Written by Hank Sohota. Originally posted on Good Audience on 28th January 2019.

A viable, sustainable and scalable P2P sociopolitical economy, which embraces digital and data sovereignty for all agents, is about to emerge. One in which, as a consequence, money and intermediaries — social, political and economic — will no longer play the central, and therefore controlling, role they play today.

Let us start where Bitcoin started

Whatever socially and politically legitimised ‘flavour’ of money operates within a given community, nation or civilisation, it fundamentally shapes the economic, social, and political potential — and therefore possibilities — within those domains.

The Problem with Money

Money — by its very nature a social construct, as it fundamentally relies on people’s confidence in it — has three defining core functions. These are:

1. a store of value (i.e. sufficiently stable in value — and particularly, in people’s confidence in it — over time), which enables it to be …
2. a medium of exchange (i.e. also sufficiently saleable across scales and space), all of which enables it to be …
3. a unit of account

However, in order for money to work at scale, standardisation is also required which, in reality, inevitably means centralisation. Unfortunately, this intrinsically undermines the hardness of money (i.e. it’s ‘uninflatability’*), and the level of confidence people can have in its core functions, because decision-making shifts into the hands of the few. One cannot have sound money without reliable and consistent long-term hardness, as well as confidence-maintaining monetary policy. Regrettably, the few — or in the bygone case of a monarchy, an individual — have a long history of abusing their fiduciary responsibilities on both counts.

So, in order to solve the ‘hardness of money’ and the ‘level of confidence’ problems, we need to solve the centralisation problem, which — applied more broadly — asks:

How do we coordinate, cooperate and collaborate across space and time, at scale, without the need for intermediaries, representatives, executives or organisation-owners?

Arguably, this articulates, for some, the holy grail of anarchy (which should not be assumed to be synonymous with lawlessness, chaos or disorder).

Limitations of Bitcoin and Ethereum

Bitcoin is an attempt at solving the ‘centralisation of hard money’ problem which in the bigger picture is a good place to start. However, it does this by using a distributed ledger of hashchain blocks (giving it immutability), hard coding hardness (giving it uninflatability), and constructing a single network-wide timeline through a decentralised but not fully distributed Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism (giving it ‘uncensorability’*). This provides a form of ‘trustlessness’ by trusting the network rather than any individual entity or actor. Due to its significant practical and philosophical limitations, this approach provides only a partial and impractical solution because it is not distributed enough, not fast enough, not cost effective enough, and not scalable enough. Furthermore, it could push climate change too far in the wrong direction to be worth it, due to its electrical power consumption needs. Unless of course, conversely, it turns out to be a boon for renewable forms of generating electricity by increasing the financial incentives for it, perhaps even leading to green energy infrastructure which otherwise would not be funded. Nonetheless, these shortcomings will still apply even if all the near-to-medium term solutions work out as proposed. Even so, the four key features of Bitcoin*, in its current form, namely, immutability, uninflatability, uncensorability and unconfiscatability, are an historic achievement.

Ethereum, although not necessarily trying to solve the same problem — and not necessarily doing a good job of it — is fundamentally based on the same underlying ledger technology as Bitcoin and so suffers from the same or similar limitations, even before we include its ‘centralisation of power’ issues, its shortcomings as a cryptocurrency relative to Bitcoin, the complications and disadvantages of smart contracts, and its attempt to move to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism*. What Ethereum has done is enable the launching of several thousand Altcoins, none of which seem to make much sense, and nor do their fundamentals give one confidence that they will ever achieve their stated goals. Given that this has taken place in a new asset class and an unregulated market, no one should be surprised by the emergence of a FOMO-FUD wild west, or the role played in it by market makers.

Mutual Self-sovereignty — the foundational core construct of a fair and just sociopolitical economy

In my view, economics should have a strong focus on thrivability in human social systems — viable, sustainable and inclusive thrivability, at scale.

