories was locked behind a paywall, so I wanted to report on the progress of my income-generating experiments, and explore the ethical considerations of these different options.

Pondering becoming @Medium member: I want to read more @RichDecibels – wondering if he knows his writing is now stuck behind a paywall? :-/ (BTW I already fund the media I want to see by routinely financially supporting LOTS of great projects see https://t.co/cO6pX2cH5k) pic.twitter.com/Dp3iECnwW0

— Josef Davies-Coates (@jdaviescoates) May 23, 2018

In the year since writing that post, I’ve written another 15,000 words of my mostly-finished first book, published on LeanPub as a work-in-progress-for-sale. I’ve published another 20,000 words in 21 articles, receiving 40,000 pageviews on Medium. In addition to Medium, I usually publish on my website for convenient reproduction, and on Scuttlebutt to guarantee permanent storage in the commons (Scuttlebutt is the peer-to-peer future of the Internet that I’m most excited about). I use creative commons licensing to encourage syndication of my stories, so I’m delighted when I’m republished on blogs like C4SS or P2P Foundation.

Experiment #1: Patreon

My ideal goal with Patreon is to eventually crowdsource a stable living wage from voluntary recurring donations. When someone makes a recurring pledge on my Patreon I take that to mean something like, “I think your writing is important, here’s a few dollars a month to encourage you to keep going”. This community of support feels to me like an ever-present low-pressure sense of responsibility to keep publishing. So far, I really love this. Every single new patron is extremely encouraging for me.

I feel like I am in relationship with these people in a much deeper way than say, a passing reader or commenter. I don’t feel like I have to give my patrons anything more than gratitude, so I don’t have to lock any of my stories behind a paywall. I have the option to give patrons early-access to new stories, or to give them free access to a book that I’m selling elsewhere.

Results so far

I signed up in May 2017. Most of my stories end with a link to my Patreon page, but I haven’t promoted it any more than that. Over the year, I’ve gained 44 patrons, and lost 5. Currently this earns me US$196/month. Patreon takes 5% for their service, and about another 5% is lost to transaction fees (boo PayPal). Total income for the year, after fees and VAT, before paying income tax: $1566.94. This is a lot less than a full salary, but also a lot more than spare change.

Ethical considerations

This represents the “gift economy” solution to the writers’ dilemma: my writing is a gift to the world, and some of my readers gift me some money in gratitude. This gives me nice warm feelings and makes me feel like I’ve outsmarted capitalism.

To earn a full salary from Patreon, I would need many more supporters, requiring a marketing effort that starts to feel like begging. The gift economy is lovely in theory, especially because there’s no coercion: contributions are voluntary, and there is no punishment for readers who choose to not contribute. But when I interrogate these dynamics at a deeper level, I’m less satisifed.

In my point of view, social capital is subject to the same accumulative and alienating dynamics as financial capital. It’s even more dangerous in some senses, as the transactions are impossible to track, so it is much harder to redistribute accumulations of wealth.

Personally I redistribute 10% of my income to other Patreon creators who I think are doing more important and less fundable work than me: street poet David Merritt and anarchist authors William Gillis and Emmi Bevensee. At least this is a gesture to remind myself that the social capitalist is no more woke than the financial capitalist.

Frankly, as a producer, the clean transaction of buyer and seller just feels better to me. It feels good to produce something of value and have that value acknowledged by somebody purchasing it.

Experiment #2: Medium Partner Program

I happily signed up to pay $5/month for Medium membership as soon as it became an option.

As a reader, I want to support a sustainable and ethical citizen media ecosystem. You know the expression who pays the piper calls the tune? That explains in a nutshell why I prefer participating in a business model where the customers are readers, not advertisers. Reader-supported publishing incentivises high quality writing; advertising-supported media incentivises high quality data mining and manipulation.

In addition to being a paying Medium reader, I recently joined the Medium Partner Program, which means I am now on both sides of the Medium marketplace. With this scheme, when I write stories I can choose to mark them as members-only, or leave them free for all. This creates a semi-permeable paywall: readers who are paying the Medium membership fee have unlimited access to members-only stories; free users can read up to 3 of these stories per month. In return, I get paid based on the level of reader engagement with each story.

Results so far

I’ve only just joined the program and published 2 stories. The payout algorithm considers page views, readers and fans. I was surprised at the low level of engagement with my first locked post. In the first month it got 140 views, 59% reader completion, 11 fans. I would have expected maybe 5 times that amount if I had published a similar story without the paywall. So I was disappointed with the small audience, but then I was pleasantly surprised by the high payout: $4.27 for the first month. Considering I regularly write stories that get 10-50 times more engagement than this one, that’s a promising sign that the paywall could deliver a reasonable chunk of revenue if I use it for my really high quality stories that have a big audience and a long shelf-life. Estimating audience size is an inexact science so I intend to publish a few more locked stories to get more data.

