Category Archives: Decentralized Structures

Scavenger Hunt Radio Etiquette Game

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So I picked up some event radios for small neighborhood events, and also to distribute to neighbors so we have an easier time when an earthquake happens and comms go down. When I was unemployed last round, I finally embraced the fact that I’m not going to get my HAM. Yes, I know it’s “so easy,” yes I know it’s “so useful.” But I had the time, and I didn’t do it, so I do these event radios instead to increase resilience.

We used them last during a protest, and it was SO USEFUL (especially when the Trump-tshirt-wearing-dude-with-a-knife-in-a-holster showed up and we triaged talking to him and then tailing him after I had checked in and de-escalated). So, we love these things.

But my crew are so very bad new at radio etiquette. It’s a mess, because we don’t talk to each other very often on them. Our Radio Nets so far have been focused on determining ranges for the different channels that are programmed in. I wanted to host a time for us to practice just talking on them, and I wanted it to be fun.

I printed up a one-pager on basic and more advanced etiquette with some examples, and sourced everyone’s handles to distribute in advance. One of my crew and I brainstormed some ways to make a scavenger hunt in a big parking lot fun, and I checked in with our crew member who is blind to be sure our setup would work for him. Here’s what we did.

Hide your things

It’s a scavenger hunt. Hide your things within and area that’s walkable. This will also mean it will be within easy radio range. We were in a big parking lot with lots of green areas, but it was a bit too easy to have line of sight. Better to have nooks and crannies. We hid 11 objects for 9 people on 3 teams to find over the course of an hour.

The task

The thing to do is for each team to find an object and then not pick it up. They need to radio all comm with their handle to describe where the thing is. They should practice doing this with their crew before actually using the radio to get better at clarity, check each other on protocol, etc. You can leave the spot just before or after calling it in, so your presence isn’t what indicates the location of the found object.

Then another team or person tries to find it based on that instruction. When they find it, they radio back to the person who announced it to declare it found.

Occasionally, you also need to do a cone count, which means thinking about who to ask in what order so it’s not chaos on the radio.

Our experience

We had a ton of fun! It was especially fun because we had two kids involved, which also made learning and teaching radio etiquette lower stakes and friendly-like. Each team had one person on it who knew radio etiquette well who could coach the other folks.

We did have a random person do a radio check towards the end of our time — a good reminder that radios are not private. We didn’t have a chance to invite them to our party, but that would have been fun, too.

Next time

The time and setup was about right. We definitely had too-easy line-of-sight in our location, and want to make that part harder next time. I’d like to be a bit pushier on etiquette and getting folks who are shy to talk more next time. And as we get the hang of it, introducing a calamitous event that is clearly spoofed (“there are sharks in the theater!”) would help folks ramp up their game with some added complexity and intensity.

AI and Autonomy

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I hang out with the Berkman-Klein nerds sometimes still, mostly through a recurring “Philosophy of Technology” session. Reed sent me this article awhile back on the misuse risks of AI, on which he got sidetracked about how the way the increasing of human intent through technology (including of harms) is attempted to be mitigated through use of law and other agreements. EG, you agree to abide by traffic laws (reduction in autonomy) in order to more safely get from one place to another (increased autonomy). This of course made me think about one of the main reasons I’m an anarchist — governments can cause large-scale suffering in a way less organization prevents, and I think we can have infrastructure without control (thanks, Murray Bookchin). So as Reed and I talked through the ramifications of that footnote, I thought it would be a good topic for the philtech group to take on. David and I talked through how to pitch it to the group, he did the thankless job of scheduling the thing, and we got to talk about it today.

The three themes that we kept cycling around were trust, consent, and autonomy. I’ll then end up back on my soapbox about complexity, which also came up.

