Gillis presents a compelling explanation for the ineffectiveness of many political organizations, focused on some of the inescapable artifacts of human communication. Paraphrasing some of the salient points:

• Knowledge problems: language is a lossy codec for communicating our internal experiences to other agents, leaving an immense gap between words and meanings.
• Computation problems: tools like wikis and markets are subject to the massive efficiency gains of concurrency as they decentralize communication both in time and space. But most radical organizations prefer consensus meetings, which are severely constrained by the extremely low bandwidth channel of sequential one-at-a-time utterances.
• Tribalism: in organizations, the cognitive biases and psychological needs of most humans act as a constant pressure to prioritise the self-preservation of our collective identities ahead of measurable progress towards shared aims.

However, while the critique is illuminating, I found myself unsatisfied, wishing that they had offered more light at the end of the tunnel. Frankly, I don’t care for critique without reconstruction.

Through my work at Loomio I’m connected with social movements around the world, as they use our collective decision-making software. These international connections give me great optimism, as I see new developments in organizing strategy and digital technology overcoming the limitations outlined in Gillis’ talk. Optimism is more fun when you share it, so I wanted to document two cases that I think are worth emulating.

The movements I’m most inspired by are inspiring precisely because of their combined competencies in organizational and technological development. Namely, they’re:

1. The international municipalists informally headquartered in Spain.
2. The conservative anarchists building new democratic forms in Taiwan.

Organized citizens in Spain have made an extraordinary demonstration of the necessity of making uncomfortable coalitions (they talk about “complicated majorities”). You see this when distinct organisations temporarily coordinate in service of one shared issue, disbanding after victory. Radical leftists are working shoulder-to-shoulder with organised labour, with immigrant groups, with progressive politicians and social entrepreneurs. Stacco Troncoso credits this practice of coalition-building as the primary factor in keeping the far right mostly out of action in Spain. It’s hard to fuel the hate-fires between tribes when they are being continuously reminded of their shared interests, and continuously invited into acts of mutual aid (e.g. the old unemployed factory worker loses some of his xenophobia when the immigrants show up to prevent his home eviction).

Another uncomfortable coalition you see in Spanish cities is the collaboration between A) the people who understand the state apparatus as a means of redirecting civil unrest it into channels that support the status quo, and B) the people who understand the state apparatus as one of the most effective levers in catalysing social change. In most parts of the world, this is a boring argument between radicals and liberals, an endless ping pong match where each team claims to have the One True Strategy while the Evil Others are undermining the struggle. In Spain activists have made peace with this tension, courageously taking the reins of institutional power while maintaining the grassroots mandate and accountability. For example, the most radical political conference I’ve been to was mindblowing not just because the speakers were incredible, but especially when you consider the event was hosted by the same people who run the Barcelona city government.

To name this tension between street movements and institutional power, in Madrid they coined the term extituion: “If institutions are organizational systems based on an inside-outside framework, extitutions are designed as areas where a multitude of agents can spontaneously assemble.” (The same author has named Cooperation Jackson as a U.S. example of the same phenomenon.)

All of this extremely promising organisational innovation is enmeshed with technological innovation. I’m immensely encouraged by the deep collaboration between political scientists and computer scientists that I’ve seen in Spain, which holds a rigorous critique of proprietary “sharing economy” and “smart cities” software, while also prototyping tools for direct democracy.

Similarly, you see elements of the same “organizational + technological innovation” recipe at play in Taiwan. In 2014 their occupy movement won. Since then they’ve been dramatically reformatting the government, moving beyond political parties, and deploying technology for mass citizen participation in law-making. This 4-minute video from queer open source hacker turned movement spokesperson turned digital minister Audrey Tang is a great introduction.

In Taiwan as in Spain, the credibility of the new political actors is rooted in the streets. Second, those actors have deployed a rigorous political strategy, systematically making allies throughout the public & private sectors, and civil society. The folks from vTaiwan told me how they interviewed every state official they could find and used the results to map out which government departments were most ready to concede decision-making power to citizens. Then they used those early engagements as leverage, playing departments off each other in a competition for who could be the most participatory. That is the kind of strategic genius that could be repeated the world over.

On the tech front, you see a dual strategy: comprehensive research of existing tools, plus regular hackathons for developing new tools. Perhaps the best-documented example of this approach is the vTaiwan Uber case, where Uber drivers, taxi drivers, citizens, and officials efficiently found the region of their agreement using a combination of face-to-face deliberation and digital sentiment mapping using .

Perhaps most importantly, these processes are being hosted by people who appreciate the immense skill required to facilitate multi-stakeholder deliberation, who are up-to-speed with the palette of tools available, and who are pre-emptively mitigating the risks of “open-washing”.

