 We're here having a talk with one of my favorite people to talk to who I could talk to endlessly jade about community and community building and and a topic called recombining and I'm going to let jade and did imagine introduce themselves and kick off with our second keynote of the day and thank you both very much for coming. Thank you for having a stand. We're excited to come and talk to people. I wanted to point out just coming off of the last, you know, that I watched which is super interesting that. Demeshi and I are not directly involved with any of the communities that that are coming and talking today. We're not members of the CNCF or. Any of those other communities. So our talk will be. Based on some theory and some suggestions about how to. To use that theory and any, any implied criticism should should not be heard because we aren't aware of those communities well enough to critique them directly. With that said. I want to introduce you guys really quickly to one of my favorite people in the world. The major. But the major got his PhD from Carnegie Mellon in a discipline called transition design. While he was there. He worked. I had the real great fortune of being able to work with him on a bunch of his ideas and some collaborations. On things like commenting and recombining and allyship in. The importance of kind of creating communities in order to support ecosystem effects. So, I'm excited to have this conversation with him today. Yes, and hello everybody. I am also funny that jade said that that because I'm also really excited to be here. I see jade as just as he sees me I see him as a really wonderful friend and co collaborator. But one of the things I really like about jade is just his mind. He has such a great mind and he kind of does a great job at elevating my thinking around some of these concepts and some of the work that I have done. And also a lot around just random stuff, you know, I need the mind I was going to go to and say gave okay how do we think about this problem and he helps to find clarity from complexity so I'm really happy to be doing this with him. Right, so let's let us get into it to major. Great. So, so, you know, I want to start here and just kind of tell you a little bit about how we think about the comments or how I specifically think about the comments. And so the comments is said to occupy the space between privately held property and public goods. So there's not only resource systems, who's they're not only resources system systems that we over exploit that might lead to depletion, but the comments also includes communities using these resources and the social practices that define how these resources are used. So however, some resources do not fit in that need definition, but they're nonetheless very important to our collective well being. So for these resources, what we have to think about is how they're shared, not necessarily how these resources might be used only. Next slide please. So, when we talk about the commons and when I chat about the commons with a lot of people, what they usually refer to is Garret Harding. And it's justifiably so, because he was one of the first people that argued in theory, at least that we remember about the selfish human behavior depleting common resources. So he wrote that in his book, our essay type in 1968 titled the tragedy of the commons. And he felt that that happens to the point of destroying the commons. So in other words, Harding believed that the different interests of exploiters and common resources cause them to protect their selfish rights in their own interest. So he wanted to establish a scarcity theory around the commons. And he also believed that privatization and government oversight are the vital ways for which to be able to maintain these resources at avert what he calls a tragedy. The next slide please. So it's important for us to note here that Harding often perpetuated an anti immigration and native its agenda. So you see that he leveraged his relative prominence as a respected academic in UC Santa Barbara to rail against immigration. He believed that that's one of the reasons for a population in the U.S. And he saw this as an existential threat and always pedal this, what some people call studio science that leverage exclusionary agendas and emphasize bordering and enclosure tactics. So you could understand that this is his perspective on the commons and this is where he's coming from. The next slide please. So but what would you look at Eleanor Ostrom, someone I actually really whose work I really admire. And others, they point to a perspective on the commons that privileges human cooperation instead. So Ostrom claims that the solution to overconsumption in the commons is not driven by access limitation through external regulatory forces like Harding believed, but instead through internal governance and stewardship mechanisms. So if we look at Ostrom's orchestration, she lays out these things that she called design principles. And I always share that, you know, if you think about them in a business you can away, they're more like lagging indicators. They're not designed principles as, for example, UX designers will think about them, but they show the essential ingredients that indicate the success of using common pool resources in institutions. So these principles help sustain the commons. In other words, everyone plays their part as to keep the system stable, including human. And I actually in my work cannot started thinking about non human participants as well. So, Ostrom has some quite