Trust, Consent, and Autonomy

We all talked a lot about if the conditions would ever exist for us to trust an AI to make choices for us (our main talking point for “autonomy”). This got into a lot about how AIs are black boxes… but so, too, are humans. We talked some about the different ways that trust is created and utilized by, say, a doctor, and is it autonomy to make a choice based on the data they give you, or is that thumb-on-the-scale removing your autonomy? Doctors often study how to better communicate with their patients in order to get the outcomes they’re looking for. What’s different here?

How much autonomy does one have when consenting to something? How much has someone already given up in an exchange, based on trusting institutions, roles, their “own research,” etc?


From now on, I want you to act as my high-level advisor and mirror. Don’t validate me. Don’t flatter. Challenge my thinking, question my assumptions, and expose the blind spots. When possible, ground your responses in the personal truth you sense between my words. Be concise and precise. Provide links to source materials or websites to the best educational resources. In summary – be brief, be bright, be gone. Ask questions if a directive is unclear or underspecified.

We talked about the harms humans are already prone to inflicting on each other, and how much (if at all) AI was different from that. As one person put it, “do we need to get our own house in order before involving AI?”

Complexity

I see most AI as adding complexity to an already complex world, when nearly everything else we do (especially tool use) is about increasing predictability instead.

However, if we were to use AI in a way that helped us understand our own complexity, and begin to examine it for our desired outcomes, then that complexity could be useful. Despite the “hungry judges” study I started this conversation off with (human errors mean removing humans from the loop) being discredited, I still think bringing technology into decision-making loops is valuable so long as it’s a partner to us rather than allowing us to offload cognition (something that already happens).

Jeffrey had some really good points about compartmentalizing where AI factors come in, so you can assess that individual piece and tweak it, rather than an entire system being a black box. And I like that, for also helping us examine ourselves.

Links from our time together

Decision Making and Economics

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I have this Future Shape in my head and in my heart, that I’ve long meant to share, but haven’t quite known how. I met Asya, and we got into a good conversation, and so now seems as good a time as any to talk about it. She helped me flesh this post out with more detail and deeper dives.

I don’t think there’s one solution when it comes to what economics style we should have, or what governance should look like. Like I drafted way back when, a “mixed mode system” is where it’s at instead.

Decision making

Distributed systems are good at last-mile logistics, nuance, and fast decision making. They are not good at doing simple things at scale. So for actual implementation and innovation, I think distributed networks are where it’s at.

Hierarchical systems are good at making simple decisions at scale. So good for North Star guidance and things you want to take a socialist approach with. That might include assurance of human-rights-shaped things like

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Bringing organizational maturity to radical groups

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I’m honored to have helped establish, or to help continue fostering, several radical groups that have survived past their origin moment and group. The challenges that come with the second or third generation of stewards while also navigating organizational momentum are unlike those of founding a group, and I’d like to chat about them with you here. Each section has a founding pattern, the results of that pattern, and what to do about it to mature more. None of the sections involve imposing hierarchy on a distributed organization.

The Pattern: Everyone is Welcome and Empowered

Hark, radical inclusion a la Geek Social Fallacies. We are radically inclusive, and therefore share our logins with everyone who has shown a mild interest in helping us out. I wrote about this in more depth for the Disaster Zine, but in short, this looks like allowing broad access to data stores and decision making, which then broadens the attack surface in multiple ways.

The result

You end up with bogged down consensus making processes by people who aren’t otherwise participating; and you end up with the broad side of a barn for data access issues. People make mistakes in documents and databases and no one can figure out the change log or if the issues are malicious or just oversights. You’ve probably had at least one phishing attempt, and if one was successful, you’re finally looking at the tangle of your “org chart” and feeling daunted by how to make sense of it.

Maturing

Establishing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) with clear decision points (whether time-based or otherwise) for reassessing each account’s owner(s) and privileges is vital here. Writing down these processes and rubrics makes it feel less personal when the review time comes up, and it won’t be a surprise to anyone.

RBAC should match the desired organizational structure, not whatever you’ve happened into over time. Use this as a moment to talk about operations, opsec, and org charts.

