Category Archives: Culture

Civics in an age of mistrust and decentralization

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Originally published on Medium with NECSI

For the January salon at NECSI, Ethan Zuckerman and Erhardt Graeff led a discussion and workshop on civics in a distributed society. Both are at the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab, Ethan as director and Erhardt as a PhD researcher. We explored how people with influence/power/money try to create change in the world, how those affected by those changes view and respond to those attempts and changes, and also what we would do as people of influence/power/money.

Many thanks to Ethan and Erhardt for their valuable time and attention as well as images used in this blog entry, and to Erhardt especially for designing such a great workshop, and for suggesting edits to the blog itself. Y’all are pretty great. ❤ – w

Many people want to change the world.

Leverage through money or power

Democracy as it tends to be generally practiced is the act of selecting people for positions of power, and then pressuring them through petitions, protests, and letters. Ethan remarks that this is a remarkably impoverished view. We also interact with governance and our social systems based on what we buy (and don’t buy), where we live, how we speak. However, today our trust is low, and not just in government, but in institutions as well; and not just in the US, but all over the world (see Figure 1). (note: The origins of distrust may be traced to the high complexity of society that makes centralized decision making ineffective.) Many of us would like to change the systems we live in to improve the world. What strategies are available to make such change?

Figure 1

Among those who are trying to make changes are individuals and foundations with large amounts of wealth who strive to act in ways that will improve the world according to their perspectives and understanding. What strategies do they use to exert influence? How successful are they at achieving their objectives? Examples ranging from the Koch brothers to George Soros provide some insight. They might invest in think tanks, in market-based interventions, in campaigns to affect public opinion to place pressure on courts and elected officials.

Regardless of whether an individual came to have influence through an electoral process or through access to wealth, Lawrence Lessig provides a framework in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace on which most (if not all) change is attempted.

Four fulcrums

  • Laws are explicitly stated codes of behavior, created and enforced through governance systems.
  • Norms are often implicit social expectations, enforced through social pressure and assumptions of media and other communications.
  • Markets shape behavior by making some actions more or less expensive financially or time.
  • Architecture/Code are the frameworks that surround us and must be adhered to because we act within them. Today many of these frameworks are technological which might be called: the tyranny of the database, or how interfaces demand obedience.

How do you know if what you’re doing is working?

The enforcement of laws can be tracked. Market costs can be quantified. The use of an architecture implies success of its constraints (though choices of what architecture to use, and innovators, hackers and other reappropriators, provide freedom). Ethan and Erhardt primarily focus on changing norms. These are also arguably the most difficult to characterize and to discover if a hoped-for-change is occurring, as norms are often implicit, rather than explicit, and are distributed across the statements of individuals, groups and media sources.

At the Center for Civic Media, they think about norms and the attention economy, and one way of seeing shifts in norms in this view is by tracking how the media talks about a topic. They use a tool called Media Cloud for gathering media sources, creating visualizations, and comparing the words used to talk about topics of discourse. For instance, Erhardt analyzed the dynamics of the media conversation around Trayvon Martin through the roles of broadcast and participatory social media.

In short, creating change is hard, even if you’ve got money and/or power.

Here’s the video from our salon

More on the topic of civics in a distributed society from Ethan’s post about his keynote at Syracuse University’s Humanities annual symposium on Insurrectionist Civics in the Age of Mistrust (highly recommended, and most of the images on this blog comes from the associated slide deck).

How would YOU create change?

With this framing, this question was posited to the salon attendees. Erhardt facilitated an interactive workshop: “So let’s say you have 10 million dollars. What would you do, about climate change? Fund think tanks and organizations? Fund advocacy groups / passing laws? Fund research? Create tech to do things we can’t otherwise do?” The room divided into 4 groups, and then picked one of Lessig’s four means of interventions and brainstormed ideas.

What would you focus on doing, and how would you know if it was working?

Architecture/Code: Attach sensors to cars, trucks, and environments focused on transportation-based discharges of greenhouse gases. The emissions sensors could provide immediate feedback to drivers and city officials when emissions go to high and trigger sanctions.

Markets: Invest in a startup that offered green logistics/delivery services such as bicycles that would compete with truck-based last-mile services such as UPS and FedEx. Gain market share not just by comparative cost but also by being better for the environment.

Norms: Incorporate data about individuals’ carbon emission from how they live into their online social profiles so that their is an opportunity for social sanctions and desire for self-improvement is publicly viewable.

Law: Create policy that forced power suppliers to develop more resilient grids from renewable energy sources. The data would be monitored by the government for compliance.

We were also joined on Twitter:https://medium.com/media/636d0bf5ea05901a2a4a1b980c23e010https://medium.com/media/d9363c613a23182d898f47ff90bcf6d1

Summary

To shift the world, even with massive funding and assumed power, is difficult. All of the interventions discussed at the salon were at a speculative pilot/demo level. To know you’re succeeding through an intervention is also difficult. There was a realization that those who have money and power are often not wildly successful at changing the world because of the difficulty of understanding how constructive change can be achieved. Perhaps a few “why don’t you just…” phrases were put to rest. At the same time, as individual citizens, we saw how much of a role we have to play in societal shifts — perhaps more effectively in our distributed and connected networks.

“The exercise of designing a method for evaluating your campaign’s success often forces you to rethink and get more specific about your original intervention idea. When you need to turn your target and goals into dependent and independent variables to study and then worry about the timeline for change — it really complicates your view of how to make change. And I would say each of the groups felt this.