Although I over-simplify, I believe that at the heart of thrivability lies a dialectic in human social systems, that of group solidarity vs. individual sovereignty (cf. the political philosophy divide of left vs. right). Both aspects of this dialectic provide tremendous benefits for the group and the individual, namely, social cohesion leading to better survival odds, but this comes at a price, namely, acquiescence, conformity and homogeneity.

However, I would suggest that solidarity and sovereignty are two sides of the same coin – they mutually and dynamically ‘co-form’ and ‘in-form’ each other, and so co-evolve symbiotically. They constitute a ‘dialectical singularity’ which is brought into ‘harmony’ through mutual self-sovereignty (cf. Yin-Yang; i.e. black and white dynamically interacting with each other at the same time, without either diminishing in identity or the two combining to become a ‘middle’ grey). In this dynamic, both social cohesion and individual sovereignty are both ‘strong and fluid’, at the same time — a concept often referenced in Daoist philosophy using the metaphor of water. I believe it is this perpetual dynamic which leads to the anti-fragility of a human social system. I further believe, it leads to the perpetual emergence of one’s sense of self and one’s sense of identity.

The mutual self-sovereignty challenge

Even solving the centralisation problem — of hard money or more broadly — would not be enough. We need to go further and address ‘the mutual self-sovereignty’ challenge, which can be thought of as:

Not only do I need a viable option of not having to participate in any particular socially mediated ‘game’ played by a particular set of rules, I also need to be able to, easily and permissionlessly, change the rules of the game (i.e. create a forked version — preferably not a sh*tty/scammy one) and invite others to play, or — just as easily and permissionlessly — be able to invent an entirely new game.

Furthermore, and equally importantly, in all such games the rules (i.e voluntary and mutually enabling constraints) must be enforceable and policed in an emergent and self-organising manner by the participants — governance of the people, by the people, for the people — and the rules must respect relativity (i.e. multiple relativistic timelines) — global consensus should not be necessary. Otherwise, we inexorably end up back at the centralisation problem.

All of which means that Bitcoin and Ethereum — specifically their underpinning blockchain technology — are not going to take us where we need to go, in order to address our most pressing global and local challenges. This is because they are not sufficiently workable and do not go far enough although they will have been critical and essential catalysts. Even those who were initially inspired by the distributed ledger technology (DLT) of Bitcoin, as a means of addressing the challenges of enabling a radically new peer-to-peer (P2P) sociopolitical economy — which motivated some in the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities — are now having to recognise, and to concede, these limitations. Hence, the sense of malaise and disillusionment among the Ethereum and Ethereum-esque developers who are not in it for the money.

Holochain and the Post-monetary Economy

Holochain, on the other hand, will take us where we need to get to. It is the first technology, in human history, which genuinely addresses the mutual self-sovereignty challenge, completely and at any scale — in fact, it is inversely scalable, its efficiency and efficacy improve as network size increases — and as an integral component of the MetaCurrency and Ceptr projects, it also pre-dates both Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Holochain provides a bio-mimicry inspired, software-based, enabling social technology — a pattern, if you will — from which can emerge anarchy — life without mass intermediation as a necessity. Thus empowering us to move to a post-monetary epoch with, for example, a multitude of asset-backed mutual credit (crypto)currencies — which on Holochain are natively inter-operable — using a much broader definition of currency (i.e. a formal symbol system for shaping, enabling, and measuring flows — e.g. of value, promises or reputation). A much more enlightened interpretation of Hayekian thinking, I would suggest, than the neo-liberalism version.

A value flow, of any kind, must first be acknowledged and recognised before it can be managed for the better — making visible only GDP-related flows has been a disaster for humanity and the planet, if not potentially catastrophic. Then, and only then, can we begin the work of reinforcing or amplifying interrelated positive flows and mitigating — hopefully eliminating — interrelated negative flows, in an emergent and self-organising way. Thus we can form the basis on which more meaningful, and more humane, wealth and prosperity can be created for the many, perhaps even, for all.