Ethical considerations

The main obstacle to me embracing the Medium Partner Program is the audience perception. Simply: people don’t like paywalls. In particular, a significant portion of the people I write for have values that are explicitly against anything that looks like an enclosure of the commons. My people are advocates of free culture/ creative commons/ platform coops/ social enterprise/ and decentralisation. Some of them have a knee-jerk reaction against Medium because it doesn’t tick those boxes.

I’m happy to debate on this topic, but for what its worth, so long as Medium respects my right to license my own content, I feel pretty stable on my moral high horse. I could choose to release some of my work to a paying audience first, if that proves to be a viable funding model, but all my writing will maintain its commons license. I expressly don’t put limits on reproductions or derivatives of my articles, because I want to encourage distribution and engagement.

As a writer, I feel like I’m renting audience-discovery services from Medium. When I publish on Medium, most of the audience-discovery is done by algorithms, augmented by human curators. When I publish on C4SS or P2P Foundation, the audience-discovery is done entirely by humans, painstakingly cultivating a community of readers and writers. There are pros and cons to each method, but either way there’s valuable work being done which I think is worth paying for.

Experiment #3: LeanPub

I’ve spent most of the summer in Aotearoa New Zealand writing a short practical book about decentralised organising. I write using Markdown, which is a text formatting syntax designed for portability. As I completed the first draft, I started researching the technicalities of publishing: how will I convert these text files on my computer into an ebook in various formats?

My research lead me to LeanPub, which at first was interesting to me purely as a technical solution. You can write in Markdown on your computer, use Git or Dropbox to sync the files to LeanPub, and with one click generate html, pdf, epub and mobi formats.

The “lean” in “LeanPub” comes from “lean manufacturing” or “lean startup”, i.e. an approach to product development combining rapid iterations and ample user feedback. So LeanPub has created a marketplace for selling in-progress ebooks. I came for the publishing toolchain, stayed for the marketplace.

Results so far

I published the first version of the book when it was about 75% complete. LeanPub allows variable pricing, so I set the minimum price at $4.99, with a suggested price of $14.99. I gave free access to all my Patreon supporters, and sent out one Tweet to announce the publication.

I published my book! Now I just need to finish it…https://t.co/Hh83QNHd5w

— Richard D. Bartlett (@RichDecibels) April 20, 2018

I was quite stunned with the positive response from such a small amount of publicity: 21 purchases in the first month, totalling $302.36 in total revenue, 80% of which comes to me.

The best part is the audience interaction. Readers are invited to join this Loomio discussion group to give feedback. I’ve already had detailed, page-by-page feedback from two readers, which is immensely valuable. They’ve pointed out weak or awkward parts, and provided a tonne of encouragement that this work is worth doing. I’ve got a really clear list of homework to do next time I get into writing mode.

While my articles are published with no rights reserved, for now at least the book is licensed CC-BY-NC-SA. That means anyone can reproduce or modify the work, if they meet 3 conditions:

• BY = they must credit me as the author
• NC = non-commercial (they’re not doing it for profit)
• SA = share-alike (derivative works must use the same license)

I’ve chosen this as an interim measure, to keep my options open while I figure out the best balance between free and paid sharing.

Ethical considerations

Because this is a straightforward commercial transaction, it’s pretty easy to analyse the ethics of this approach. On the plus side, buyers can freely choose to pay at least $4.99 if they want to read my work. On the down side, this excludes people who don’t have money.

I don’t want to exclude people who are broke, but I also don’t want to make it overly easy for freeloaders either. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll ride this balance yet. I could tell people to contact me if they want a free copy, or just drop the minimum price to $0 after some period of time. I’m not totally certain of my choice to use CC-BY-NC-SA, so perhaps I’ll switch to CC0 (no rights reserved) too.

Next steps

So, the trickle of income from Patreon feels nice, but I don’t want to self-promote more than I already am. Medium’s paywall is a promising income stream, but I risk losing the audience I care most about. So far it feels like publishing on LeanPub hits the sweet spot between revenue and ethics. So I’m considering that my next experiment could be to package up my existing blog posts into a kind of “best of” ebook that people can buy if they want to support my writing.

Reading back through this post, I’m not feeling certain about any of the ethical choices. I’m publishing this in the hope that some of you clever loving people challenge my thinking and enhance my ethics. I’d also love to hear from other authors who feel like they’ve solved the dilemma between the paywall and the commons.

p.s. this story is licensed with no rights reserved, available for reproduction on my website

Photo by mrhandley

The post Paywalls vs Creative Commons: Experiments with Patreon, Medium and LeanPub appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Scuttlebutt is slang for gossip, particularly among sailors. It is also the name of a peer-to-peer system ideal for social graphs, identity and messaging. Scuttlebutt was created by Dominic Tarr, a Node.js developer with more than 600 modules published on npm, who lives on a self-steering sailboat in New Zealand.

Dominic is often offline, but he’s still able to use a social network to communicate with his friends such as James Halliday (a.k.a. substack), who is also often offline. James has also authored hundreds of npm modules, such as Browserify, and is building a shack with his partner Marina on top of 300-year old lava flows in Hawaii.