There was also a clear bias amongst participants toward norms-based change even though they were addressing legal fixes, market forces, or technical architectures. We all want to think that people will know what behavior is the right behavior once they have enough information. The fact that such a process takes many years and many interventions and runs up against cognitive biases where information counter to your position can leave people stronger in their problematic ways, is what makes norms-based change so hard. The goal of making sure that everyone in the workshop had a chance to think about laws, markets, and code as well helps concretize the need for many different approaches: carrots and sticks in various guises needed for a movement to make its mark. And $10mil is not a lot of money to start with.” – Erhardt

Civics in an age of mistrust and decentralization

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I regularly coordinate a salon over at the New England Complex Systems Institute. For the January salon at NECSI, Ethan and Erhardt led a discussion and workshop on civics in a distributed society. We explored how people with influence/power/money try to create change in the world, how those affected by those changes view and respond to those attempts and changes, and also what we would do as people of influence/power/money.

Many thanks to Ethan and Erhardt for their valuable time and attention as well as images used in this blog entry, and to Erhardt especially for designing such a great workshop, and for suggesting edits to the blog itself. Y’all are pretty great. ❤ – w

Many people want to change the world.

Leverage through money or power

Democracy as it tends to be generally practiced is the act of selecting people for positions of power, and then pressuring them through petitions, protests, and letters. Ethan remarks that this is a remarkably impoverished view. We also interact with governance and our social systems based on what we buy (and don’t buy), where we live, how we speak. However, today our trust is low, and not just in government, but in institutions as well; and not just in the US, but all over the world (see Figure 1). (note: The origins of distrust may be traced to the high complexity of society that makes centralized decision making ineffective.) Many of us would like to change the systems we live in to improve the world. What strategies are available to make such change?

Figure 1  

Among those who are trying to make changes are individuals and foundations with large amounts of wealth who strive to act in ways that will improve the world according to their perspectives and understanding. What strategies do they use to exert influence? How successful are they at achieving their objectives? Examples ranging from the Koch brothers to George Soros provide some insight. They might invest in think tanks, in market-based interventions, in campaigns to affect public opinion to place pressure on courts and elected officials.

Regardless of whether an individual came to have influence through an electoral process or through access to wealth, Lawrence Lessig provides a framework in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace on which most (if not all) change is attempted.

Four fulcrums

  • Laws are explicitly stated codes of behavior, created and enforced through governance systems.
  • Norms are often implicit social expectations, enforced through social pressure and assumptions of media and other communications.
  • Markets shape behavior by making some actions more or less expensive financially or time.
  • Architecture/Code are the frameworks that surround us and must be adhered to because we act within them. Today many of these frameworks are technological which might be called: the tyranny of the database, or how interfaces demand obedience.

How do you know if what you’re doing is working?

The enforcement of laws can be tracked. Market costs can be quantified. The use of an architecture implies success of its constraints (though choices of what architecture to use, and innovators, hackers and other reappropriators, provide freedom). Ethan and Erhardt primarily focus on changing norms. These are also arguably the most difficult to characterize and to discover if a hoped-for-change is occurring, as norms are often implicit, rather than explicit, and are distributed across the statements of individuals, groups and media sources. 

At the Center for Civic Media, they think about norms and the attention economy, and one way of seeing shifts in norms in this view is by tracking how the media talks about a topic. They use a tool called Media Cloud for gathering media sources, creating visualizations, and comparing the words used to talk about topics of discourse. For instance, Erhardt analyzed the dynamics of the media conversation around Trayvon Martin through the roles of broadcast and participatory social media.

In short, creating change is hard, even if you’ve got money and/or power.

Here’s the video from our salon:

More on the topic of civics in a distributed society from Ethan’s post about his keynote at Syracuse University’s Humanities annual symposium on Insurrectionist Civics in the Age of Mistrust (highly recommended, and most of the images on this blog comes from the associated slide deck).

How would YOU create change?

With this framing, this question was posited to the salon attendees. Erhardt facilitated an interactive workshop: “So let’s say you have 10 million dollars. What would you do, about climate change? Fund think tanks and organizations? Fund advocacy groups / passing laws? Fund research? Create tech to do things we can’t otherwise do?” The room divided into 4 groups, and then picked one of Lessig’s four means of interventions and brainstormed ideas.

What would you focus on doing, and how would you know if it was working?

Architecture/Code: Attach sensors to cars, trucks, and environments focused on transportation-based discharges of greenhouse gases. The emissions sensors could provide immediate feedback to drivers and city officials when emissions go to high and trigger sanctions.

Markets: Invest in a startup that offered green logistics/delivery services such as bicycles that would compete with truck-based last-mile services such as UPS and FedEx. Gain market share not just by comparative cost but also by being better for the environment.

Norms: Incorporate data about individuals’ carbon emission from how they live into their online social profiles so that their is an opportunity for social sanctions and desire for self-improvement is publicly viewable.

Law: Create policy that forced power suppliers to develop more resilient grids from renewable energy sources. The data would be monitored by the government for compliance.

We were also joined on Twitter:

@willowbl00 @NECSI I think the Great African Tree Wall is a good start; ban Urban commutes by automobile on penalty of stoning; nuke plants.

— Kevin Foobar (@fu9ar) January 13, 2016

@willowbl00 @NECSI Investments in https://t.co/gNtzicIT9q 2.Battery tech 3.Ending animal agriculture (bigger than transportation) — Ben Rupert (@Meowdip) January 14, 2016

To shift the world, even with massive funding and assumed power, is difficult. All of the interventions discussed at the salon were at a speculative pilot/demo level. To know you’re succeeding through an intervention is also difficult. There was a realization that those who have money and power are often not wildly successful at changing the world because of the difficulty of understanding how constructive change can be achieved. Perhaps a few “why don’t you just…” phrases were put to rest. At the same time, as individual citizens, we saw how much of a role we have to play in societal shifts — perhaps more effectively in our distributed and connected networks.