Mass Disintermediation

Despite its long history, for most people, the economic and sociopolitical revolution Holochain will induce will seem like it happened overnight. This is because it is an open source software solution taking place in a digitalised world. It can be deployed at speed, at scale, and at zero marginal cost, using the full range of computational device types from a Raspberry Pi, to a smartphone, to a tablet, or a laptop — even a server — using software development languages and tools which produce secure, compact and fast web and native apps.

The first hApp (Holochain dApp) to be built — using Rust and WASM — is Holo, an hApp for hosting hApps which includes the first ever mutual credit cryptocurrency called Holo Fuel, to reimburse Holo hosts — who with Holo, host hApps using the spare computation and storage capacity on their own devices. This enables hApps to be accessed using a standard browser — such as Holochain favoured Mozilla’s Firefox — through the web, without any change in the user experience. However, even this hosting can be avoided, since any device running Holochain is natively both a user and a host. Holo’s purpose then is to provide a bridge between the current server-based web and the potential longer term server-less — because it is peer-to-peer — Holochain alternative. Ultimately, it should be possible to integrate mesh networkingtoo, which would mean a genuinely and fully distributed internet and web.

Furthermore, Holochain’s data integrity model supports mutual self-sovereignty by having an agent-centric orientation, using sourcechains (think, agent owned hashchains), digital signatures, and validatingdistributed hash tables (think, BitTorrent and GitHub), rather than a data-centric orientation. Thus fully returning value realisation and ownership, as well as privacy and confidentiality, to those actually creating the value locallyrather than intermediaries, representatives, executives or organisation-owners, seeking to extract and monetise it.

The Ultimate Question

Once workable, practical and ubiquitous, mutual self-sovereignty — as a movement — will redefine every dimension of our lives — social, political, economic, artistic and cultural. Most profoundly, it will completely change the nature of the stories we tell ourselves and each other in order to navigate our lives, both intra and inter generationally. In doing so, along with the societal implications of advanced, model-free, deep reinforcement learning AI — not to mention Ceptr and Ceptr-based AI — we will ultimately re-conceive and therefore redefine what we believe it truly means to be human — in the 21st century.

Disclosure: I am financially and philosophically invested in Ceptr/Holochain/Holo. I have never invested in Bitcoin, any alt-coin or crypto asset.

Photo by Freddie Collins on Unsplash

Thanks for reading.

You can share this article using these links: 
Facebook | Twitter | Reddit | LinkedIn | Telegram |Email.

Further reading:

Ceptr/Holochain/Holo Whitepapers

Antonopoulos, M. (2016). The Internet of Money: A collection of talks by Andreas M. Antonopoulos: Volume 1. Merkle Bloom.

Antonopoulos, M. (2017). The Internet of Money Volume Two: A collection of talks by Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Merkle Bloom.

Ammous, S. (2018). The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking. John Wiley & Sons.

* Special thanks to Tone Vays and Murad Mahmudov for so freely sharing their intellectual musings with the public.

The post Beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum — a fairer and more just post-monetary sociopolitical economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

I’m developing this plan in three phases:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, let’s go!

Part 1. Collapse

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

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

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

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

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

Design criteria for action amid collapse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Definition of terms

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

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

1: the Self

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

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

2: the Dyad

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

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

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

3: the Crew

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

4: the Congregation

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

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

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

5: the Crowd

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

There’s an empty space between Self and Crowd

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsolidarity Part 3: The Reciprocity Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, Crews are often dysfunctional

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

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

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

A Sequence to Crystallise new Crews

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Reciprocity Game

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

Level 1: Listening

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

Level 2: Money

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

Level 3: Consistency

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

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

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

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

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

Level 4: Conflict

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

Level 5: Co-owners

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

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

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

Microsolidarity Part 4. An Unorthodox Recipe For Social Change

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

1. Exclusivity

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

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

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

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

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

2. Not for profit but with profit

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

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

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

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

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

3. Do Better Than Good

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

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

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

4. Decentralised governance with not a blockchain in sight.

‘Nuff said.

