Category Archives: Decentralized Structures

Creating (New) Collaborative Spaces

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There’s this ongoing sense of frustration from the adaptive, iterative, inclusive informal side of disaster response with the formal side. While we often focus on how to get members of a population not accustomed to collaboration to feel empowered to speak and act, and that is a core component of any work I do, that’s not what this entry is about. In the same way that I think many people don’t engage in their environments when conflict is a possible component, I think the lack of collaborative and codesign approach in the formal sector is simply a lack of exposure and understanding.

Come with me / and we’ll be / in a land of pure collaboration – sung to the tune of Willy Wonka’s “Pure Imagination“

The thing to understand is that after Kindergarten, most people have been discouraged from being collaborative. While it comes easily in our youth, when we haven’t built up the skills (social and technical) to operate from that source, it can be difficult. When creating codesign space with members of a formal or traditional organization, they come with the mentality that experts are the best (and perhaps only) people equipped to know how to assess and respond to a challenge. In this mentality, only academics have time to think, only corporations have access to resources, and only people who have been in the field for decades can see patterns. Often, because of the constructs around being an expert or specialist, people considered as such have had difficulty finding cohorts. In fact, you’re often actively discouraged away from it – anyone who shares your field is a competitor for limited resources. Any remotely collaborative activity is done asynchronously and piecemeal, cobbled together later by yet another specialist. This backdrop should indicate the importance of providing safe and guiding space for learning collaborative methods to those coming from traditional sectors. Here’s how I’ve done collaborative space-making in the past.

First, we must understand the codesign methods we aim to use by making it safe and inviting to work collaboratively, and ways to ask questions and with the expectation of listening. We call this “holding space,” through facilitation methods of encouraging inclusivity like paying attention to equal speaking time and accessbility of language. Within this space, we set a North Star, the purpose of the group. Frame all conversations and problem solving trajectories by that North Star.

With the Field Innovation Team (FIT) for FEMA’s Hurricane Sandy response, our North Star was “helping members of the affected population.” This might seem obvious, but formal organizations have been set up to help the official response organizations – Office of Emergency Management, or Red Cross, or the local police department. This has happened in the past because of scaling issues of knowledge and delivery abilities. Any situational knowledge was based upon limited aerial imagery (difficult and expensive), people who were in the area but are now able to report by being in an office (stale information), and past experience (misaligned patterns).

With things like crowd mapping, a higher resolution of situational awareness is possible. People on the ground can tell you where they are and what they see. With this ability comes a new responsibility, to deliver response at a similar resolution. This setup also includes an ability to directly interact with members of the affected population, so it’s important to refocus our efforts on our end users.

Any time any question came up, or any difficulties got in our way, we reminded ourselves about our main objective. From this, we immediately saw many paths to achieving the objective such as education, housing, heat, and connectivity. Through skill and connection discovery, we determined what the best focuses were, based on the team members present. We were already collaborating – by focusing on a main objective, and outlining various ways of achieving that objective, people start to consider how they can offer ways of getting there. Too often, we delineate our jobs and then figure out what we can do – which would have limited our creativity by leaps and bounds.

This is when it’s important to have a slew of collaborative tools in your back pocket. What will kick up this new track of collaboration with productivity? Just as importantly, what will be so easy to use that your newly-fledged collaborators won’t trip over install processes or learning curves, losing this precious momentum towards beautiful new worlds? I really like etherpad, hackpad, or google docs as a starting point for this: nearly everyone uses a word processor, and it’s immediately evident as to what is going on. Suddenly, there is a shared view! The common problem of resolving differences across multiple word documents has disappeared in this setting! Reports begin to write themselves out of meeting notes! Butterflies and bluejays are frolicking in the sky. Be wary that during this part of the process, it is important to both make sure people understand what is going on, while also not becoming their administrator. Help people put their own information into the platform, don’t do it for them when they stumble. Other great platforms are trello, basecamp, and loomio for near-immediate recognition of usefulness. People will sometimes stumble in the transition – simply take their recent update on the old method (email, anyone?) and continue the discussion on the new collaborative platform.

Once that objective is set, everything else is just problem solving. Things which would have kept us waiting to act instead became new opportunities to try things out.