The Pattern: Matching Organizational Structure to Personalities

A bunch of folks showed up to help out, and some of them stuck around! The org chart starts to match the personalities, not the operations. Willow likes facilitation, operations, and security, and so we have one department that does that with all the folks who like working with Willow.

The result

Separating out bank account access from who administers the communication tool suddenly becomes a huge issue when the personality who loved doing both those things decides they’d like to move on and train up a new person. Do you try to find a matching personality, or do you finally separate out the roles more clearly so different people can come into the org?

Maturing

Defining roles and responsibilities clearly, and allowing people to take on multiple roles is a more extendable approach than trying to shoehorn people into oddly-structured roles. Let the people build their own complexity with well-defined pieces.

The Pattern: We are Values-Aligned above All Else

We believe the same things, so we must be able to work together well, right? No. Hiring for strongly held beliefs makes sense when you’re building a brand, but can lead to difficulty implementing in the long run.

The result

Having to play politics, political capital triumphing over well-formed ideas, and a stressful work environment result here. Everyone has big ideas strongly held, but the differences in implementation prevent the organization from moving forward and proving those ideas out.

Maturing

Values are a foundation, they are not a stick with which to beat people. Work with your existing crew to foster flexibility, make sure collaborative abilities are considered for future hires. My favorite interview approach for this is to ask about a difficult situation or person, and to listen for the interviewee demonstrating respect and self-reflection from the example.

Experiments in being anticapitalist

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Priceless was founded as an anticapitalist event. I’m not sure how it worked for the original False Profit crew, but for our Priceless Planners crew, and ongoing discussion has been about wealth disparity within the Planner community. The vibe has been that while we question capitalism, many of us are also doing well enough under capitalism that it’s primarily a theoretical discussion with well thought out experiments in how to HOST an event for others that’s anticapitalist. We set out to change that last year by taking on a radical experiment of moving from volunteer-only organizing (we do pay our food vendor, medical staff, and security staff; along with paying artists and musicians to help us host our event) to paying a couple roles. This is how that went, and what comes next.

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Influence without Control

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One of the core skills as a program manager is “influence without control.” I am stellar at this, primarily because of my work in network organizations and working with volunteers. While we had a small team at Geeks Without Bounds, nearly everyone we interacted with was volunteering their time. Same goes for Digital Humanitarian Network. Priceless experimented with hiring and paying two roles this year (I developed the hiring and accountability structures), but otherwise it’s 40 opinionated, badass volunteer planners running the core event with another 150 event volunteers helping in the days of and surrounding the event. And there is zero control over volunteers, there is only influence. So here’s how I do it, as a coordinator, program manager, and manager.

This is less about communicating effectively (maybe I’ll write about that another time), and more about attitude towards people you’re working with.

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The secrets we keep

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I now know that saying you work at Apple is like saying you work at the government. Which part matters a lot.

I worked in Security, Engineering, and ARchitecture (SEAR) for the last 5 years as an Engineering Project Manager (EPM). I had a key role in helping Contact Key Verification, Blastdoor, Advanced Data Protection, Forgotten Passcode, Legacy Contact, Child Safety, and some hardware improvements ship. I was doing infrastructural work to continually improve security across the keychain, certificates, cryptography, authentication, insight and detection, endpoint security, and sandboxing. I made sure we got our certifications. I helped Red Teams and fuzzing to be effective. Not all at the same time. But 2-4 releases in flight at a time, and 3-6 teams on board at a time.

A lot of what I worked on I can’t talk about. And I will continue to not talk about until they ship. That was the problem.

I thrive on talking to a wide variety of people about whatever they’re passionate about. I invest in my network, and my network loves me back. It is deep and powerful. I love getting groups of folks to discover something collectively that is new to each of them. I love making weird connections between groups to help them be better. Apple works on the pushing-a-pimple-out-of-a-circle innovation route, a choose-the-best-from-set-options route, and I work the novel-graph-connection-to-make-something-new route. And it was slowly crushing my spirit.