Dominic and James are a few key figures in a community of eccentric open source hackers gathering in a social network independent from mainstream internet. The unique properties of Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) make it possible for digital information to spread easily even in the absence of Internet Service Providers (ISP) and the internet’s backbone. What makes that possible is a decentralized protocol based on the mechanics of word of mouth.

Scuttlebutt is decentralized in a similar way that Bitcoin or BitTorrent are. Unlike centralized systems like PayPal or Dropbox, there is no single website or server to connect when using decentralized services. Which in turn means there is no single company with control over the network.

However, Scuttlebutt differs from Bitcoin and BitTorrent because there are no “singleton components” in the network. When accessing the BitTorrent network, for instance, you need to connect to a Distributed Hash Table (DHT, think of it as a huge round table where anyone can come and take a seat). However, to get access to the DHT in the first place, you need to connect to a bootstrapping server, such as router.bittorrent.com:6881 or router.utorrent.com:6881. These are very lightweight servers which simply introduce you to the DHT. They still depend on the existence of ISPs and the internet backbone. Also, those systems are concerned about public information. For instance, with Bitcoin, each peer stores the entire log of all transactions ever sent by anyone.

Secure Scuttlebutt is also different to federated social networks like Mastodon, Diaspora, GNU social, OStatus. Those technologies are not peer-to-peer, because each component is either a server or a client, but not both. Federated social networks are slightly better than centralized services like Facebook because they provide some degree of choice where your data should be hosted. However, there is still trust and dependency on third-party servers and ISPs, which makes it possible for admistrators of those to abuse their power, through content policies, privacy violations or censorship.

In Scuttlebutt, the “mesh” suffices. With simply two computers, a local router, and electricity, you can exchange messages between the computers with minimal effort and no technical skills. Each account in Scuttlebutt is a diary (or “log”) of what a person has publicly and digitally said. As those people move around between different WiFi / LAN networks, their log gets copy-pasted to different computers, and so digital information spreads.

What word of mouth is for humans, Scuttlebutt is for social news feeds. It is unstoppable and spreads fast. Once the word is out (just an arbitrary example) that Apple is releasing a new iPhone model, there is no way to restrict that information from spreading. A person may tell that piece of information to any of their friends, and those friends may in turn spread that information onwards.

With typical gossip, however, information deteriorates as it spreads and eventually becomes harmful rumor. Scuttlebutt on the other hand makes word of mouth securewith cryptography. Each Scuttlebutt account is comprised of simply two things: an append-only diary and private/public asymmetric crypto keys. An account’s identity is its public key. There are no unique usernames, because you can’t guarantee two people in separate places from choosing the same username, much like you cannot forbid the name “John Smith” to be given to a newborn in Canada if it is already taken by another person in Australia.

All information a person has published is registered in their diary. Public messages (like in Twitter) are the most common type of message in a diary, but you’ll also see “I am friends with that person” type of messages. To ‘send’ a private message to someone, I simply record a message in my diary, but encrypt it first, so the message isn’t plainly readable by anyone who gets their hands on a copy of the diary. Authenticity of diaries is preserved in that all diary entries reference the message that was written before, and then is signed. This prevents tampering and makes replication easier.

Every time two Scuttlebutt friends connect to the same WiFi, their computers will synchronize the latest messages in their diaries. Another way of synchronizing information is to connect to a common Scuttlebutt server, known as “pub”, set up by any member in the community. Pubs make information spread faster, and globally, but are totally dispensable. It’s even feasible to exchange latest news through sneakernet, using e.g. USB sticks.

This architecture is built so that network connections accurately represent the social graph and word of mouth. Typically with social networks like Facebook or Twitter, the network connections are centralized with their servers. The network architecture looks completely different to social architecture. Most users don’t care about this because the network architecture is invisible to them. However, it becomes a real problem once an authoritarian government or even the host company itself takes control over the network architecture in ways that disrupt the social architecture. It is not uncommon for a government to shut down a social network in a country for days/weeks, affecting how people communicate with each other. This has happened in Egypt, Cameroon, and Brazil.

With Scuttlebutt, the social graph is the network architecture, with peer-to-peer infrastructure accurately matching peer-to-peer interactions. It makes communication and the spread of information highly resilient, bringing improvements to freedom of speech with modern information technologies.

This peer-to-peer system has existed for more than two years and brought unique challenges and possibilities. For instance, unique usernames are impossible without a centralized username registry. On the other hand, this questions the need for a login system in the first place: why do you need to “enter” into the service? Scuttlebutt will not have a user registration flow, because such thing makes no sense in that world.

So far, the network has received a dedicated social network desktop app, a Soundcloud alternative, a Viewer webapp, and a git layer (putting “distributed” back into “distributed version control”). These work seemlessly together: a person using the git layer to push a commit will record that on their diary, which is visible also in the social network app, for their friends. Currently, the community is using this to “eat their own dog food”, coordinating team work and contributing code all on the same platform, without any intermediate company. GitHub being down will rarely be a problem for them.