“The exercise of designing a method for evaluating your campaign’s success often forces you to rethink and get more specific about your original intervention idea. When you need to turn your target and goals into dependent and independent variables to study and then worry about the timeline for change — it really complicates your view of how to make change. And I would say each of the groups felt this.

There was also a clear bias amongst participants toward norms-based change even though they were addressing legal fixes, market forces, or technical architectures. We all want to think that people will know what behavior is the right behavior once they have enough information. The fact that such a process takes many years and many interventions and runs up against cognitive biases where information counter to your position can leave people stronger in their problematic ways, is what makes norms-based change so hard. The goal of making sure that everyone in the workshop had a chance to think about laws, markets, and code as well helps concretize the need for many different approaches: carrots and sticks in various guises needed for a movement to make its mark. And $10mil is not a lot of money to start with.” – Erhardt

The Social Disaster Cycle

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Originally posted on the Aspiration blog

This blog entry written with substantial input and support from Meredith L. Patterson.

Aspiration has taken on Weaponized Social as an extension of our commitment to solidarity with our community and to equality in our interactions with and through technology.

Better Tools for a Better World

Our work to support more people in their existing efforts by making use of technology has a peripheral effect of bringing historically marginalized populations into online space. And as the ever-larger online community welcomes new people, we have not only an opportunity, but also an obligation, to do so with more intent and understanding than society has tended towards in the past. When we speak of online intimidation or harassment, regardless of the perpetrator or recipient, culturally we struggle with issues of accountability, enforcement, and identity.

It’s a Disaster

We’ve had a few events (NYC, Nairobi, and San Francisco). From these, and ongoing conversations on the mailing list, the wiki has been expanded and cleaned up. It now includes clearer indicators of how to make use of it, as well as a restructuring into the same framework as the disaster cycle. The disaster cycle falls into preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. More details on these, along with the added aspect of being an extreme event, can be found on the wiki, with projects and resources listed below each aspect of the cycle. Event notes and project specs continue to also be hosted on the wiki. What are not found on the wiki are academic resources (which can be found in this literature review compiled by friends), nor organizations and initiatives (which Tactical Tech recently curated here).

This approach was taken because many conversations in this space are derailed when discussion of intentions and tactics are conflated. For instance, #hoodsoff revealed the identity of those both in positions of political power AND who were members of the KKK using the same tactics which those same activists might find untenable in regards to doxxing of visible feminine gamers. Or that the tactics used against Brianna Wu and Chris von Csefalvay match at a pattern level that goes beyond that specific instance of escalation. This is where Weaponized Social seeks to explore and intervene, because human rights apply to everyone, including ourselves and whoever we might perceive to be our enemies. “Lead by obeying,” as the Zapatistas say.

Who Watches those Watching the Watchmen?

On the same note of rules applying to everyone equally, including the rulers, and of making the conversation clearer, the Weaponized Social crew has also been ruminating a fair amount recently on how accountability and enforcement factors into all this. When people treat each other in unethical ways, our current social systems indicate bringing the law (and associated enforcement) to bear on those breaking the rules. But we are currently facing a long-overdue distrust in enforcement, especially in police. So just as we’re running into the network effects of negative human interaction, we also have no successful foundation to build upon to mitigate through enforcement. The conversation is therefore further confused by asking who should be holding whom accountable, how do we know that’s being done fairly, and how does enforcement happen? Some are turning to community, some to law, some to software platforms, some to police, etc. Each of these may become a viable option. It’s more likely to be a combination therein, and it’s important to think about the historical patterns of enforcement as well as the repercussions of unchecked social errors.

What’s Missing?

The glaring hole which was surfaced by restructuring projects and pieces into this framework is a complete lack of recovery (it’s also totally possible that I’m just not aware of it. If you know of any, please send them our way!). Preparedness and response are necessary and worthwhile aspects to cover, but we offer no long term support or recompense to those who have been affected by the weaponization of social so as to make them whole again. Even legal and policy interventions seem to linger in only half of the cycle, when arguably institutions are responsible for longer term stability (leaving the network to adaptation). This is heartbreakingly familiar, as it’s the same in response to offline disasters.

Additionally, as the conversation expands and deepens, more individuals and organizations are beginning to see their responsibility in encouraging healthy interactions. A few requests have now come in for guidelines in making tools and platforms which take into account these issues. We’ve started to describe the various vectors of online communication which might be fiddled with, and we welcome your feedback!

What I’m excited about is how much of the Weaponized Social crew (most notably, Meredith and TQ) has focused on the mitigation aspect of the disaster cycle. How can we change the very way we do things, to become more pro-social for everyone? We welcome your perusal and contributions to any of the projects on the WeapSoc wiki, but these are the ones I’m most excited about.

What’s Next?

What’s up next is a discussion with Meredith et al to historically, theoretically, epicyclically, technically explore the weaponization of social interaction, such that we can arrive at better interventions. To start, we might discuss the history of liberal social justice and identity politics social justice, cognitive biases, and network effects. You can tune in December 18th at 11a PT / 2p ET by registering here.

We’re also starting to explore a code sprint on some of these tools. If you’d like to get involved, please let us know!