In 4 years of hobby-horsing, I’ve met exactly 2 other westerners who were familiar with the Taiwan story before I told them about it. I realise I sound like a stuck record. I feel like I’m in a little bubble where nobody seems to care much about these stories. I don’t know who else is capturing the lessons, building the transnational networks, and remixing strategies into their local context. So I’m confused, like, am I an early adopter way ahead of the curve, or am I making a mountain of a molehill, or am I just hanging out with the wrong people?

Photo by speedbug

The post Organizing Beyond Organizations: Good News Stories from Spain and Taiwan appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In the years since, Taiwan has seen dramatic changes. Policymakers have been using open-source tools, including Pol.is, to crowdsource feedback for policies on ride-hailing apps, among other things. Another social movement, driven by the same tools and decentralized organizing methods as the Sunflower Movement, resulted in the country deciding to shut down all of its nuclear power plants by 2025.

With the election of President Tsai Ing-wen last year — a social progressive who vowed a “new era” of democracy — Taiwan has become a leader in tech policy and transparency. In fact, one of the leaders of the digital movement, Audrey Tang, was appointed head of a new council on digital policy, and describes herself as a “hacker minister.”

At the forefront of Taiwan’s digital movement is the unique, open-source community called g0v. Initially they came to prominence for creating alternative versions of Taiwanese Government websites, replacing the .gov with a .g0v and making data about ministries, budgets, and finances more transparent to Taiwanese citizens.

We had an offline and online discussion with several members of the g0v community to learn more about how they operate, their unique projects, and how they plan to help other communities across Asia and the world better build powerful, digital-driven social movements.

Note: Chihao Yo, Yun-Chen Chien, and two other members of g0v participated in this conversation, but emphasized that they do not, themselves speak for, or represent g0v, keeping in line with the values of the community. More on this below.

Can you tell us a bit about how g0v operates — your governance structure, how decisions are made, and how you communicate within your network?

First of all, g0v does not have a “governance” structure. We consider ourselves as a community rather than an organization. Like other open-source tech communities, we believe everyone is equal to participate in the community. We welcome every citizen to join any projects since all our projects are all open online, including codes, documents, videos, and images, etc.

So how does it work? Online, we throw up our projects ideas, discuss thoughts, and look for collaboration in our Facebook group, our Slack group, our IRC channel, our hackpad workspace and our GitHub repository. Offline, we host at least one hackathon every two months, around 120 participants each time, and also host two international summits to connect to the global civic tech hackers.

We are a multi-centered community, which means anyone can initiate any projects and host hackathons on any topics in any forms. We believe in openness and collaboration. Every Facebook fan page posts will be reviewed by the community before released. Any lecture invitation will be send to a Google group, and the lecture slides will be open licensed.

This is to address this, and all the questions raised in this pad, that principle #0 of the g0v community is that no one is or represents the g0v community. I personally believe that this principle is key in keeping this community open and egalitarian.

What would you consider some of your biggest, or more meaningful achievements?

G0v’s “being here” for the past years and its evolution is very meaningful to me and, hopefully, the larger Taiwanese society. I think it has restored faith in people about their capacity to adapt and bring about change by empowering them to self-organize and “make things happen.”

What are some of the most exciting, or most promising, projects that you are working on right now?

chihao: I’m working on a project called “dipSpace.” It is an open-source content management system for contemporary journalism. Some other exciting g0v projects include No More Silence, Laweasyread, Taiglme. You can see them all here: http://g0v.tw/en-US/project-from-registry.html.

Though g0v is probably leading in innovations, it seems like other organizations with similar goals are emerging elsewhere in Asia. Can you tell me if, and how you’re working with activists and hackers in other countries?

The g0v community has a good relationship with civic hackers around the globe, not limited in Asia, for example, Code for America and mysociety in the U.K. g0v also participates in Open Government Partnership in Paris in 2016, sharing civic tech tools and experience in open government. There are also always foreign participants in our hackathon.

Speaking of Asia, g0v summits have invited speakers from South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Myanmar etc. g0v.news also aims to cover more civic tech stories in Asia in both English and Chinese, for example, fellowships in Japan and Pakistan and joint website to dismiss President Park [Geun-hye] in South Korea.

Other ongoing projects include cyber-security workshops for NGO workers in Asia, one long-stay staff from Malaysia, and the Civic Tech Fest in September.

Are there any lessons g0v can offer the platform co-op movement in terms of collaboratively organizing/mobilizing large groups of people?

Be open. Release early, release often. Troll hugging. We don’t organize people. We just encourage everyone to take actions. We create the atmosphere and platform that everybody can contribute something by clear and open documentation on project process, what kind of help the project needs. g0v’s motto is, “Don’t ask why nobody did this, admit you are the nobody first.” When you start to do something good and influential, people will join you. If they feel accepted and accomplishment, they will continue to contribute their knowledge and passion. After all, we are all citizens believing in using technology to better democracy and society.

Cross-posted from Shareable.

All photos courtesy of g0v

The post Meet g0v, the Open-source, Digital Community Transforming Democracy in Taiwan appeared first on P2P Foundation.