Back in New York, the Joint Forces Office wouldn’t allow the FIT team in, because not all of us were federal employees, a few of us were foreign, and some of us were *cough* activists */cough*. Instead of twiddling our thumbs, we instead worked from the apartment of a friend-of-mine. They had better (and more open) internet, far superior coffee, and great serendipity liklihood. While working from there, we linked the OccupySandy volunteering map into the Google Crisis Map and (unofficially) chatted with UNICEF about what options we hadn’t yet looked at for resources. The neutral space allowed us to accomplish far more than we would have in the official offices. It also meant that as we tried out collaborative tools, firewalls didn’t get in our way. When we were later welcomed into the official offices for their first-ever design jam (with Frog Design!), the indignation about Basecamp and hackpad not loading was so great that the FEMA firewalls are now on different settings!

Remember that people are delicate. What most people in the formal sector have been missing for a long time is the ability to SPEAK and to ACT, just on a different vector than those in historically marginalized populations. We are asking all parties in the codesign process to be active and engaged. In distributed and collaborative spaces, this is something we excel in. It is therefore our responsibility to show all newcomers how awesome it can be. Stand with them to make more space. Sometimes as manifest in blanket forts.

Value-Based Design

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Bex and I put together a Value-Based Design workshop for the Codesign Studio at MIT Media Lab. Originally posted on the Codesign site (and then to the Civic blog and Bex’s blog). Here’s how we did it:

link to the hackpad version of this post

When you are designing a project for social justice, where do you start?

In this workshop, we practice value-based design, a method that helps us to design for large scale social impact and to relate this directly to how we plan and implement projects. We envision the impacts we’d like to contribute to in the world and the values we bring with us into our work as the first steps in this design process. As individuals, this method helps us to express our connection to our projects on a personal level and to prevent burnout as we are able to identify work that resonates with our values and to set aside work that doesn’t. As a team, this method helps us to identify shared values and to make design decisions based on our shared vision instead of personal preferences.

At the last Codesign Studio, Bex and Willow took the class through an hour-long workshop to identify our individual values and to design our projects and approach around shared values.

This workshop is inspired by Monica Sharma’s work in transformational leadership for large scale system shift. In this article, she describes the framework of the methods she shares for this kind of work. Connecting with our personal values and designing based on values is a key component. [Sharma, Monica. “Contemporary Leaders of Courage and Compassion: Competencies and Inner Capacities.” Kosmos Summer 2012.]

Individual Values

Purpose
Uncovering our core values gives us better understanding of our own purpose and desire in the world. Doing this exercise with teammates is a great way to connect to each other’s inspiration.

Process
(3 min) Select one person in the room to work these questions with:

Share something you’ve worked on that you had some role in designing.

Ask the following questions:

  • What did you envision as success for that project? Often people will dissemble, and say it wasn’t a success. People will also commonly talk about the activities of the project, things they did, instead of what the vision was of the project. So:
  • Ask them to imagine that it WAS a success. What is happening in the world then? How are people living? What is the quality of life?
  • Drill to one word. That’s the value you were working from. The value you represent. The word should not be an action or process (manifestation, collaboration, interaction, etc), but what people feel like if they can act or work in that way (joy, justice, inclusion, health, etc).

(12 min) Now, break into pairs. If there are project teams in the room, ask people to work with someone in the same team and ask each other the questions above.

(at 6 min) Remind people to switch

Reportback
Have each person say their value when you reconvene. If you can, write these somewhere that will be visible for your team as you continue to work together.

Value-Based Design

Purpose
Designing a project with the larger purpose in mind helps to think big and understand that your actions connect to your visions of social justice. It also helps your team to recognize shared values, a great starting place for connecting when you have to make difficult design decisions.

Overview (5 minutes)
In this method, we design with our teams first by developing shared understanding of the impacts we want to see as a result of the work we do together. These will be large-scale and will likely relate to values we identified in the Individual Values exercise. In this exercise, Impacts, longterm sustained state change.

Because we can’t implement impacts directly, we continue to design our work into pieces of work that we can implement. We divide these pieces into three categories: Inputs, Outputs, and Outcomes.

Process
Share the above graphic.