Politicized Humanitarianism

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This post is a collaboration between Margaret Killjoy and yours truly. If you find yourself in need of a co-author or ghostwriter, or just generally like to be challenged and your hopes dashed and lifted at the same time, please reach out to them.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” Desmond Tutu

Four years into the Syrian Civil War, with no end in sight, the Syrian refugee crisis is just getting worse and worse. More than four million people have fled their homes and sought refuge in Turkey, Europe, and throughout the world.

There are wonderful grassroots initiatives (most too informal to even call “organizations”) who are on the ground in Europe helping Syrian refugees navigate the nightmare they’ve been thrust into (bureaucracy and xenophobia) after the nightmare they’ve escaped (the Syrian civil war). But as crucial as it is to meet these people’s immediate needs, it will take more than emergency aid to solve the source of this crisis and ones like it. It will take radical, political solutions.

Relief organizations and related nonprofits could position themselves to advocate and act towards / in alignment with those solutions. Which is to say: we need humanitarianism, yes, but if we’re going to find long-term solutions, we also need politicized humanitarianism.

When we speak of people and groups being politicized, we don’t mean campaigning and/or voting for elected officials every few years. Instead, to be political means to do work that addresses the very way our society—and its decision-making—is structured. For many of us, to be political also means to embrace the feminist concept that the personal is political—that the way we interact with one another one-on-one cannot be divorced from the broader structures of social control. Continue reading →

…and yet…

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At Cascadia.JS in 2014, I picked up a tshirt from the freebie pile. It’s pink. I know — I was also shocked about this, but the quote on the front was so good I had to go for it. “We don’t know what we’re doing either.” On the back is a subtle “&yet” which I learned was an open source consulting company (ish). Neat! — humility, a culture that accepts shirts which are both pink and comfortable, and a nuanced logo. I especially love wearing this shirt in academic and tech-centric situations.

A few months ago, Case asked my consent to be put in touch with someone on the &yet team — they had a conference coming up, and had suggested I speak. Our phone conversation was brief, but it sounded both fun and values-based, so I said yes (a rarer and rarer thing for me these days), and so I spent Wed/Thurs/Fri of last week in Richland, Washington. If interested, here are my drawings of others’ talks, my slide deck, and the paper I referenced.

It is now easily one of my favorite large social experiences. Music, art, and story were woven throughout the conference, all evoking self-reflection on our role in the path the world takes. It was already populated by some of my favorite people in this space (the aforementioned case, plus ben, jden, kawandeep, etc), and the textcapade starting weeks in advance, recieving letters from another character in the story by mail, all playing through these struggles, had me jazzed up long before the event.

The talks were a beautiful mix of art demonstrations, hopeful distribution structures, empathy arcs, and design philosophies. Inclusion was constantly present, and never for its own sake, but rather from a deep understanding that these are the voices that make up the world. The care &yet took of attendees (and encouraged us to take for each other) opened space for some rather heart-wrenching moments. Please, check out the talks when they go up.

While all of this is amazing, I want to talk about the trust and responsibility that &yet placed in the attendees. The storyline was a surprisingly nuanced version of one of my own ongoing internal battles — burn it all down, or patch to save what we can. (The mixed-mode system work is my attempt at making these transitions graceful, by the by). At no point was a clear value judgement imposed upon the story, or implied to the players. The textcapade transitioned into a sort of backchannel for actors in the parts of those sending the messages at points during the conference, and this archetypical internal battle continued to be played out there as well as by stage actors between talks.
Continue reading →

NECSI Salon : Ethnic Violence

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Originally published on Medium with NECSI

On January 28th, the monthly salon gathered at NECSI to discuss ethnic violence from the lens of complex science. Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of NECSI, gave a brief talk about NECSI’s paper about modeling violence. Marshall Wallace, past director of the Listening Project, also gave a quick talk about his field experience with communities who opt out of violence. Again on Feb 4th, NECSI hosted an informal discussion around the case study of Libya. What follows are my big take aways and Sam’s asides, embedded into the fairly rough live notes from the salon. I call out these take aways and asides specifically because note takers often are lost in the notes, just as a photographer is never in the picture.
We hope you’ll join us on Wednesdays of this month to begin exploring medical systems, on ensuing fourth Wednesdays for structured discussion, or on other Wednesdays for more informal times.

Register for this fourth Wednesday here.

I am primarily left with a sense of purpose towards fostering collective intent towards alleviating suffering. In this entry, you’ll see a few ways large-scale violence is posited to be avoided. It is my personal opinion (of which I will opine at the end) that diversity is the key to equality as well as dignity, based on both the complex systems modeling and field experience framing these discussions.

But first, what do we even mean by “violence”? We’re referring to violent events occurring at level of massacres or bombing. These levels do seem to be slightly contextual based upon general violence levels in the area.

When doesn’t violence happen?

Violence doesn’t happen when

  1. all your neighbors are like you, or
  2. all of your neighbors are varied (integration of diversity).

The space between these is where difficulty lies, when not all of your neighbors are like you, but not so consistently unlike you that diversity is the norm. Well then, what do we mean by “neighbors”? It ends up this is very geographically based, and roughly the distance you can traverse in a day by foot or horse (20–40 km), which leads us to believe these tendencies might skew with new travel abilities. Running these models matched up to actualities in Yugoslavia, India.

Some examples

Can either impose integration or separation, intentionally or subconsciously:

  • Singapore forces integration, “to prevent sectarianism.”
  • Greece and Turkey offered to send each other their people.
  • NYC has small patch sizes geographically. But we don’t know how things scaled, the density of people.