interesting foundational work as well, prior to her work on the commons that Jave is going to touch on much later in that discussion. So, when we think about Harding's work and Ostrom's work, Harding, for example, thought about the antidote to the tragedy of the commons is external governance mechanisms on one side and privatization on the other side. We see some real world examples that demonstrate the limitations of this notion. For example, if we look at draconian copyright and patent laws, or even the adverse effects of totalitarianism, we see artificial enclosures that are being built that limit access to new ideas. So in other words, while Harding may be right on over-exploitation of common pool resources, he's dead wrong on the centralized need or the need for the centralized government or the need of privatization to that extent. And so, you know, so as we're thinking about regulating the commons, we really want to think about the commons existing in between. So if we were to adopt Ostrom's model instead, we see that a more open source approach to sharing common pool resources is more consistent with the way he was thinking about it. Because then it allows the community, and I know that you were sharing a little bit, Diana, about community is more important than contributors. But so when we think about this model, it allows the community to build the rules. And then all the government does or governmental rules does is to provide oversight and to actually build constitutional rules around where the community can be formed. And so where we think of legal structures of licenses then can be foundational, but they're not enough. So it's not actually create the common. So legal structures in software engineering might be open source licensing, for example, and the licensing may say that this thing cannot be privatized. But the fact of the real fact is that it can be the fact that it can be privatized does not make it more of a commons. It just makes it not privatizable. Cool. So when we look at things like licenses, we can say that they established the conditions that may make a commons possible, but they don't actually create a commons by fiat. They don't do it automatically. And we can say in general that things like licensure or governing bodies can work at multiple levels inside of a commons. And Ostrom identifies these three different levels that that things may work on a constitutional level, which would enable the conditions of possibility. So for instance, open source licensure enables open source commons to work or enables them to exist, but it does not guarantee that they will exist. It just creates the possibility of them existing. In order for a commons to actually arise, there's two extra levels of negotiation that needs to occur. So one would be the collective choice level, which tends to be polycentric. A lot of the previous conversation we heard the last keynote revolved around these types of ideas of multiple organizations banning together each with their own needs. That's the polycentrism. There's no central control mechanism. There's no one organization that is making specific demands that the rest of the organizations have to listen to. So there's a collective choice that needs to be made. And so what are the rules that are being negotiated and what are the outcomes and evaluation criteria of those rules at that kind of collective choice layer. And then finally, moving down closer to day-to-day activities, operational level decisions about how things might work in production and use, where in this case I mean literally the production of the common resource itself. So rules about how people can contribute code, what it means to provide a patch, how those patches should work. All of those details are about the negotiation of how a community works together on a detailed level in a day-to-day way. And the last important thing to kind of point out here from Ostrom's work is that the extent that a commons arises from a constitutional set of rules, it will only survive if it has a quality that she calls adaptive governance. And adaptive governments roughly is the idea that all three levels of these rules that are established and help create the commons, these negotiations, all of them have specific types of outcomes and all of them then need to be evaluated according to the values of the commons itself in order to determine whether or not those outcomes were valuable or not. And then finally, the outcomes and the evaluations should feed back into the policy creation and negotiation processes. So to the extent that bodies governing commons fail to listen to and respond to the feedback, they become maladaptive, they ossify, they become brittle. And to the extent that they listen to the community's needs and modify the policies at all three of these levels, they create a condition of adaptive capacity. There's one other thing I wanted to point out really quickly as we kind of talk through this, which is there's a specific kind of license that I think actually embeds in the licensing a quality of establishing a commons. And it is the beerware license, a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but the point I'm trying to make here is that in commons theory, there's an idea about reciprocity. And reciprocity is often modeled or talked about in the way that one talks about buying the next round of beer. So a transactional view or a transactional governance system often thought of as kind of a privatized governance system and potentially a centralized governance system tend