Go through an example, here is an example of how we might have used this methodology in developing Codesign:

Ask what desired impacts of Codesign are:

  • Impacts – sustained state change. – What do you think the intended impacts of codesign as a method are? Empowered and equal engagement.

Ask what some inputs, outputs and outcomes are of Codesign:

  • Outputs – collaborative workshops
  • Inputs – YOU! Partners, us, this room, MOUs, etc
  • Outcomes – A change, but requires continued effort to maintain – Such as social relationships, people try it and don’t keep it up

We tend to fill these three categories with information in a nonlinear way — recognizing an Output may surface desired Outcomes and Inputs. Broadly, we design right to left and implement left to right.

Project Design (25 min)
Now practice the value-based design methodology with project with your team. If you are at an early stage in your work together and you haven’t yet identified or selected a project you will work on, you can begin by taking the various partner’s organizational values into consideration. Broadly, what are the impacts that your team’s members envision?

Before completing the exercise, have each group fill in at least 2 points under each section.

Wrap It Up
Reportback (15 min)
Ask people to share their process. Try using the Green/Yellow/Red method and ask each group to share one Green – a thing that was easy or clear; Yellow – one thing that was challenging or that they learned something from; and Red – something that was difficult or a block.

If the teams went to different parts of the room, have everyone tour around. Document the work of each group.

InterTwinkles

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Yesterday held many gems, and one of my favorites was seeing Charlie defend his dissertation (he would prefer it be called “defenestration“). He’s built an incredible tool called InterTwinkles, an online tool for non-hierarchical, consensus-oriented decision making.

Non-hierarchical, participatory, consensus-based decision making has seen an explosion in popularity in recent years. The traditional techniques of formal consensus, however, are limited to face-to-face meetings, which can limit organizations’ capacity due to their time and cost. InterTwinkles is a set of integrated but composable online tools designed to assist small and medium-sized groups in engaging in formal group decision making processes online. In this thesis, Charlie DeTar presents a thorough investigation of the ethical and practical motivations for consensus decision making, and relates these to concerns of control and autonomy in the design of online systems. He describes the participatory and iterative design process for building an online platform for consensus, with particular attention to the practical constraints of real-world groups with mixed technical aptitude. He presents the results of a three month field trial with six cooperative groups in the Boston area, and evaluates the results through the lens of adaptive structuration theory, with particular attention on the fit between the ethical motivations and performance outcomes.

It also generated one of the better #vizthink outputs I think I’ve done in awhile. A big part of being able to do that is based all of the wonderful conversations Charlie and I have shared over the past few months. He’s always been generous with his time and his brains.

Keep an eye out for his future work, try out InterTwinkles in your housing co-op or other affinity-based consensus group. While I (and the rest of the Media Lab) will miss Charlie dearly, Montana calls him to new adventures (and to his awesome partner!).

Things to Care About

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GWOB’s IndieGoGo

Geeks Without Bounds, the thing I’ve given my life to over the past 3 years, has launched a fundraiser to hire a fundraiser. It’s all in the video, but it basically boils down to this: the internet was supposed to be the great equalizer, but it isn’t. People with technical skillsets need a way to help other people. We bridge that gap. Go help us grow. There are only a couple days left to contribute in this way.

Moonlet

All over the place, the internet is showing itself as what it is – not only owned by private interests, but also tracked. We’re building a prototype template of group-held servers for people who don’t know how to run their own servers. Email, Calendar to start, all sorts of other goodies as it builds. Join in the first round to help us build the future we were supposed to have, and to keep your data.. yours.

Moonlet will be a small scale personal cloud services collective. Our goal is to pool together about 20-40 peoples’ resources to pay for the hosting and sysadmin time necessary to replace most or all of the cloud services we use with ones we can trust.