A third way to avoid violence: boundaries

The distance you might walk in a day-if there are boundaries around this, unlikely to have violence. These boundaries can be either political or physical. The idea behind this is that if there’s a grouping of a people of a given size in a certain space, they start to impose their values on that space. Others coming through, or “encroaching” who don’t hold the same values would seem to be intruding in a way which violates those values.

If we have patches of that size, can we create peace? Tested the models in Switzerland, which both has diversity of values as well as a general lack of violence. It ends up the mountain rages act as boundaries. Where these boundaries are insufficient, as represented in the models, is where the people do enact violence. Switzerland’s response to these rare pockets was to place a canton, which reduced that violence. Cantons throughout Switzerland are thoroughly mixed by demographic or not at all, which coincides with no violence in these models.

Field Perspective

The clashes in India indicated by census-data overlay are also the area called the Red Corridor, where the Maoist insurgency takes action. That doesn’t show up on the census — and so doesn’t show up on the map models. Gujarat in the West has occasional flareups. There patch sizes may be 20–40km, a lot has intense mixing as well. But there’s a lot of political effort to create separation. It’s intriguing to me that patch size [and equivalents, in other jargon] comes up again and again. Population of Kenya is really dispersed, but the patches of conflict is indeed on the 30/40 km range already referenced. In short, there are alternative explanations for what’s going on — which significantly match up with the models, which is interesting.

from Wikimedia Commons

Creating boundaries

In Rwanda, there were many separations as well as integration. What was happening there? There were boundaries — were these simply in the wrongplaces? In India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the borders are in the wrong places. The people who live there will tell you that. It’s nice to have models which indicate the same.

Creating new provinces: Kenya has also tried this. [aside: contrast w/ gerrymandering? -s] Power dynamics come out in these processes — people aren’t putting borders in right places. What are their intentions?

Lots of Marshall’s work is on the unintended consequences of delivering aid. Interventions often see the arbitrary boundaries which exist, and work with those boundaries. As an example, one hotbed of violence in Kenya had a mass migration. Those migrating clustered as the villages they had previously been in, but settled across a border between two states was. One state side was Anglican, the other side was Protestant. As the aid agencies only worked on one side of the border or the other, religious conflict emerged as one area simply got more attention and aid than the other. Religiously-aligned people previously uninvolved due to geographic distance got caught up in the conflict because of the way resources were brought into the space.

This relates so painfully to my experience in humanitarian and disaster response, where funding and support are silo’d arbitrarily or based on arbitrary policy, rather than on actual need and people. Marshall’s experience is in the extreme of how this can play out, and we must be cognoscente of it as we build tools and engage with communities lest we fall to the same fate.

Field and Model

YBY: the largest Swiss canton is also separated into circles, separated by religion.

In Rwanda before the violence, the Muslim population was about 10% of the total. The Muslim community as a whole stayed out of the genocide, didn’t kill others. The Hutu Muslims didn’t kill Tutsis, et cetera. Some people suggested that they didn’t participate because they had clustered themselves. This model would say those patches should have been targets for others… note there was also class-based violence within whatever else was happening. Maoists would tell you this is what’s happening there as well, not linguistic or religious conflict.

Are these patches the right size? Too small? Too far apart? People tell stories afterwards, but want to see the system.

Questions and Answers

Can be found where we took live notes, to be aware of attention spans and word counts. My favorite bits include:

  • Can we us stories to change a zero-sum mentality to a winning™ mentality?
  • MLK talking to white America about their myths of fairness and justice and equality.
  • Breaking points, with examples from peace demonstrations that devolved into violence after a rock was thrown through a window, often by non-participants.

Breakout Sessions

Conflict patch analysis: what’s needed next?

Many times people make up differences if they don’t exist. So to what degree is this inescapable? How to identify the identity the factors that matter the most at a given time?
Again, more in-depth notes exist on our live notes, with top-level thoughts as:

  • How do we get to predictions or global scope?
  • How do we refine the model / what might be changed?
  • What other data is possible?
  • How do we prioritize where to look?

Failed States

Belgium as a stable failed state: little violence, garbage still gets picked up. Libya as an unstable failed state: lots of violence, no civic infrastructure. Often places in distress are able to ask for, and hopefully receive, outside assistance. Bolstering from the UN, outside trade support, etc. Besides this large-scale response, local individuals can also receive training and credibility from well-respected and known entities such as UNHCR, Red Cross, or academic or medical institutions; then return home to increase the quality of life and stability of an area. Groups like ISIS break these models, as any external entity (and representatives of such entities) are met with dangerously high levels of threat.

I’d like to point out that the Kurds seem to be doing pretty well (not to diminish their substantial losses) at responding to these sorts of issues, as a distributed group as well. We just don’t like to pay attention to them, as they’re feminist Anarchists.

Closing thoughts from salon

There are a lot of people working on peace and negotiation in Boston (where the Salon took place). We (NECSI) don’t know them yet, we need to start reaching out to them and offering to engage with them. We have a simple model that provides a deep lens, and would like to help move beyond the meme of “all just get along” to an understanding that this may not always work.

NECSI takes part in ongoing conversations with military groups. Do theytalk about these issues — ethnic violence? Yes, with a focus on anchoring discussions in the sense that we’re really an integrated world now. The US is no longer in “out-group” conflict: we are an integrated system. [socioeconomic; also environmental ++] Military is vey forward thinking, compared to health care.

Strategists tackling complexity are often still constrained by policy. We still believe we’re looking at a whole system. The approach of blaming individuals versus governments in recent conflict is related to this shift, represented in part by things like not being able to work with refugee groups in Syria because they’re classified as terrorists. This also relates to how difficult things are with Dadaab, the Somalian refugee camp in Kenya, based on migratory patterns and tribal tensions.