5. Design for smallness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are! You! With! Me!

Postscript

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

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

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

The Crowd.Law Website

Although legislatures fund the research done in universities, they invest next to nothing in researching and reinventing how they themselves work. Thus, the Governance Lab at New York University is launching the CrowdLaw Research Initiative and website (“CrowdLaw”) to understand the future impact of technology on the lawmaking process, in particular those technologies that enable participation by individuals and groups. We focus on these collective intelligence tools — as distinct from the technology that enables greater legislative transparency — because they offer the potential for a two-way conversation that could channel more and more diverse opinions and expertise into the lawmaking process and may thereby improve the quality of legislation and its efficacy.

The focus is on creating not only more direct, but also more informed democracy. Our work starts from the hypothesis that expertise of all kinds is widely distributed in society and that we can use technology to introduce better information into the legislative process, making it an ongoing conversation and collaborative process.

The Crowd.Law website includes:

1. An in-depth analysis and explanation of CrowdLaw
2. Short case studies of 25 global examples of CrowdLaw initiatives;
3. A Twitter list of leading thinkers and practitioners of CrowdLaw;
4. A bibliography of Selected Readings on CrowdLaw;
5. In-depth design recommendations for designing crowdlaw processes and platforms; and
6. Model language for legislating public engagement in lawmaking.

This work is informed by three online convenings among crowdlaw practitioners from more than a dozen countries1 and a semester-long graduate research project undertaken at Yale University in the Yale Law School’s Clinic on Governance Innovation.

Future CrowdLaw Activities in 2018

The launch of Crowd.Law is only the beginning of a series of activities for the coming year designed to deepen our understanding of CrowdLaw practices, convene the community interested in legislative innovation, pilot additional CrowdLaw experiments in practice and study what works.

To that end, on November 17th, the Madrid Regional Assembly and the Madrid City Council will convene a workshop on CrowdLaw together with the GovLab at NYU and the Harvard Study Group “The challenge to design a technological Agora” designed to investigate potential pilot projects on CrowdLaw for lawmaking at the local and regional level in Spain.

This Spring, the GovLab and multi-disciplinary students from New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering in Governing the City will undertake research for the city council of a large metropolis to map how a bill becomes a law and, in turn, how that law gets implemented into regulations, in an effort to identify the benefits and risks of greater public engagement.

With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Governance Lab will convene political and legal theorists, parliamentarians, platform designs and legislative staff from six continents at the Rockefeller Bellagio Conference Center in Italy in March to explore the theory and practice of public engagement in lawmaking and to set standards for data collection and sharing by parliaments practicing crowdlaw to enable evidence-based research.

Why CrowdLaw?

Today the public, with the exception of interest group lobbyists, has very little impact on governing. There’s a vast literature on the infirmities of the legislative process, which explain the causes that have given rise to poor quality. As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson conclude in Winner Takes All Politics, the multi-billion dollar lobbying machine of organized business that emerged in the 1970s to combat Great Society social programs has captured the political process and continuously pushed through a legislative agenda designed to favor the very rich over the middle class. Their book-length work chronicles the exclusion of the “every man” from politics and the resulting inequality in American society. In David Schoenbrod’s DC Confidential, he lays out the “five tricks” politicians use to take credit while passing the blame and the buck to future generations for their bad legislation. As another studyconcluded: “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”2

The unknown question is whether new forms participation beyond the Ballot Box can, in practice, enhance the legitimacy3 and quality4 of the lawmaking process and remedy what ails it. It is worth noting that these two goals are in often in tension because one focuses on ensuring that all voices are heard and the other on enhancing expertise in the process. There is no right answer as to which is more important. But most experiments with public engagement in law- and policymaking to date have focused on the former to the exclusion of the latter. They have not resulted in any measurable improvements in legislative outcomes. It will be crucial when designing new pilots to experiment with trying to design platforms and processes to achieve both goals at different stages of the lawmaking process.