The platform is being improved constantly, in areas such as: mobile support, an NPM alternative, WebRTC support for browser peers, and even legal transactions in New Zealand. It has proved to work as a platform setting the requirements and examples for a human-centered social network, as Dominic well described:

I wanted an open platform that anyone could build things on. (…) Also, we couldn’t realistically plan to just sit down and create an app that everyone wants to use, we need many experiments so that one can succeed, therefore we need a decentralized application platform more than we need any given a decentralized application.

To use Scuttlebutt, I recommend reading the ssb handbook.

If you liked this article, consider sharing (tweeting) it to your followers.

The post Scuttlebutt: an off-grid social network appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The bigger the group, the more rules they need. Can we do better than written agreements?

In this article I’m going to bite off some big ideas, musing on the limitations of encoding agreements in text. To keep it grounded, I’ll illustrate the ideas with real-world stories. I’ll include a couple of practical tools you can try right away. But mostly, this is a reflection from the frontiers of decentralised organising: the ideas here probably only reflect the reality of a tiny number of organisations. It’s highly speculative, subjective, exploratory. I’m not educated in social psychology so I haven’t quoted any sources and I’ve probably mangled the science. In other words: don’t try this at home. The invitation is to put on your safety gear and come exploring with me…

First I’ll set some context, exploring why groups create written rules as the grow. Then, I’ll name some of the dysfunctions that emerge from the rule-setting process. Then I speculate that we might get different outcomes if we used something other than a written rule book. Here goes!

Where does togetherness come from?

Lately I’ve been reflecting deeply on this question: what holds a group together?

Small groups can maintain a lot of togetherness without much explicit structure. We can hold shared context without needing to agree precisely on the words that describe that context.

When the group is small, everyone can build peer-to-peer trust bonds with everyone else. It is pretty easy to trust someone once you’ve shared food with them a couple of times, or done some engaging work together, or supported them through a hard day. With a small number of members, it doesn’t take long for everyone to have a coffee date with everyone else. If you have a team of 5, it only takes 10 coffee dates for everyone to get some time together.

Arriving into this high-trust environment, newcomers can accelerate their own trust-building process. If I’m the 6th person to join, and I spend some time with three of the original members and decide I like them, then I can skip ahead to trusting the other two without having much direct interaction with them, because any friend of yours is a friend of mine!

You can have all of this lovely trust and belonging and harmony without having to talk about it. Bonding operates down at the level of your emotions and psychology: we stay together because it feels good to be together. We have a sense of each person’s unique skills and interests. We like each other. We have a shared sense of direction. Notice none of that needs to be written down.

When there’s some tension between people, it’s easy to spot. If the team is made up of emotionally responsive adults, somebody will notice that Tina and Sam are not talking to each other, and will support them to repair the relationship. Everyone can see everyone else. Everyone can know everyone else. Everyone can fit around a dinner table and have a conversation. So you don’t need to formalise a lot of processes or make explicit agreements.

But this lovely easy harmony is impossible to maintain with many more people. Once your group grows bigger than a dinner table, you need to introduce some scaffolding to maintain the togetherness. If you have a team of 5, everyone could have a 1-on-1 conversation with each other member, and it would only take 10 meetings for everyone to see everyone. You can do this over a weekend retreat or a roadtrip. For 30 people that leaps to 429 meetings. 150 people: 11,175 coffee dates. This unavoidable algebra makes big groups much more challenging than small groups.

Bigger groups require more structure to keep them together

At a certain size we start making explicit structures to keep the group together, because it’s cognitively impossible for everyone to maintain a lot of context about everyone else.

Usually, this “explicit structure” comes in the form of written agreements, contracts, policies, rules, roles, guidelines, and best practices. In this article I’m going to take a closer look at this legislative approach to creating structure, and ask if “writing things down” is the best we can do.

If you review the Enspiral Handbook, or the Gini Handbook or the handbook for any of these hip “future of work” organisations, you’ll see a bunch of roles and rules. These written agreements are the artefacts of deliberations. The deliberations follow a general pattern, something like:

1. something harmful or frustrating happens
2. people in the group talk about it
3. they grow a shared understanding of the problem
4. people suggest different possible responses
5. we evaluate the possibilities, collectively running a complex simulation (if we agree to this, what might happen next?)
6. then finally, we decide on a response

When we talk through a problem, sometimes the response requires no action, like “that restaurant was crap, let’s not go there again”. Most of the time though, the response is a new piece of structure: you agree to a set of Restaurant Selection Criteria (rules), or appoint the Restaurant Selection Working Group (roles). I’ll jump to a real example to give you the flavour:

Story 1: Don’t feed the trolls

Right now I’m involved in a deliberation about a software project called Scuttlebutt. The founder Dominic Tarr was gifted $200,000 (thanks Dfinity!) to work on this ambitious community-driven project. Dominic decided to break up that big dose of money and distribute it in a series of $5k grants, available to anyone who wants to help grow the ecosystem. Grant-making decisions are made with community input, up to 4 grants per month.