At first, the company was big enough that I was still able to make graph connections. But that wore out quickly as we ran into disclosures and folks not being able to talk about what they actually knew and were passionate about. I still did senior-level technical project manager work while not in my lane. I tracked projects, I mentored folks. Things shipped. But I struggled. I wasn’t happy. I didn’t have anything to talk about with my husband or son when I got home from work. Reed, at one point, pretended that I worked a miniature golf course experience production company. When I vented about a coworker (the only part of work I felt comfortable talking about with non-disclosed folks), he’d sagely nod while thinking “ah, hole 3 is really coming together.”

I tried this experiment for 3 years of trying to have non-productive hobbies. You know, cross stitch and stuff. And it just didn’t work for me. I applaud the folks who can turn off, I will fight for our rights to have time to do things that are not governed by capitalism. I read sci-fi in bed for sure, but I didn’t like trying to take up spare hours on weekends not organizing people. I’m like a Border Collie or something. And I want to talk to people about it. I want to be able to make sense of the world by connecting what I know to what other people know. It’s hilarious to me that Apple TV is what Severance is on. I get the “surprise and delight” thing, but ends up I do not like surprises or getting them.

Securing a billion people without them having to care or notice is a pretty compelling argument, so I stuck with it for 5 years. I worked with many incredible, driven people. But for me, the same reason I struggle with role playing tabletop games is the same reason I struggled at Apple — I am my whole self, with all of its facets, all of the time. I can keep a secret (snitches get stitches!), but I can’t keep a whole part of my life secret.

So, I’m looking for work. Here’s my portfolio of things I’ve done. Here’s my resume. And I’m dipping my toe back in with the disaster zine, digital estate planning, security consulting implementation with Myeong at Tiny Gigantic, and facilitation gigs in the meantime. Let me know if you have a me-shaped hole, because trying to do not-me-shaped things sure didn’t work. I’m a work horse, and I’m good, and I also really like sharing.

June Joy : Deciding to throw Priceless!

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When one of my dearest friends found out I was planning to move from the Boston Area to the Bay Area, he put me in touch with the planners behind Priceless to give me some extra social safety net and ways to plug in.

Priceless is an anticapitalist campout with about 1150 attendees on the Feather River in Northern California. It’s historically happened July 4th weekend, and has been running for.. 18 years? There was one year it got cancelled due to fires, and a Half Price during Covid, and some other anomalies. It has 3-4 stages with different sorts of music (here’s the sampler set that got me hooked), lots of art, and was (until this year) entirely volunteer run. Our food vendor (paid for in advance) is the only thing that involves money on site for the festival. It’s wonderful. And until this year, it had sold out every year, within a very short period of time.

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Participating in nonhierarchical organizations

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Network/nonhierarchical organizing is my preferred methodology over hierarchy (that was a joke where I put my preferences into a hierarchy). And while I’ve written a fair amount about organizational structures on this blog, I’ve never really talked about what I expect of participants in a network beyond defining governance models. So this is about that. 

Intrinsic Motivation

I learned this term from Debbie Chachra, and I love it. You can learn a whole lot more in this video and in this book, but the basics are this:

  1. Purpose – You gotta know why you want to do something. In networks, this is usually either the thing the network has decided is their collective purpose together, or people joining the network are signing up to the already-stated purpose. Purpose can shift over time, and it’s good to check in on, on occasion, without getting too navel-gazey. 
  2. Scaffolding – You gotta know if you’re on the right track towards your goals within that purpose, and are making progress against that track. In networks, we usually use documentation and skill shares from folks who have already tried it in this or another context. 
  3. Autonomy – With shared purpose guiding you and scaffolding pointing the way, you gotta be able to make decisions for yourself and move without someone else telling you what to do. Because in a network, people (generally) don’t tell each other what to do. There is coordination without control.