For example, when parliaments decide what issues to take up (agenda-setting), this may be an opportunity to raise the concerns and problems of the community and for the public to propose, prioritize and critique problems to tackle, as is the case of Finland’s Citizen’s Initiative Act, in which a member of the public can propose new legislation. At this stage, participation has the potential to enhance information and bring empiricism into the legislative process through public contribution of expertise.

When legislative and regulatory bodies arrive at the substance of a solution to a problem (proposal-crafting), this could present the opportunity to identify innovative approaches by leveraging distributed expertise beyond that available from legislators and their staffs and occasional hearings5 and, at the same time, to create a process for gauging public preferences and public opinion in response to proposed solutions. Parlement & Citoyens in France enables citizens to submit proposals on the causes and solutions to a problem posed by a representative. Citizens’ proposals are then synthesized, debated, and incorporated into the resulting draft legislation.

Many of the newer political parties from Podemos in Spain to the Alternative in Denmark have used new technology to invite their constituents to draft the party platform in an effort to assess the opinions of their base and be more responsive to them.

If parliaments distribute the work of monitoring implementation to citizens with camera-phones, for example, this could dramatically increase the ability to evaluate the downstream cost and benefits of legislation on people’s lives and introduce into lawmaking greater empirical rigor, which is typically lacking. 6 7 8 9 10

Yet it is not self-evident that more public participation per se produces wiser or more just laws. There are countless instances to the contrary, including notable recent plebiscites. Rather than improve the informational quality of legislation, opening up decision-making may end up empowering some more than others and enable undue influence by special interests. More direct participation could lead to populist rule with negative outcomes for civil liberties. Legislatures are rightly slow to implement public engagement, fearing that participation will be burdensome, at worst, and useless at best.

To counter these risks and realize the benefits, there is an urgent need for systematic experimentation and assessment to inform and guide how legislatures engage with the public to collect, analyze and use information as part of the lawmaking process. But if we want to get beyond conventional democratic models of representation or referendum, and evolve how we legislate, this requires knowledge of how more participation might help to improve the legitimacy and the effectiveness of lawmaking.

Endnotes:

[1] “Toward More Inclusive Lawmaking: What We Know & Still Most Need to Know About Crowdlaw,” The Governance Lab, June 4, 2014, http://thegovlab.org/toward-more-inclusive-lawmaking-what-we-know-still-most-need-to-know-about-crowdlaw/. “Expanding Insights — #Crowdlaw Session 2 Highlights Need for Experimentation & Collaboration,” The Governance Lab, June 24, 2014, http://thegovlab.org/expanding-insights-crowdlaw-session-2-highlights-need-for-experimentation-collaboration/. “#CrowdLaw — On the Verge of Disruptive Change… Designing to Scale Impact,” The Governance Lab, December 4, 2015, http://thegovlab.org/expanding-insights-crowdlaw-session-2-highlights-need-for-experimentation-collaboration/

[2] Gilens, M., & Page, B. (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. Perspectives on Politics, 12(3), 564–581. doi:10.1017/S1537592714001595.

[3] Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman and Henry Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

[4] Nam, “Suggesting frameworks of citizen-sourcing via Government 2.0,” 18.

[5] John Wilkerson, David Smith and Nicholas Stramp, “Tracing the Flow of Policy Ideas in Legislatures: A Text Reuse Approach,” American Journal of Political Science 59:4 (January 2015): 943–956.

[6] “Initial Findings from Pará,” MIT Center for Civic Media, last modified May 2017, http://promisetracker.org/2017/05/23/initial-findings-from-para/.