A few months in, after allocating 10 or 15 grants, one of the community members suggests a “pause and review” to check how well the process is working. There’s a big discussion, lots of people taking lots of time to write out their thoughts and consider the ideas of others.

Here’s my summary of the conversation so far: essentially everyone is saying “this is the best grants process I’ve ever participated in”, with a bit of “we could improve this or that detail”. Everyone that is, apart from one person, who alternates between trolling, insulting people, making incoherent arguments, demanding attention, and not listening.

So now we’re at a crucial point in the development of the community. Can we collectively agree that “don’t be a dick” is a good enough principle to keep the grant-making process running smoothly? Or do we need to make an explicit written agreement about what behaviour is appropriate? — Join me on Scuttlebutt if you want to see how this plays out!

Problem > Deliberation > Agreement

This is a common pattern right? There’s a problem, we talk about it, and then we decide to add a bit of structure to prevent the problem from recurring. You deliberate together, aiming to get to a new agreement: we expect to handle that problem in future with this new rule.

These conversations are a good way to get to know each other, and discover what the community values. Deliberation takes up hours of time that could have been spent on more obviously productive activities. Sometimes that is a good investment in bonding, but it can get a bit tiring if you over-do it.

I’m interested in what happens when you run the problem-deliberation-agreement loop over a number of years. I’ve been experimenting with self-governing groups since 2011 so I have a bit of firsthand experience to reflect on. I’ve noticed a few side-effects of this loop. I’ll name three of them: attention drift, constitutional accretion, and delusional mythology.

A. Attention drift

If you govern your network/community/organisation with a lot of deliberation, eventually some people tune out and learn, hey, nothing falls to pieces when I withhold my opinion — I’ll stay out of it and just focus on my little corner. You’ll see some of your most experienced people stepping out of the way.

So the decision-making population narrows down to a) the people with the biggest investment (e.g. your personal identity is closely tied to the collective identity) and b) the people who most enjoy sharing their opinions on governance questions. That’s not a bad way to make decisions, exactly, but it leaves a lot of collective intelligence un-engaged. It also leads to a gradual decrease in legitimacy of these decreasingly shared decisions, opening room for a fork or a decay of the “togetherness”.

B. Constitutional accretion

If you keep running the problem-deliberation-agreement routine, you’ll start to experience constitutional accretion: over time, these agreements start to build up.

I’ll illustrate the accretion process with another story. This one comes from Enspiral, which is a network of 100-300 people forming social-impact companies. It’s a group with strong boundaries and a lot of engagement in governance.

Story 2: Digging Through the Sedimentary Layers of Enspiral’s Agreements

When I joined Enspiral in 2012, we had 3 agreements (People, Ventures, Decisions). Later on we added the Diversity Agreement to signify our intention to grow the demographic diversity of our membership. In 2016 there was a major renovation of the network which brought us up to 8 agreements. Within a year, that number has grown to our present set of 11 agreements.

These agreements are expensive to produce. Each of those is the result of a long deliberation, involving anywhere between 100 and 300 people. They are designed to symbolise our most important shared values and commitments. A new agreement is A Big Deal, signifying some new shared understanding.

This is highly subjective, but I’ll sort them into three categories:

1. First are what I call “structural agreements”. We have six of them that to me are crucial to the day-to-day operation of the organisation (Board, Brand, Decisions, Financial, People, Ventures).
2. The next category I call “boundary agreements”. They set expectations for what behaviour is appropriate and what can be excluded. I count three of them (Diversity, Harassment & Abuse, Personal Conduct). I’ve seen other communities get by with just one boundary agreement: “don’t be a dick”. The extra detail at Enspiral is probably a result of spending a lot of time together and doing high-stakes collaboration.
3. The third category I call “Nice idea, but”. We currently have two of them (Catalyst and Stewardship). They were the best solution we could design at the time, but we’ve never had the resources to implement them well.

So of our 11 agreements:

• 6 Structural Agreements govern the day to day interactions of people and companies in the network.
• 3 Boundary Agreements don’t make any difference to my day-to-day interactions (note I’m speaking as a high-privilege, high-status community member). I hope they contribute to the safety and wellbeing of other folks, but personally they do nothing for me.
• 2 “Nice Idea, But” Agreements: they exist on paper, officially carrying as much weight as the rest of them, but they just don’t match reality.

Right now we’re in a pleasant limbo where people haven’t really noticed that the Stewardship Agreement and the Catalyst Agreement are not being implemented in the way they were intended. (I’ve probably collapsed that liminal space by publishing this article, whoops.) As far as I can tell, nobody is overly concerned just yet. But it would be nice if our theory matched our practice: it seems sub-optimal to have divergence between our explicit structure (what we say holds us together) and our implicit structure (what actually holds us together).

In a sense, if you can’t trust one of the agreements, you can’t really trust any of them. They’re either a set of highly significant guiding documents, or they’re not. How is a newcomer supposed to make sense of the discrepancy? We have agreements that are not up to date with our practices, and we have practices that are not up to date with our agreements. So what do we do?

