Austin PPS blogs — Dan

Well, the Democratic party won increased majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the presidency.  After watching Obama turn a raucous crowd silent while he was here in Austin by saying “We’re for capitalism”, I don’t expect that the Democrats are going to all of a sudden embrace the principles of Parecon really really close.  But I do expect that there’ll be room for some more good ideas that would have been non-starters before.

The obvious one is the Employee Free Choice Act, allowing unions to certify via card-check, rather than forcing them to run the gauntlet of employer intimidation before an election.  Another one I think should be on the top of the list is ending the membership restrictions on Credit Unions.  Here in Austin, credit unions are at the top of the list of democratically-controlled economic institutions, ahead of housing and food coops.  And, while they’re not exactly participatory, you can’t build a better credit union while the current credit unions have to deal with ridiculous restrictions.  And even the mega-consumer-coops are still an improvement over other ownership structures.

What else would be on your electoral activism wishlist?

In my last post, I discussed software that allows for efficient collaboration within lateral structures by partitioning the lateral structures into task-based small groups–software like Mediawiki (behind Wikipedia) and bugzilla.  I think some of the lessons from this software could be used beyond the worlds of free software and free content, within participatory structures.

Last year, I unwisely got myself heavily involved in discussions of governance in the student housing coop I was living in.  The governance problems the coop was having were all about issues of participation and effectiveness; there were committees for people to get involved in governance, but attendance was very low; there were open board meetings, yet people still felt out of the loop.  We went around and around in drafting rules.  In the end, we succeeded in passing some rules changes, but they haven’t had a major effect on governance.

And the further I’ve gotten from the situation, the more I’ve realized that we were going about it the wrong way.  While there were occasional clashes in values, for the most part, everybody involved wanted better and more effective collaboration.  The problems we were experiencing were not there because the rules were leading us the wrong way, though they probably were.  The problem was that nobody knew how to collaborate effectively amongst large (~200) groups.

One of the projects, therefore, I’d like to take on in building participatory economics and participatory society, is creating the tools for people who value the things we value to more easily see these values through.  Part of this will be software tools for brainstorming and part of it will be “best practices”.  If you’re interested in helping with this, send me an e-mail or just read on to my later blog posts as I start figuring out more of what this means.