[7] Janet Tappin Coelho, “Rio de Janeiro Citizens to Receive New App to Record Police Violence in City’s Favelas,” Independent, March 5 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rio-de-janeiro-citizens-to-receive-new-app-to-record-police-violence-in-citys-favelas-a6914716.html

[8] Martina Björkman Nyqvist, Damien de Walque and Jakob Svensson, “The Power of Information in Community Monitoring,” J-PAL Policy Briefcase (2015). Available at: https://www.povertyactionlab.org/sites/default/files/publications/Community%20Monitoring_2.pdf

[9] Dennis Linders, “From e-Government to We-Government: Defining a Typology for Citizen Coproduction in the Age of Social Media,” Government Information Quarterly 29:4 (October 2012): 446–454. Available at: http://www.academia.edu/27417288/From_e-government_to_we-government_Defining_a_typology_for_citizen_coproduction_in_the_age_of_social_media

[10] Tiago Piexoto and Jonathan Fox, “When Does ICT-Enabled Citizen Voice Lead to Government Responsiveness?” Institute of Development Studies Bulletin 41:1 (January 2016): 28. Available at: http://pubdocs.worldbank.org/en/835741452530215528/WDR16-BP-When-Does-ICT-Enabled-Citizen-Voice-Peixoto-Fox.pdf

Re-posted from the GovLab blog.

The post Legislature 2.0: CrowdLaw and the Future of Lawmaking 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.

“On 20 July 2016, something happened that was arguably the most philosophically interesting event to take place in your lifetime or mine.”

The above quote is undoudbtedly hyperbole if you’re not a geek, but nevertheless, last year’s conflict around Ethereum and The DAO, which punctured the anarcho-capitalist utopia of a trustless society, was a milestone for the understanding of technological systems and their embeddedness in human value systems. Rather than aiming for trustlessness and the atomization of individuals in automated market systems, we should focus our efforts on building systems based on trust between humans, on community building, and on the centrality of the commons.

This article gives details around last year’s DAO crisis around a central theme: Blockchains don’t offer us a trustless system, but rather a reassignment of trust!

Excerpted from E J Spode:

“Such are the perils of supposedly trust-free technology. It might make for good marketing copy, but the fact of the matter is that blockchain technology is larded through with trust. First, you need to trust the protocol of the cryptocurrency and/or DAO. This isn’t as simple as saying ‘I trust the maths’, for some actual human (or humans) wrote the code and hopefully debugged it, and we are at least trusting them to get it right, no? Well, in the case of The DAO, no, maybe they didn’t get it right.

Second, you have to trust the ‘stakeholders’ (including miners) not to pull the rug out from under you with a hard fork. One of the objections to the hard fork was that it would create a precedent that the code would be changeable. But this objection exposes an unmentioned universal truth: the immutability of the blockchain is entirely a matter of trusting other humans not to fork it. Ethereum Classic Classic would be no more immutable than Etherum Classic, which was no more immutable than Ethereum. At best, the stakeholders – humans all – were showing that they were more trustworthy qua humans about not forking around with the blockchain. But at the same time, they obviously could change their minds about forking at any time. In other words, if Ethereum Classic is more trustworthy, it’s only because the humans behind it are.

Third, if you are buying into Ethereum or The DAO or any other DAO, you are being asked to trust the people who review the algorithm and tell you what it does and whether it’s secure. But those people – computer scientists, say – are hardly incorruptible. Just as you can bribe an accountant to say that the books are clean, so too can you bribe a computer scientist. Moreover, you’re putting your trust in whatever filters you applied to select that computer scientist. (University or professional qualifications? A network of friends? The testimonials of satisfied customers – which is to say, the same method by which people selected Bernie Madoff as their financial advisor.)

Finally, even if you had it on divine authority that the code of a DAO was bug-free and immutable, there are necessary gateways of trust at the boundaries of the system. For example, suppose you wrote a smart contract to place bets on sporting events. You still have to trust the news feed that tells you who won the match to determine the winner of the bet. Or suppose you wrote a smart contract under which you were to be delivered a truck full of orange juice concentrate. The smart contract can’t control whether or not the product is polluted by lemons or some other substance. You have to trust the humans in the logistics chain, and the humans at the manufacturing end, to ensure your juice arrives unadulterated.