C. Delusional Mythology

Full disclosure: I believe that groups are mostly held together by good feelings, and the explicit structure is just an artificial scaffold. Enspiral’s written agreements are important because of what they symbolise, not necessarily because of the precise words they say. I think a group is held together by history and relationships and collaborative meaning-making and amorous feelings and psychological responses and co-imagined futures and shared identity, and yes some written agreements and explicit roles too, but I’m convinced the explicit stuff is just the tip of the iceberg.

The explicit stuff is a lot easier to talk about, because we have shared language for it. So it’s easy for us to get distracted and focus on the agreements and lose sight of the underlying meaning that they signify. It’s easy to confuse what we say for what we mean. At times during the Enspiral journey, I’ve felt like we’ve given more attention to the abstract structure of our organisation and lost sight of the tangible things that people are doing. We mistake the symbols for what they symbolise.

Okay I’m getting pretty far-out now, time for another story:

Story 3: Hallucinating together

Let’s say the group is a tree, and we’re all little kids playing in the branches. (Please use a little kid voice as you read this story.)

I’m climbing in this huge tree telling you I’m Jack and this is a beanstalk and we’re going up to see the giant. You’re happy to play along with my fantasy, so long as you can count on me to play along when you say this is a spaceship and we’re astronauts and we’re going up to space to camp on the moon .

The kids know the tree is a tree, but it’s fun to tell stories instead. Well, it’s fun when we all get to take turns inventing the story, and nobody is confused between fantasy and reality.

In organisations we make up some imaginary stories called “roles” and “rules” and suddenly everyone stops playing. We all have to agree on the One True Fantasy. Even though most of us know the group is held together with good vibes, it’s easier to explain “well we have the People Agreement, and the Ventures Agreement and if you look here in the handbook you’ll see…”

No gods, no masters, no books?

We make a rule-book, elevate it onto a pedestal, and then put ever-increasing effort into keeping it relevant, accessible and engaging. Meanwhile, the bigger the group, the less this book can describe the lived experience of any of the members.

The obvious solution is to try harder. Find more volunteer hours, or pay someone to put more energy into keeping the agreements up to date. But I’m never satisfied with “try harder”; I think sustainable solutions usually look more like “try different”.

Some of us have a sense that there are negative side effects from the problem > deliberation > agreement loop (I’ve named three of them, I’m sure there are more). So when I reflect on these dynamics, I can’t help but blame the written form itself.

When I get together in community and deliberate about a problem, what’s important to me is that I feel heard, that I feel we are responding intelligently and compassionately, that what we’re working on is meaningful, that we are adaptable and efficient, that I’m a valued member of the community, that I’m seen, that I can count on the community to respond to my needs, that I can be proud to overlap my personal identity with our collective identity. A good deliberation can meet all those needs. The written agreement we produce at the conclusion of that deliberation is a symbol, a placeholder that represents my needs and feelings and experiences. The actual written words can’t capture a fraction of the meaning.

“Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms. Humans, on the other hand, do not – never did, never will.” — Your Brain Does Not Process Information and It’s Not a Computer, by Robert Epstein

Can we do better than written agreements?

So this is my big inquiry at the moment: assuming we need some explicit structures to hold our groups together, can we do better than written agreements?

I don’t have a great answer yet — it’s taken me weeks just to articulate the question! While I’ve been exploring, I’ve picked up some interesting leads to follow:

1. Community Mastery Board

Drew Hornbein from Agile Learning Centres introduced me to the Community Mastery Board (CMB). Working with self-governing groups of young children, they use CMB as a tool for “creating sustainable culture within a community through iterative trial and error”. Documentation is sparse, but you can start to learn about it in Drew’s blog here, another blog here, and this one-page PDF. (Also my long distance crush Art Brock wrote a teaser way back in 2014. C’mon fam, write that sweet documentation!)

“For instance, in our current space everyone is expected to clean up any dishes they use. We didn’t come to this decision by having a meeting and coming up with rules, rather by way of becoming aware of a problem and trying out a number of solutions and sticking with the one that stuck.” Drew Hornbein — Agile Learning Centres

Instead of the expensive “problem > deliberation > agreement” routine, the process is focussed on finding something safe to try, as quickly as possible. The process takes minutes, not hours. Rather than spending a lot of time designing the best possible guess and getting everyone to agree with it, with CMB you just focus on trying a solution and reviewing it quickly. What most interests me about CMB is that it seems to be less focussed on the rules, and more focussed on the “deltas”, i.e. what needs to be changed. I can imagine running a “change-up” meeting every week or every month and developing a shared sense of “this is our capacity for change.”

Compared to a rule book on a pedestal, CMB feels much better suited for the way our brains work, and the way our groups are actually held together. Over time, the good rules get embedded into the group culture: if you see everyone else cleaning up their own dishes, you don’t need a sign to tell you you’re expected to clean up yours.