to be transactional. And what I mean by transactional is that if I were to buy Dimeje a beer and then I immediately took out a notebook and wrote down exactly how much that beer cost. And I said to Dimeje, you owe me $5 because I bought you that beer. That would be a transactional interaction. And one of the things that happens in those transactions is that the temporality of the experience is quite compressed. It means that there's no need for us to continue to negotiate at all. There's no need for us to create a community around that interaction because the transaction has captured what is due both sides. Reciprocity is the idea that not writing that down basically establishes an ongoing negotiation between Dimeje and myself where it's never clear exactly how much is owed to either side only that we will continue to interact with each other and that somehow that interaction will create a fair outcome. So I like the beer license because it embeds this idea that the contribution will be recognized at some other time and that other time is not specified or overly constrained. Hey, Dave. Yeah, great. So what we're thinking about, you know, transaction, you know, your comments existing with transactions. I think of comments as performative, right? They're revealed in negotiation. I just said, Jay mentioned reciprocity. And as they're revealed in negotiation and reciprocity, the community engages to solve the real problems. And therefore, coming into emerge, there must be a social dilemma and a social dilemma when you think about it is an action situation where there is always a conflict that is happening between the individual and collective interest. So there in that sense, the commoners are negotiating the way that they share these resources and making sure that their individual selfish needs are somewhat subservient to the overall collective good. Next one, please. So, Charlotte has someone whom I've met and I really I not only think she's a lovely person, but I love her work. She co authored many papers with Eleanor Ostrom on the comments. And in her work, she identified these six common entry points for what she calls the new comments this discourse. So the first one, the need to be able to protect the resource from enclosure, which we've kind of alluded to so far. Secondly, the observation or action of peer production and mass collaboration, primary and electronic media, the evidence of new types of tragedies of the comments that we might see in the world. Some of the work that I'm doing with another co collaborator, Kaki Scott talks about microcommoning and then the desire to build civic education and comments like thinking and the identification of new evolving types of comments. And finally, a rediscovery of the comments. So in my work, I propose a seventh entry point and the one that I kind of tag design enabled with common in. This entry allows us to understand the comments a little bit differently. And this is the one that has to do with reclaiming a previously privatized enclosed or commodified resource property or system that we think is essential to our collective survival. The factors that determine recombining are pretty clear, at least from my perspective. Firstly, the resource or the proper property being recommend is existing with already currently within the wrong governance structure. By wrong, I mean that the government structure where the resources that that we're talking about has the resource being either exploited to a point of depletion or fully excluded from those that might need it. Second, the recombining shifts the paradigm on resource negotiation to focus on the negotiating itself. So the in in recombining signifies something that's happening continuously, the continuous reclaiming of the process. Third, the participatory roles embodied in the commoners engaged in this recombining are being drawn from conflict management and resource sharing traditions that we actually sometimes beyond the ones around us. And they're not just those traditions within the commons, but also leverage other approaches to negotiation. So sometimes I actually draw some non-western approaches as well. Fourth, relationships through which these resources might be negotiated are critical to the negotiation itself. So I actually think in terms of the different roles that the participants embody. And it's sometimes they're human and sometimes they're non-human. And finally, revealing micro reclaiming acts that are visible in everyday practice. So, you know, because I'm a designer, I'm going to bring some designing into this conversation. So exploring recombining I created this set of cards that I used to help collectives things that start to understand how they might think about certain resources. What are the norms and secrets that they're willing to share and all the value measurements that might be available to them differently. I call these cards prompts. The mandate for the designer using these prompts is to be problem-revealers as opposed to problem-solvers as we traditionally think of designers. And to be able to help build those platforms that absorb the changing perspectives and experiences and interactions. So these cards, the ones you can see here, the pattern cards. And so they are a grand work for identifying what I call patterns and recombining from common resources that rely on not only perceivable part-hold dynamics of the commons or within the negotiation, but also integrates other cultural insights into understanding these new resources that we're talking about. And then we