tools before rules
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.
November 30th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Hi. I think I am very on board with what you are talking about in this entry. I’ve often thought about how rarely people are truly motivated to act at a federal level, but those same people can be really involved on a local level (whether in politics, social movements or economic initiatives). So people respond more enthusiastically to issues which affect them (which makes complete sense). So that would indicate a trend towards local governance is best. But then again the hierarchy as you described is just so darn enticing because of its efficiency. So a clever way to exploit both of those positive qualities is to organize the hierarchy so that it is responsive to smaller more manageable local groups. I just read a book called America and the World where Zbig Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft talked about what they thought the next president had to focus on. Something they both agreed on was the need for the president to restructure his departments so that each one was working on a narrower topic while sharing information between departments more effectively. They actually compared this idea directly to Wikipedia and said that the difference in organizing that kind of a structure in politics is that it has to be deliberately implemented (where as in the corporate world it often develops sua sponte). I don’t see why a similar information-spreading and responsibility-delegating system couldn’t be similarly imposed from a federal to local level. Does it defeat the purpose of democratic, participatory ideals if it is imposed? And I had a question for you: what do you mean by “best practices?”