Our goals are:

  • To offer cloud-replacement services at a reasonable price to members
  • Security and privacy are primary priorities
  • Ensure a useable and well-integrated solution that replicates the hassle-free convenience of the better existing cloud services
  • Document the process clearly so other people can replicate the experience

NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge

Some mornings, I wake up and watch the NASA/Sagan YouTube series. It gives me hope and peace to remember what humanity is capable of. All the shit we do to each other, rather than focusing our efforts of banding together to overcome the natural obstacles around us, is trumped when Us/Them mentality replaces the “Them” of other people with the “Them” of the unknown. NASA represents that. They’re also a manifestation of a gov org trying to do it right – massively pooled resources to conduct collaborative exploration turned atrociously bureaucratic. They’ve started releasing datasets, opening up their processes, engaging the public, etc. And now they have a grand challenge around finding asteroids. I’ll probably post more on this one later, but check it out now.

Becoming Structured

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Feeding off the Pixels and Paintbrushes blog entry. Interested in that transition space between the analog and the digital. It’s funny, liminal has long been my favorite word, rivaled only recently by penumbral. More and more, I get to look at and live in that space. But now I see it more as the space of transition, not just as space between/at the edge.

So this thing happens, where we have formal structures, and the informal takes up the space between. As in the previous entry, each of these has its purpose and strengths and weaknesses.

This drawing based off a conversation with Galit, a cohort and roommate.

This drawing based off a conversation with Galit, a cohort and roommate.

As a reference, let’s take the limited work I’ve done with Occupy Relief efforts. I act as human API – if you need something from a formalized organization, including them getting out of the way, let me know. Then there are posts like this one, which is totally legit. But it puts me in a strange place of saying “I stand with you politically, but if you want this taken care of logistically, then let’s do that.” Something that keeps me in the relief space is how stark a relief differences are thrown into1. The choices that have to be made, and what is considered important when, and what cultural artifacts are created by those choices. A big part of how adaptable and powerful Occupy is, is based upon their NOT being defined nor legible. More and more I wonder how to make groups like FEMA legible to Occupy, rather than the other way round.

Reading Seeing Like A State, if you can’t tell. So very good. And then, I got to see Douglas Rushkoff speak about his new book, Present Shock. I think a HUGE part of these ideas overlap.

He equated the quest for the upper right quadrant in Capitalism with the Singularity as an example of existing world views being applied to new ways of considering the future. Rushkoff also brought up the feminist media theory of storylines and plots of male vs female orgasm – one is a single escalation and then easy bell curve down. The other being complex, multi-apex, etc. The only way we’ve known for things to be predictable is with the storyline we could track – the male orgasm model2.

Now we have the ability to see, track, understand the complexity of “actual” life3 through big data4 in a way that understands as it emerges, rather than forces adherence to a predictable, and thereby incomplete, model. And instead we are applying the same two-dimensional, simplistic pattern to it, and cutting off the long tails of a bell curve we’ve forced everything into. We’re bringing the legal system of documents and MAYBE spreadsheets to a database and RDF world5. We are not allowing ourselves the nuance of the paintbrush, digitized through the use of high-density pixels. We’re making ourselves bland and bucketed instead. A low-res snapshot of culture, of which the mere act of capturing makes us fulfill it more closely. Through quantified self and things like Prism, we’re stealing our own souls, at least as things are set up now6.

And this is why I’m doing the research I am. I’m tired of us lugging our unexamined baggage into the future we’re building. In the past, institutions were where knowledge was stored. Now it’s stored in us, in a sharable and duplicatable way. Seeing Rushkoff was inspiring, because he noted that yes, it’s difficult to exist in the crevices, but it’s also totally worthwhile. Video and audio are up already on the Berkman site.

 

It’s the trying to fit new things into old methods. We have to be willing to embrace some unpredictability in order for the lives of others to be more predictable to themselves. Crowds becoming “less predictable” to an outside view, but they’re becoming more self-determining. Let go of the reins and let it guide itself. Isn’t that the point of having power? To push it outwards?
—–

1. See why penumbral is a favorite word?
2. Sidenote that I just tried to find links to the academic background on this, but guess how useful the internet is for THAT.
3. Or at least a closer approximation than we’ve had in the past.
4. Which would be the crowning, and crowing, triumph of Sociology.
5. And the database model isn’t The Best, it’s just “better” than what we’ve had before, in that it’s more self-defining and adaptable.
6. Damn kids get off my keyboard.

Pixels and Paintbrushes

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This is a more half-baked entry than most, but I feel it’s as far as I can push it right now without additional reading or feedback. Please do comment to share thoughts, or send me emails.