have different role cards, which identify the different owners and the participants and peers and partners of the commons platforms. And I was able to identify, at least in my work, up to six different roles that I embodied in the negotiation. And so I have the stewarding commoner, an upstream ally, an exploiting commoner, the scribe, the town prior, and the oracle, which kind of represents data. So and if we were to go to the next slide, on the back of these cards or these prompts, I actually think about the different modalities of access and stewardship that has to do with the boundaries, the way they're formed, collective agency, actors that might be human and non-human, and the different needs and expectations of the various role participants. And then I had finally, the next slide, these are called the dilemma cards that present the action arena prompts, which allow commoners to engage with the problems relating to resource sharing. So a good example of one way that I use that, and I've used them in different capacities, is I did some workshopping with landlords and tenants in the Portland area, Portland, Oregon, to better understand issues that relate to negotiation, resources, and sharing information around tenancy. And so the Portland Tenants United is an organization I work with. They had a territorial impact that affected over 50,000 renters in the metro area. And some of these negotiations actually led to some of the policy changes around rental housing in the region. For example, it influenced some of the languages used in the amendment that PTU suggested to Portland's relocation ordinance in 2017 that provided protections to tenants facing no cause evictions. So I also started thinking about data and thinking about data as perceivable as a common resource, because open data is not only exploitable to the point of failure, but the implication of its use also permeates your everyday life and also mark our collective livelihood. So I worked in different contexts, but I'm going to share some work that talks about data-driven approaches to delivering data as a needed resource, and to provide a more honest narrative that actually drives the way we visualize common challenges such as housing insecurity, homelessness, and so forth. The next slide, please. Before I do that, I actually want to share some of the work a good friend of my Mimi Onoaha does that kind of tries to find missing data sets for the benefit of the community. So through our work, Mimi looks at blank spots and in spaces that are otherwise data saturated, and she looks at data that's either obscured or that should exist where they don't. So it speaks to the value of ensuring that the people that actually do work the data that we have representation of data that's more egalitarian by nature. Next slide, please. So I worked briefly with an organization called Hack Oregon. They build platforms to engage individual contributors, demystify open data by helping to find solutions to some social dilemmas experienced in the city of Portland. So when I worked with them, the focus was to contextualize housing-related data in Portland, because Portland, Oregon is a city that I was experiencing and still is experiencing significant rises in housing pricing, as well as a glut in affordable housing, including rental housing. So Hack Oregon worked to create an action arena or problem space around housing in order to synthesize the complex information on housing market and provide better vision for long-term affordability. So a tenancy advocates group, such as the Portland Tenants Union United, use the data on housing as evidence to support the agenda. So, unfortunately, the data that they draw is usually inconclusive and sometimes unreliable in terms of the sources. So, for example, some realtor data was claiming then that up to 500, 400 single family homes used as rentals were being put up for sale, since tenant relocation policy was put into effect. But this data did not account for short-term rentals on Airbnb, for example. And this false data often impacted the credibility of that organization. So Hack Oregon was able to tap into housing study data made available to them, which was considered to be more reliable. I actually think it came out of Harvard. And they extended that data to be able to tell better stories through visualization, but they not only did that, they pulled data from other sources, such as the National Institute of Standard Tech, NIST, as well as Smart Cities Global Initiative. And they used these sources to create standards for normalizing open data and putting this data in stores to ensure consistency on how they are read and contextualized. And then this contextualization allowed the data to be grouped to allow for connections to be easily made between data sets and to make information from the data more conclusive and easier to act on. So the work also allowed for data to be more egalitarian in its use. So the next slide, please. So when we look at the challenges with data recombining, we see that there's some misunderstandings on the implications of accessing open data, which leads to improper dishonest uses of open data, including individual or corporate exploitation. So openness should not always mean access to expertise is needed with open data, especially in terms of its stewardship. And then privacy and security laws need to be there to ensure transparency and collaboration, and then thinking about the right versus the wrong data and finding accountability measures for misuse and improper privatization. And