Can’t these gateways to the system be trustless as well? Can’t smart contracts some day have code to call for robotic orange-pickers and robotic juice concentrate-makers who would summon their robotically driven trucks to deliver the orange juice concentrate straight to our door? Yes – in theory. But imagine the task of reviewing the code to ensure that every step in the process hadn’t been corrupted by a bug that uses security failures to highjack trucks, or that gives false approvals to adulterated orange juice. Perhaps we could write second-order programs to automate the testing of the first-order programs – but why do we trust those? Do we ultimately need automated automated-program-tester testers? Where does it end?

By now, the answer should be obvious: it ends with other humans. Blockchains don’t offer us a trustless system, but rather a reassignment of trust. Instead of trusting our laws and institutions, we are being asked to trust stakeholders and miners, and programmers, and those who know enough coding to be able to verify the code. We aren’t actually trusting the blockchain technology; we are trusting the people that support the blockchain. The blockchain community is certainly new and different, and it talks a good game of algorithms and hashing power, which at least sounds better than tired slogans such as Prudential is rock solid and You are in good hands with Allstate. But miners aren’t necessarily any more reliable than the corporations they replace.

The sorry case of The DAO raises another question: Why are people so eager to put their faith in blockchain technology and its human supporters, instead of in other social and economic organisations? The upheavals of 2016, from Brexit to Trump, suggest that there is widespread fatigue with traditional institutions. Governments can be bought. Banks are designed to service the wealthy, and to hell with the little guy. ‘The system is rigged’ is a common refrain.

But instead of targeting the moral failures of the system and trying to reform it, the very concept of ‘trust’ has become suspect. Blockchain enthusiasts tend to cast trust as little more than a bug in our network of human interactions. To be sure, one of the weird features of trusting relationships is that, in order to trust someone, there has to be some chance that they will fail you. Trust involves risk – but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Which brings us back to Buterin and the hard fork of The DAO. What made this event significant was not just what it demonstrated about the foibles of technology or the hubris of 20-something computer scientists. What it really exposed was the extent to which trust defines what it is to be human. Trust is about more than making sure I get my orange juice on time. Trust is what makes all relationships meaningful. Yes, we get burned by people we rely on, and this makes us disinclined to trust others. But when our faith is rewarded, it helps us forge closer relationships with others, be they our business partners or BFFs. Risk is a critical component to this bonding process. In a risk-free world, we wouldn’t find anything resembling intimacy, friendship, solidarity or alliance, because nothing would be at stake.

Perhaps we ought to reconsider the desire to expunge trust, and instead focus on what should be done to strengthen it. One way to support trust is to hold institutions accountable when they betray it. When the US Department of Justice, for example, elected not to prosecute any of the bankers responsible for the 2008 financial collapse, the net effect was to undermine confidence in the system. They debased the principle of trust by showing that violating the public’s faith could be cost-free.

Much of our system of trust is invisible to us – but it would be helpful if we could be more aware and appreciative all the same

Second, trusting relationships should be celebrated, not scorned. When we believe in someone and they betray us, our friends might call us a sucker, an easy mark, a loser. But shouldn’t we celebrate these efforts to trust others – just as entrepreneurs talk up the value of failure on the road to innovation? Isn’t the correct response along the lines of: ‘I see why you trusted them, but isn’t it is terrible that they let you down?’

Third, we should appreciate the trusting relations we engage in, and are rewarded by, every day. We’re constantly relying on others to help us with something or look after our financial affairs, and much of the time we simply take it for granted. In part, that’s because much of our system of trust is invisible to us – but it would be helpful if we could be more aware and appreciative all the same.

Finally, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves with the idea that a technological fix can replace the human dimension of trust. Automation of trust is illusory. Rather than disparaging and cloaking human trust, we should face the brutal truth: we can’t escape the need to rely on other people, as fallible and imperfect as they might be. We need to nurture and nourish trust – not throw it away, like so much debased and worthless currency.”

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