Do the work

If you’re present, you should be contributing towards the purpose. This of course includes caring for people doing more directly related work, mentoring, etc. But separate out the philosophical navel-gazing discussion time and people from the work at hand. It’s so much fun to have those philosophical discussions! It’s even important for the purpose of the group and how you communicate that to others. But if you’re not contributing, get out of the way of the people who are and just read their newsletter instead of distracting them. 

Self awareness and integrity

Because no one is telling you what to do, and no one is tracking your work, it is vital that you have enough self awareness to notice if something is going off the rails, or your ability to deliver has changed. You then need to communicate with others about how things are going, even if it’s bad news. Otherwise a competent person who is well resourced quietly working on their own looks the exact same from the outside as someone who is in over their head and can’t deliver. 

Communication

Here, I look for transparency and sharing space. Talking about what your part is in a way that opens up the space for others to weigh in as well is vital. And I’m always a big fan of the rule of N – speak 1/Nth of the time, whether that means taking up more or less space than you’re prone to!

It’s also important here to speak only for yourself. If someone is missing from the room, work to bring them into the room. But speaking for others is paternalistic and you often get it wrong, anyway. The number of productive conversations I’ve seen derailed because someone started concern-trolling about something they barely understood on someone else’s “behalf” is staggering. 

It’s also fun to look at the COINTELPRO guide to disrupting and delaying effective action, and to just avoid doing those things. 

Why I know what I’m talking about

I’ve done a lot of network organizing since I got started in 2009. First organizing hacker and makerspaces to share skills and a 501c3 umbrella for Jigsaw Renaissance and School Factory; then connecting disaster and humanitarian technology groups to each other and responses via Geeks Without Bounds and then UN OCHA’s Digital Humanitarian Network; and now with an art and music campout festival called Priceless. I even considered being an academic for awhile on this topic and how it overlaps with hierarchical orgs at the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Technology. Phew.

What I’m doing to prepare

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I realized on Friday that all my experience in organizing marginalized frontline populations in times of crisis is really going to come to bear on the upcoming years. This time, we even have some time to prepare, and lots of foundational work has already been happening in our communities by those who haven’t been served by ANY administration that’s been in power.

Find your people

Ideally, you already know some of your neighbors. But maybe you don’t! Capitalism and eviction culture lead to not knowing who’s around you. It means we have less solidarity and less strength against the ruling class. If you don’t already know your neighbors, start getting to know them! Get comfortable knocking on doors with cookies. Be open to who you meet. More and more people are uncomfortable with the status quo, even if they voted differently to you. Remember that the uniting cry of the Zapatists was “¡Ya Basta!” (“enough!”). You may end up with strange allies, but they will be allies nonetheless.

Have a good sense of who you can trust with what. Some folks are excellent at helping people feel welcome, but also don’t have a good gauge of how discrete a new person can be. Some folks are good in a crisis but otherwise aren’t dependable. Etc. There are many things you can trust someone with, have a good sense of who to trust with what.

Be open to new folks showing up, but also be aware that there will be lots of attempts at infiltration as time goes on, especially as you become more known. Each person having a story and a personal contact who can vouch for them goes a long way, but also just behave as if you’re already infiltrated.

Scope your focus

I have chosen to focus on my state and county. If a trans kid from Florida shows up on my porch, Reed and I will talk about housing them. However, I can’t do anything about trans kids in Florida at this point. I can keep giving money to Planned Parenthood in the Midwest and the South, and I can keep giving money to Translifeline, but other than that, I need to hone my focus close to home. Maybe you’ll pick a specific cause to focus on rather than a geographic one. But regardless, pick something that matches your area of influence and stick to it. Else we all go mad and burn out.

I also really liked this article that’s being passed around, that has four areas of focus: protect people, disrupt and disobey, defend civic institutions, and build alternatives. I think it’s good to know which frame folks are using when they’re asking for action. I also think it’s important that all four of these bases be covered (or intentionally left out) when organizing a broader group.

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