People also talked about scales and stories. A single person can do a thing that matters, and that’s exemplified in both the model and from the field. Does that make this a universality class? In a similar thread, we wondered what can be done in actuality, within people’s comfort levels? How do we encourage people to understand complexity so it’s in their intuition when they make choices?

Maryam and I joined remotely, and had a discussion in our chat about if it’s ethical to separate people by imposing boundaries, or by opting for the “my neighbors should be like me” model over avoiding violence through going for “all my neighbors are different from me (and each other), and that’s ok!” model. In the social sciences, there’s a strong advocating for integration because of the empathy it forces. People tend to self-segregate (this is called homophily, or “birds of a feather”) as it’s easier to be around people who already “get it.” But it’s also easier to avoid noticing how badly others might have it, if you don’t have to see them on a regular basis. See also gentrification, gated communities, slums, etc. When schools in the US were being racially integrated, that was the point that was made (and what proved true) — ends up “separate but equal” does not, in fact, work. Maryam pointed out that the schools are still gender specific in Iran, and that she fears this adds to tension and lack of understanding on all sides. So, while separating out genders, or races, or religions might make things safer in the short term, wouldn’t this lack of empathy and understanding make things less stable and healthy (read: equal, just, dignity for people) in the long run?

My lingering question is about how to maintain important cultural practices while also advocating for enforced empathy.

NECSI Salon: First Day Celebration

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NECSI’s action-based 4th Wednesday Salon focused on First Day. This is an event which provides the resources, framing, and impetus to take personal responsibility for community health. It is not a fix-all, but is it an important, missing piece in the US health care debate, and a fulcrum for connected shifts to a healthier society.

On Wednesday, March 11th, we will hear talks from Deb Roy from the MIT Media Lab, Devin Belkind from OccupySandy, and Sam Klein from Wikimedia on Distributed Organizations. Register here.

First Day is about taking personal responsibility for your own wellbeing at personal and global level. Inspired from the idea of regeneration and new year resolutions, First Day wants to create a community level engagement at a personal level and community level.

Deck created by Catalina Butnaru

We assumed those attending would be both in a position to, and have a desire to, act. The Wednesday before had provided space for folk to ramp up to this state, including review of readings about a similar Wal-Mart initative. We were additionally inspired by Boston’s own First Night and City Awake.

After very short reminders of what we were there to accomplish for the day, each person introduced themselves and what they were interested in specific to First Day. From these, we pulled out a few break-out sessions tasked with creating an actionable list or guidelines for organizers to work with. The overarching points we ended with were an appreciation of the need of safe space for people to ask questions which might otherwise be taboo (especially around health), comfort in complex problems having interventions (especially with a light hearted attitude!), an appreciation for existing cultural events (Days of the Dead as well as Chinese, Tibetian, and Indian celebrations of new cycles and health), and holistic approaches to mental and physical health.

Slightly curated notes follow:

Refining the Message

learn + care + act: as leitmotif for everyone there. First Day for partners, participants, sponsors: to learn, care, and act

about yourself, your family, about your network or patients, about particular communities or conditions

make this informal and welcoming. not a sale, no marketing. focused on topics, not on selling a solution

Existing networks focused on outreach and some of the above:

  • health service initiatives (startups, tools)
  • charities, publicity campaigns (often by condition)

Topics for the Fair: areas of most uncertainty, people need reassurance

  • old age : alzheimer’s, self care, company
  • insurance: finding doctors
  • getting regular care: what is available; insurers: in position to ensure people go to the doctor
  • intervention: what is possible, appropriate [mental health, &c]
  • maternity: starting a family, childbirth,
  • chronic pain: exercise, rehabilitation

Stakeholders, defining motivation for each community

  • Business
  • Academic
  • Public

Something the community wants to give, or to solve. A reason to meet together, around what subject. Totally open, or guided topic. If you have a different parts of the community get together and decide on the community level about commitments.

A topic that you care about is more attractive than a generic health fair; which is more attractive than a topic you don’t care about. A celebration is more attractive than an informational event.

So — Invite people to ‘come find your health problem’ at a gathering? Have something like this founded in games and science and discovery?

We focused on ‘Health’ rather than personal resolutions and commitments (compare WalMart’s annual event). What if this broadened to personal improvement?

How to make the event actionable in the moment

Optimize for games and Aha! moments. Fun, Groups, Feedback. How we provide value to the community: value as an outcome, fun as a driver.

Creating a network — Learn and Connect. Make friends.

  • example of phones off in class — bigger reward when the group acts in a certain way (Minority Problem).
  • community or neighborhood paired to itself. Not just an aggregation of individuals, but something you participate in together. Collective.

Make it Fun

Gamifying the event + identification with a group + finding incentives to do more given group identification It’s empowering to make it feel comforting, so we can break the barriers of shame, taboo, to actually address serious problems in a comforting way FUN is the reason to bring them together, and the outcome is learning, value and community building

Working through one Topic

This group discussed if we’d like to focus down on one topic. Topics that impact people’s lives, but action can be taken from prevention to treatment at community level based on how far along a condition is. Possibilities included chronic inflammation, lack of sleep, water, allergies/intolerance, addiction.

Implementation

Distributed component in addition to central fair?