I don’t think this process is ready to be dropped in to large self-governing groups as a replacement for deliberation and legislation. But it’s inspiring to see an approach to governance optimised for ongoing change, rather than trying to capture an ideal steady state.

2. Guide Board

When I told him about the Community Mastery Board, new Enspiral contributor Matti Schneider introduced me to his Guide Board, which is thoroughly documented here (swoon!).

“A guide is therefore the reification of a debate conclusion, a reminder that a discussion took place. These keywords and drawings are here to recall the agreement to participants, as a tangible trace of the decision. […] it became clear that the illustrated guides were easier to memorise, and much easier to identify when glancing at the board. ”

Things I like:

• Guides are primarily graphical icons, not written words. (The dynamics of creating, agreeing, and updating graphics is very different to what we’re used to with text. I don’t know if it is better, but different is worth exploring.)
• Closing a guide (i.e. erasing a rule) is part of normal business. (I’ve never participated in a community that could undo old rules without a huge amount of effort and drama.)
• The guide board (like CMB) is designed for flow: the passage of time is laid out intuitively from left to right. It’s more like a movie, less like a book. Each rule is contextualised in time: acknowledging it was relevant last year, without claiming that it will be eternally relevant.
• A guide reminds us that we talked about something, it doesn’t pretend to capture the content of the conversation.
• Both the Guide Board and Community Mastery Board are oriented towards continuous participatory change, less “what are the rules around here”, more “how much capacity do we have for changing the rules here”

3. Team of Teams

As I’ve been contemplating these questions, trying to put my finger on my discomfort with written agreements, I’ve noticed a new trend at Enspiral. In conversation with the longest-standing members, I’m noticing a new consensus emerge: I believe Enspiral is evolving into what General Stanley McChrystal calls “a team of teams”:

The invitation was “welcome to the community, jump in and contribute, find opportunities, get supported to do meaningful work” and I think it is maturing into “welcome to the community: find a dinner table you like, or start a new one”. The difference is subtle but represents a profound shift in expectations: the network does not provide support, you can only expect support once you’ve found your team.

I’m anticipating a future version of Enspiral which has the minimum set of agreements to govern the whole, and maximum autonomy, diversity, and subjectivity in the parts. If we all spend most of our time in one or two dinner-table sized groups, we can stay focussed on the squishy human-to-human kind of togetherness, and put much less effort into the explicit, written scaffolding that holds the whole together.

I don’t want us to spend a few hundred hours to design the Tables Agreement! I think it would be much more effective to have a few of the elders telling stories like “I thought I found purpose and connection when I joined Enspiral, but that was nothing compared to the depth of support I experienced once I found my table.”

So I’m publishing this as an open question, and I’d love to hear your contributions. Who do you know that is doing collaborative governance with something other than written agreements?

Writing this highlighted the gaps in my education: I have tonnes of practice but very little theory. I’m open to your reading suggestions. I get the feeling that I’m bumping up against the artefacts of colonial/ patriarchal/ judeo-christian/ anglo-saxon/ greco-roman epistemology, so I’m most interested in learning from thinkers outside of the academy. Specifically I know I need to learn more about governance in oral cultures — if you have experiences to share, I’d love to chat with you. I also wonder if anyone can share stories from, e.g. collaborative governance with children, or with people who don’t read — there could be some interesting leads to follow there too.

Thanks to Matti Schneider, Hailey Cooperrider, Billy Matheson, Theodore Taptiklis, and Drew Hornbein for their thoughtful contributions to this piece.

p.s. If you want to encourage me to keep writing: please share/ like/ recommend/ tweet or otherwise validate me quantifiably 

p.p.s You can give me money on Patreon if you want me to hurry up and finish my first book.

p.p.p.s. I waive copyright on all my writing: you may do anything you like with this text. You’ll find pdf, markdown, and html formats on my website.

The post The Vibes Theory of Organisational Design appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Towards a more democratic Web

In the aftermath of the recent Harvey Weinstein revelations, Rose McGowan was suspended from Twitter for breaching its Terms of Service. Twitter made an unusual move by commenting on the status of a specific user’s account, which it normally publicly declares it does not do.

Many people who have suffered harassment on Twitter (largely women), are understandably fed up with Twitter’s practices, and have staged a boycott of Twitter today October 13, 2017. Presumably the goal is to highlight the flaws in Twitter’s moderation policies, and to push the company to make meaningful changes in their policies, but I’d like to argue that we shouldn’t expect Twitter’s policies to change.

Twitter: a neutral platform or a curated community?

No matter if you’re a conservative, liberal, a woman, an apologist for a serial rapist (fuck you), or a Nazi (fuck you too), chances are good that at some point you’ll:

1. Say something on Twitter that leads to your account being suspended, and/or
2. Be frustrated by Twitter’s actions (or inaction) surrounding moderation

Twitter is a public space for conversation and community for millions of people, so for Twitter to suspend an account is akin to banning someone from the public center. That should not be taken lightly.