One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. – Neil Gaiman, American Gods

The balance between the formal and the informal is a constant. The formal being the structures, agreements, legible interactions of people trying to exact control and predictability out of their world. It is the tallying of food on a ship to ration for a voyage gone awry, it is the systematizing of forestry to produce a known quantity of wood, it is the manual of building types by address on the secret shelves of a fire truck. The informal is the learning to fish, the grazing of sheep on a multigrowth forest, the running in to do what you can when the books don’t have a reference for the fire you’re looking at.

For generations, we have optimized for outputs rather than for adaptability. We have chosen for formal over the informal, in the belief it was the only way for us to survive. We have made our systems predictable with the factors we were aware of, but we did not see enough. This has made us fragile.

We have optimized our objectives and approaches for the removal of cognitive and emotional barriers, allowing ourselves to produce at scale and have use impact via torque. Slower moving, but persistent and consistent. This allows us to produce and plan, a necessary approach for growing populations. The current (and hopefully continuing) trend of glorifying innovation is a response to this. It is about difference and barriers forcing examination and collaboration. That brings out creativity and the ability to adapt. This is quick, but not patient, and rarely replicable. It is the wibbly bits around the edges, the water that flows between the scaffolding.

I have started comparing these aspects to the level of detail we can get out of digitization approaching and surpassing what the human brain can process. The beauty of analog, and of those wibbly bits, is that this is where the smoothness of sound comes in, the ease of a brush stroke. The deep quality and enjoyable nature of an LP, as opposed to the lossy MP3 of the same song. But digitizing means we can replicate, send, readily share that song, and as our processing power increases, we are able to approximate real life more and more.

This has entirely to do with how much detail is available for you at each level of zoom, and what your ability to perceive those differences is. As I talked to Kav about this blog entry yesterday, slowly sunburning on a walk through New Orleans streets, he pointed out that one theory of chaos is it as order complex beyond the ability to process.

Pixels and paintbrushes. Our desire to plan and optimize has interrupted our ability to create and adapt. There is a tension here which could be used to better each component, rather than have them at odds. We now have the ability to see and use more complexity, but we are bringing the mindset of optimization through simplification to it. Big DataTM shouldn’t just be about what falls within allowable standard deviations, it’s about acknowledgement and examination of the tails; and more importantly, the complexity of interaction. We now have the ability to have a large quantity of qualitative data. And that is amazing.

If each of us is a set of pixels in an image, or we produce the pixels which make up a digital self, at some point you get high resolution by sharing more, but it’s still in the abstraction of viewing the whole picture that people get a sense of who you are. Strangely, because we are each sharing things with metadata, we are also able to get abstraction divorced from the individual, and rather across the topic (EverydayCarry being a great example of this). These pixels, if we each are keeping our heads down for fear of how we are treated in the future, lead to one bland picture when you step back from the individual into the zoom setting of society. Civic Media blog

That thing about the map becoming more and more accurate, and that making it too bulky to be useful in any way is now negated by filters. And filters which inform each layer about context. We now CAN have the map as the territory.

There are remainder thoughts here about how this self-documentation now means explicit selectiveness in the enforcement of law. And how the process of making the illegible (those woobly, informal bits) legible is what monocultures a system. But this is already wordy, and I am hungry. Maybe another time.

The Ethics of Ethical Review

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My lit review is coming to an end. My beautiful, ingest knowledge constantly, lit review. I’ve read more books1 in the past two months than in the last two years combined. Having space to sit and read is an amazing thing. The most spoiled, as it were. But the time of ingesting existing information is coming to a close, and the time to start interviews is approaching. And that means ethical review of my process.

The Institutional Review Board exists for good reason. We’ve done some awful shit to each other in the name of science. IRB is there to be sure human subjects are treated with dignity and in a safe manner. It is also required by many institutions to embark upon research, to get funding, and to be published. IRB has a section on its form to indicate institutional affiliation – a section which, if left blank, doesn’t allow you to submit the form. Both academic institutions and the IRB are predicated by the other.

This set up makes it nigh impossible to do “legitimate” research involving humans in the academic context2. I find this morally reproachable. I think anyone should have the opportunity to do research, so long as they do so ethically3. So what’s a robot to do?