Checklists for different levels of society

  • for cities: checklist for things to do on First Day: walk in clinics, talk about collective obligations, &c
  • for community leaders: checklist for your flock, events and outreach
  • for individuals: checklist for self, talk to your close family (and friends)
  • for organizations: send people to learn, reflect on what you can improve
  • for sponsors: ways to reflect, amplify this community process (compare WalMart day of health & resolution)

Things to worry about

How to vet organizational participants. Choosing a date that makes sense. First day makes sense;

Deck created by Catalina Butnaru

also considered existing health related holiday things that we might plug into. Boston: marathon! Chinese / Tibetan New Year. (Tie in with each community)

Avoiding duplication, can we build, augment, etc? Or is redundancy ok? Preventing across co-option. Trademark transmission

Closing Comments

Thanks to everyone who came out and made the event amazing. We look forward to building First Day with you!

Land and Water : a long-term perspective

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We will explore themes of reduced access that have developed out of tensions in property-holding, leases, and contracts; forms of control exerted or facilitated by the state, by law, and by other institutions; and exclusions of class, race, and gender. We believe that history has lessons to offer about how change is introduced to society. In taking this long perspective, the conference invites proposals that look backwards in order to look forwards.
Academics will have an opportunity to be inspired by the practical questions of activists acting in the present, as activists talk about their work, their present projects, questions, and concerns. Activists, in turn, will have the opportunity to articulate large structural conceptions such as capitalism, empire, or debt in relation to access to land and water.

I’m here because the organizer, Jo Guldi, has been a dear friend and on-again off-again roommate of mine since my move to Cambridge in 2013. Through her, I have begun to see the underlying fabric of many social justice causes of who has access to what, and how important a long-term view is.

Opening Remarks

The opening did a beautiful job of framing the conference overlap of activists and academics, with author John M Barry speaking about seeing himself as an academic who speaks the truth, and is therefore seen as an activist/environmentalist. As the beginning of what would be ongoing themes of access to information and accountability, he also pointed out that while both legislation and media are pointing at the levees in Louisana being the culprits of land loss, locals know it’s because of the oil industry dredging canals in order to place equipment. The permits for dredging explicitly indicate that backfill must happen within 90 days of the dredging, and yet years later it still hasn’t happened. He states that the oil industry should be paying for fixing the part of the damage which they have caused — no more, and no less.

https://prezi.com/embed/ldwmcufxheyd/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&landing_data=bHVZS2czc0xGc1o4L25iNEY0Z0gxZHVvMTZtbHdGSkM&landing_sign=jJ89GmA5DyjuXabzPcvIOQ_cHqPPoylFIBwL5lxsJ9Y

Technology and Infrastructure

The Technology and Infrastructure panel focused on the interlinking and continuum between these, with a hopeful view of new opportunities, and a historical grounding in past efforts. We heard from:

  • Dorn Cox, of FarmHack, on open-source engineering and the economic support of small holders
  • Mark Healey, University of Connecticut, on dams, territory, and utopian schemes for water governance in Argentina
  • Don Blair, of Public Lab, on the new cheap age of water quality monitoring, solar, and everything else
  • Timothy Gorman, Cornell University, on the politics of water management infrastructure and salinity control in the Mekong River Delta
  • David Kinkela, State University of New York, on the history of plastic waste

I like that this conversation didn’t look for One Silver Bullet to Rule Them All, but rather looked at the systemic issues of externalizing costs and accountability. Represented were both extremes of citizen science in Louisiana holding governments and corporations accountable (or at least proving damage, even if no further steps were taken), as well as communities in Vietnam tearing down government-sanctioned levees so they could continue raising salt water shrimp for higher income than they might get from farming rice. We asked who gets to ask the questions, and to what purpose (a story, a court case, a profit, etc). Another theme was that of externalization of cost, with recycling becoming the responsibility of the consumer, rather than industry needing to produce degradable items. All returned to the topic of the conference – a long term perspective, and who both pays and benefits from which choices.

Command and control, citizen science, regulation and monitoring — who is responsible for what? #landandwater pic.twitter.com/KaKj3AhvCZ

— Willow Brugh (@willowbl00) September 4, 2015

During our breakout session, we talked about failure as both not talked about enough, being the only framing for continued financing of municipalities, and how great the idea of “releases” in software is as a way to establish the mindset of iteration. We also discussed how closed off most data is, and how imperitive it is to share in order to establish a baseline and scientific rigor. 

Utopian Solutions

This panel focused on what utopian ideals have to do with how we approach land and water access issues. We heard from:

  • Christopher England, Georgetown University, on Henry George and why the rent is so damn high.
  • Paul Graham Raven, University of Sheffield, UK, on how meta systemic infrastructure reifies the post-Enlightenment dichotomy between society and nature, and the potential for more sustainable infrastructures.
  • Thomas Summerhill, Michigan State University, on the historical successes and failures of democratic rural movements in New York and what they can tell us about the age of fracking.
  • Tess Brown-Lavoie, of Young Farmer Network and Sidewalk Ends Farms, on the future of farming.
  • Jim Hafner of Land for Good on the role of land tenure, reform and forms of “management” as environmental/land enclosure.

This conversation focused on the disconnect between those who work the land, and those who have equity in the land. Tess focuses on working the land (and organizing others who do the same), Jim on how to ensure farmers have ongoing access to their land, Thomas on historical manifestations of these tensions, Christopher on why land use is so tied to rent levels, and Paul on the overall idea of utopia. We walked away understanding that democracy isn’t enough to combat corporatism, and that we need to organize ACROSS borders in order to combat (inter)national corporations/capitalism

So far as the ideals of utopias, rather than blueprints to “just deliver on,” can we try out different “solutions” in a way which still celebrates free will? Utopia is a horizon, but we should expect (or even wish) to reach.