But we should also not take it lightly when when someone is harassed into silence by speech that threatens violence. Threatening speech is no longer just speech – we must consider how that speech impacts other peoples’ voices.

And here lies the problem. Twitter cannot be both neutral platform and arbiter of good and bad speech. Nor do I want Twitter to be either of those things!

• If Twitter acts as a neutral platform, then unless Twitter can provide very powerful tools to help users manage their feed and who they engage with, then the platform will be flooded with bots, harassment, racism, libel, and all flavors of filth. A purely neutral platform leads to a terrible experience for users.
• If Twitter acts as the decider of good/bad content, then we all have to worry about whether or not our opinions align with what Twitter has deemed “appropriate”. Maybe they align right now, but what happens if Twitter gets new executives, or if someday Twitter’s leadership is pressured by powerful forces to silence people with beliefs like mine?

Neither of those situations are ideal, and currently Twitter is dancing somewhere between these two worlds, trying to be a neutral platform while selectively enforcing bans and suspensions.

Twitter’s stalemate

You may not agree with Twitter’s policies, but you can likely observe the forces at play here, and understand why Twitter’s moderation policies have appeared inconsistent, unfair, and sometimes downright wrong.

It’s because Twitter is not driven by doing the right thing. Twitter is motivated to avoid upsetting users to the point that they leave Twitter. Users leaving Twitter is bad for business.

For example, If Twitter suspends alt-right accounts that intentionally toe the line between American pride and white supremacy, then they lose a not-insignificant number of users who’ll cry “free speech haters”. If they don’t suspend those users, they risk losing the users who won’t stand for Twitter being used as a platform for harassment and racism.

It’s not going to get better.

Don’t hold your breath

Twitter’s executives likely think their moderation policies are driven by being fair and judicious, but those policies can’t escape the fact that Twitter’s bottom line depends almost entirely on engagement and ad revenue.

Unless we expect Twitter’s business model to change, then we shouldn’t expect their moderation policies to change. No matter what decisions Twitter makes regarding moderation, some large group of users will feel targeted, and will swiftly exit the platform.

Moreover, what could Twitter do that would be a reasonable solution? I don’t see any way out of this.

So what should we do?

Decentralize. Twitter is responsible for moderating who and what shows up in your feed because Twitter’s servers house the content that composes your feed. A centralized service like Twitter or Facebook has the choice to act as a neutral platform for speech, or set strict content guidelines and then work to uphold those policies. I don’t believe either option is a good choice.

The dream of a decentralized Web

I want to decide what is good content for me. I want help making that decision based on how people I trust have responded to that piece of content. I want to be able to mark another user as a porn bot or a Nazi, and I want people who follow me to be able to see that information, and to decide how to act on it.

And most importantly, I don’t want any single person deciding if another person has the right to speak. The fragility of expecting a “media monarch” like Twitter to make good decisions is too risky. I want online media to work much more like a democracy, where users are empowered to decide what their experience is like.

Moving forward

A lot of people feel the same way, and several decentralized social media apps have bubbled up out of this mess.

You have many options if you’re ready to give up on Twitter.

MASTODON

Mastodon has been around for a while, but since it operates on a federated network, it’s not quite the flavor of decentralized I think we deserve.

In order to participate, you have to sign up to an instance, whose servers are run by somebody else. If you pick a good instance with a good administrator, you shouldn’t have any trouble, but you still have to depend on a single person to decide what you should or should not be allowed on your feed.

Running an instance is also hard and expensive work. It would be great if we could find a way to make social media apps both free and easy to use.

PATCHWORK

Patchwork is a peer-to-peer social media application with a rich community. It’s built on top of Secure Scuttlebutt, and acts as a standalone desktop application. It’s a little rough around the edges in terms of UI and performance, but the community is really great.

BUILD A PEER-TO-PEER SOCIAL MEDIA APP ON BEAKER

I work on Beaker, a peer-to-peer browser, and we’ve built APIs that give developers the ability to publish on the user’s “profile” and “timeline”.

Profiles in Beaker are just datasets that live on the user’s computer, and are transported over a peer-to-peer network. With Beaker’s APIs, applications can ask the user for permission to read/write to a user’s profile.

The best part is that because user data is separate from application code, there’s no one social media app we all have to agree upon. As long as we all structure our data in the same format, we’re each free to use any compatible application.

I work on Beaker because I think it’s the kind of Web we deserve. Keep your eyes peeled for the upcoming 0.8 release, where we’ll be releasing the Web APIs I mentioned above. Or if you live on the bleeding edge, you can try building the development branch. If you do, be sure to check out beaker://timeline :).

Photo by Donna McNiel

The post Moving forward from Netarchical platforms in the post-Weinstein era appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how have we dealt with abuse?

Just kick them out

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a strong culture

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

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

What is culture in such a fragmented space?

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

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

– polite inquiry and clarifying questions

– assertion of what sort of interaction they’d prefer

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

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

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

– clarify our beliefs and who we are

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

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

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

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

Information flows in a peer network

Block them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Medium is the Message

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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