I’m looking at having an Informal Review Board, comprised of respected folk around the area of my research, to still assess and push back on the ethics of my study. The questions around IRB are good ones – potential harm to participants, benefits, complications, etc. I would still structure around those, and publish my responses to those questions to the internet and to participants. The people on the board would be putting their own names behind the work I’m doing, which adds in a layer of accountability of me to them, and them to the world.

If I were only to go this route, the costs would be that I wouldn’t have my research explicitly tied to Center for Civic Media at MIT’s Media Lab, tho I as an individual would be. I wouldn’t be able to publish via MIT’s press. The research wouldn’t show up in academic journals. IE, it wouldn’t have the easy notoriety boost up of academic affiliation with such a respected institution. My access to get funding would also be drastically reduced.

The cost of success of the Informal approach gaining legitimacy (regardless of how the research is taken), is informal review becoming a thing which can be done. And what if someone puts people in harm’s way because their board wasn’t as rigorous as an institution which can be held accountable via traditional means? IE, someone doing research on a vulnerable population accidentally pushes personally identifying information out with their results. How would that person be held accountable?

The cost of not taking this approach is being complicit in an institutional system which locks out citizens from the process of research and contribution. And I think that is worse than the other potential costs. But I have to see what the folk who would be on my Informal Review Board say. I’m still looking for someone who is willing to push back on me, constructively but aggressively, who is also willing to be on such a board.

The balance to be had, and thanks to Mako for talking through this with me, is to do both at the same time. This would lay the path for the institutionally unaffiliated while also making use of a solid resource of COUHES (MIT’s IRB), addressing my deepest concern. To mitigate the potential harms of this approach gaining traction in worrisome ways, I’ll be working with the engine room to examine the process itself. And the issues of not having access to institutional credibility and funding will be alleviated by taking the formal route as well. Sure, it’s more work, but I think it’s worth it. I’ll publish my responses and process here in fairly short order.

1a. Book List:

  • Thinking in Systems – to gain a shared language with systems thinkers
  • The Fifth Discipline – to expand on that language, gain antedotes
  • Protocol (How Control Exists After Decentralization) – about new social structures and expectations
  • Revolutions in Reverse – what winning looks like, group creation and unification
  • Take Back the Land – internal conflict and societal skewing
  • The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It – costs and benefits of generative systems 
  • Poor People’s Movements – costs and benefits of scaling up

1b. Theses

2. Sure, you can work with a non-academic research lab, but even that is based upon affiliation with a formal organization, with its own expectations.

3. “Ethically” of course being a contextual term, but still one worth striving towards while also examining on a regular basis.

Project-Based Collaborations / Collusions

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In starting research with Center for Civic Media, I get to sit and read for hours a day. Go to conferences which seem interesting. Attend talks of people I’ve read the work of. It is absurd. I still don’t like the institution of academia, but that’s because everyone should have access to such resources, not because I don’t like (and appreciate) the opportunities. My research is on how organizations with distributed power scale. In this area of study, decentralization or distributed power in an group is referred to as “flat.” “Decentralized” as a stand-alone term usually means how resources are distributed, rather than power structures. Read more about that on Charlie DeTar’s great post.

This means I’ve been reading rather a lot around how activist groups change over time based on how they interact with the rest of the world, each other, and themselves. Most recently, I finished Revolutions in Reverse, a collection of David Graeber essays. A standard sequence which became clear to me is the following:

  • Individual groups work towards their objective from their perspective, build up some sort of core and maybe a following.
  • Occasionally, something massive comes up, and some of these groups band together. While they have different perspectives, they share an objective for a short period of time. Basically, alliterative alignment-based alliance.
  • After the shared objective is achieved, the thrill of victory makes groups want to continue to work together. Other shared objectives are sought, but alliances crumble due to the different perspectives which made the larger grouping so robust in its diversity.
  • Individual participants become disenchanted because of these dramas and depart from the larger grouping at the least, and often their orginial core group as well.