Closing

Laura Gottesdiener on Water, Housing, and Land: The Battle for American Cities

https://prezi.com/embed/0mpa0jujegwv/?bgcolor=ffffff&lock_to_path=0&autoplay=0&autohide_ctrls=0&landing_data=bHVZS2czc0xRekxmajVuczVyZ0pvTHV5NkhHd0xuR28&landing_sign=Vk-SI6EmofF9DzAJFXs_4AB-RutH9TWC2c80Xagb9ys

Embed after dinner:
detroit water crisis video
taking over, taking back on vimeo

What’s the Catch?

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Chaos Communications Camp is something that happens once every four years, and it is My Favorite. It’s a few thousand hackers etc camping together in Germany. There’s brightly colored hair everywhere, and a slowly improving gender ratio, and stickers on laptops, and a gigabit to the tent. There are disco balls in trees, and competing soundscapes of German techno and old rock and roll or hiphop, and a giant sparkley rocket ship called Fairy Dust. I’m camping with Norton’s Obscure Phoggy Embassy (the manifestation of a few Bay Area hackerspaces), which is successfully trolling much of the rest of Camp through their assumption we’re being colonial (because Emperors), as well as having an inflated shark Rubin‘s been shouting at people to jump over. Also, NOPE attire are booty shorts.

I was invited to sit on a panel called “What’s the Catch?” put together by nat from Open Technology Institute. Josh (also from OTI), Kate (from tor), and myself were the three panelists. We each attempted to speak for about five minutes, and then we focused on questions from the audience. Our topic was an ongoing debate in infosec (and other) circles : is it possible to take money from governments and corporations while maintaining a project’s integrity? I vote yes, if you work really hard at it. The talk will eventually be up on the CCC wiki (and I’ll likely post it here once it’s up) but for now, this is the rant I put together when I was considering how to concisely state why I think this is the case.

In relation to this, and the other existential questions which I continually struggle with, I refer often to a quote from the Zapatistas, one of the few groups to maintain a governance structure after their revolution: “Caminando preguntamos,” which roughly translates to “we walk while asking questions.” To me, it means that we should move, but let’s analyze as we do. Let’s be in both critique and solidarity with each other.

I’m going to attempt to touch on three points, alliterated for your memory: perfection, pluralism, paternalism.
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Accountability in Response

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I’ve started writing about response over on the Aspiration blog, but this one still has cursewords in it, and is very much in my own language, so I figured I’d post it here first.

The problems our planet is facing are becoming more extreme. People and politics mean there are larger populations more densely packed in cities. Nomadic populations traveling along their historical routes are now often crossing over arbitrary (have you *seen* some of the country lines people in Western countries have drawn in places they might never have even been!?) political boundaries, making them refugees or illegal immigrants. Climate change means more and more extreme events are impacting those populations. We have *got* to get our shit together.

In all this, the people who have been historically marginalized often become even more so as those in power see scarcity encroaching on their livelihoods. But the ability to hold people accountable in new ways (through things like social media), as well as (I hope) a real awareness and effort in the long arc towards equality, means there are groups of people seeking new ways to better allocate resources to those most affected by these events. Often, these groups are also in a post-scarcity mentality — that, when we work together, wisely, we can do a whole lot more with a whole lot less. These are folk who think we *can* reach zero poverty and zero emissions (within a generation). These are the folk who see joy in the world, and possibility.

The resource allocation and accountability necessary for these transitory steps towards a world that can survive and even thrive won’t happen in a vacuum. In the organizations, governments, and grassroots efforts there are entire supply chains, and ways of listening (and to whom), and self-reflexive mechanisms to consider. In these are embedded corruption, and paternalism, and colonialism. In these, too, are embedded individuals who have been Fighting The Good Fight for decades. Who have added useful checks and amplifiers and questions. It’s into this environment we step. It is, at its core, like any other environment. It has History.

It’s in this context that I’m so excited about Dialling Up Resilience. It taps into questions of efficacy in programming by using and contributing to metrics for success in building resilience. It assumes good faith in policy makers and implementers by offering up data for them to do their jobs better. It protects against bad actors by providing granular, speedy data aggregated enough to protect data providers but transparent enough to be clear when a program is working (or not, if those we’re assuming good faith in don’t actually deserve that). And, my favorite part — instead of contorting and posturing about what makes people able to bounce back faster after a climate-related shock… we just ask them. Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that. But the core is there.

We’ll be working with a few different groups in Kenya, including the National Drought Management Authority (and their Ending Drought Emergencies program) and UNDP on their existing surveying initiatives, as well as groups like GeoPoll (SMS), Twaweza (call center), and Kobo (household) on stand-alone surveys about how communities estabilish and track their own resilience. If we get the grant extension, we’ll work more directly with communities using tools like Promise Tracker and Landscape (a digitized version of Dividers & Connectors) to be closer to their own data, and to subsequently be able to have more agency over their own improvement as well as accountability.

What’s also exciting is that our means and our ends match. I was recently in Nairobi for a stakeholder workshop with not only the project partners, but also with the organizations which would eventually make use of the data. We’ve been conducting community workshops to test our basic assumptions and methods against reality, as well as to be sure community voice is at the core of each component we consider. We’ve thrown a lot out… and added some amazing new things in. We’re hoping to break down the gatekeeper dynamic of accessing communities in the Horn of Africa, and we want to be coextensive with existing programs (rather than supplanting them). It’s feminist and it’s development and I’m kind of fucking thrilled.