Essentially, people set aside basic debates while a pressing objective is at hand. In facilitation work, instigating projects is a great way to get people over their social anxieties and political differences in order to create bonds which later might surplant those issues. As my friend Slim once said on the twitters, “sweat is a far more honest social lubricant.” The issue is when those collusions are expected to last longer than is actually reasonable.

What I have been wondering is this: Why don’t we just shake hands after the larger objective has been achieved, and go on our merry ways? To me, this is far more sustainable culturally. Personally, one of the things which I love most about meeting people doing good work completely unrelated to my own is that there are so many things wrong in the world, in such intertwined and complex ways, if we were all working on the same aspect, no impact would be made. I don’t want to continue being joined forces, because I want to know you have my back in the larger scheme of things. Talk about the breakup before you start dating (or the “Founder’s Prenup“) – adults should be able to act like adults, even when they go their separate ways. Then you have the ability to work together on big things in the future, instead of still being butthurt about something that happened in the past.

I see this approach as similar to the move to portfolio-based employment from one long career employment. People associate with you for a discrete project based on what you’ve done in the past, which then gets added to your portfolio. Why not the same for social structures and political movements? We gather around a project, celebrate it when it’s done, and move on. Sometimes we end up working consistently with the same set of people because it makes a lot of sense, but it’s not the starting assumption. In my wariness, I don’t believe this will solve large problems, only allow us to fail for better reasons. Does anyone have any examples around this, of it working or not working, or at least being tried?

Potentially related: Temporary Autonomous Zones

The Informal Side of Sandy Response

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So, apparently I was at the White House today – my first time, as I never went on any of those tours as a kid. In a series about the FEMA Think Tank, this was the first to happen there, and somehow they decided inviting me was a good idea. Sure, I know inviting the rest of the field time is a good move. But this satire-punk kid? Oof.

The whole thing was streamed as a phone call (that, and other notes, will be available at http://www.fema.gov/fema-think-tank within a week or two. The chat was live-tweeted as well via the hashtag #femathinktank – some interesting stuff there.

img by Scotty! Thanks for indulging Galit and myself.

img by Scotty! Thanks for indulging Galit and myself.

After the mics were off, we did a round-table on connecting the formal to the informal – honest discussion about some tough ideas on moving forward. I was asked to be one of the four people to lead us out. Here’s a summation of what I was getting at:

We’re talking about connecting the formal and informal. Somewhat obviously, I’m from the informal

Individual voice (sometimes represented through social media) is important in response because it gives high resolution and granularity to our understanding of what is going on. Instead of dropping in one massive block of resources, we can figure out where tiny bits go. How communities can help themselves and help each other. In short, mutual aid. This is couple with wanting to respond at the pace our technology has made us accustomed to.

I look at this a bit like the record industry in the age of the internet. FEMA right now can become kickstarter or some other platform on which people can connect directly, and have a way of interacting and supporting each other. Through providing those connections, you can bring your institutional knowledge and directive of assistance to bear on interaction. Or you can be like the record industry and become not only obsolete but also unliked. (I like you all.)

How do we create space for innovation in tech and in policy while allowing paths for systematizing? The things that work can’t just be ad hoc all the time. Challenges are bigger than we can plan or train for – have to give people space and support to figure it out on their own.

The tools exist, as we’ve shown, and we can make more. What is needed is an assumption and platform for us working together.

Be transparent about what you do, how to be in touch. It’s already chaotic, help make it less so. The populations we aim to help can be included in that knowledge. We need your bigger abilities and institutional knowledge. We as individuals also have to learn to support you as our government. So many of these things happen out of directed conversations and open minds.

Ialsomaybetookapictureofatinyoccupytentwhileinthewhitehouse. And slid down the railings. ([x] World Bank [x] White House [ ] NASA). I wonder if they’ll ever let me back.

Studying Decentralized Structures

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So I have just been officially offered a research affiliate position at the Center for Civic Media out of MIT’s Media Lab. I’ll be moving to Boston in February. Zomg. I’ll be spending 20-30% of my time studying how decentralized structures scale. The rest of my time will continue to be spent on Geeks Without Bounds (funnily enough, figuring out how to scale it). I assume things like this lead to papers and things. I’m also working on fellowship applications. Here’s a basic summary, and a request for help.

Ad Hoc organizations on Prezi