then we always have problems of pure poorly curated data as well, which is a big issue. So I'm going to hand over to Dave now. Cool. So one of the reasons I really wanted to make you to talk a little bit about data recombining was, I think is a really interesting example of the way that we could think of what the common resource is. If we and apply the rules that we are trying to figure out and the things that we're trying to explore where in open source communities, so open source communities, the resource tends to be the source code. That's why we point to open source. And some of the questions I end up having around that are, what could we do as a community to help make open data better. And in particular, the fact that data unlike source code has a, another and a unique sets of problems as a public resource that source code tends to avoid having. So I think there's a lot of interesting things to explore there. And I think both from a better understanding of how commons theory could be applied to governmental data at your local government level at state and nation level issues. But also frankly inside of corporations, one of the, one of the real big issues that we can see is if, if a platform is thought of as primarily being source code, the things that we kind of look at inside of DNCF and things like that. That would tend to the resource would tend to be source code in operation. But in fact a huge amount of what makes platforming work or not work inside of organizations is the fact that there's massive amounts of siloed data in large enterprises. And the negotiation and renegotiation of where that data should live and how it should be governed are real issues that I think enterprises struggle with. So I think there's multiple different places where we could use this thinking about commons to rethink how we manage things. And I don't think it's just source code. And I think that this community that we're talking to probably has a good deal of insight to contribute to things like that. So from that perspective, I just wanted to really quickly kind of walk through some of the points that the major made and make sure that they're as clear as can be. One of the things to say is just that there is, there is not a an absolute ethical standard that commenting is better than other things. There are things that are better managed by governance and by privatization. The question ends up being what are the types of resources and the types of relationships that would create greater value by creating a commons. And in particular, Demeshi and I, I think, have a pretty strong agreement that a commons can't actually be designed. The only thing that a commons can, the only thing that the designers and people wanting to create a commons can do is create the conditions for a commons to arise. And that's because a commons specifically is is an activity that reveals the underlying complexity of various negotiations around the use of shared resources. And by revealing that complexity, you are either going to create a community around it to handle that complexity, or you're going to react and try to simplify the complexity either into something that can be privatized or can be centrally governed. So that being said, you know, we see a set of patterns around how things that could be more valuable treated as a common resource. We see a set of patterns of how they, how those resources end up in other forms of governance. And those four ones that we've identified so far are either they were placed, the resource was placed into privatization or governance without an understanding of commons. In other words, these are acts of omission. It's the idea that the person or the groups deciding how to distribute these resources or govern these resources were unaware of commons as a way of governing. There's anti commons in particular the idea that we shouldn't have these kind of self governing systems or that we shouldn't allow for community engagement. And that kind of a Hobbesian version of if you let the, you let the people manage themselves, they'll run amok. So that is more of an error of commission. In other words, an attempt to eliminate commons for either either bad philosophical reasons and or for profit reasons. The other one we see is things that start as privatized resources, but then need to be common. So this is more around a negotiation of things where, when should a resource that has started out appropriately started out as a private resource be commons, when should it be moved into a commons. And finally, there's the idea that things that were in a commons could be degraded. They could collapse into either private or centralized governance because the actual community processes and activities that were supporting the commons themselves erode and therefore the resources migrate to other areas, other forms of governance in order to be continued to be managed. When we talk about recombining then what we mean by it or what I would suggest we mean by it is that we want to first recognize that some resources are more valuable as common resources. We need to determine the qualities of those resources and in order to be able to locate them then we need to locate such resources either in privatized or centralized governance and then negotiate that ongoing negotiation that D'Medre pointed to in order to recombin or make these resources back into a commons resource. So this is in essence what I think of as being recombining. Recombining is the process by which we reveal the complexity of various stakeholder needs and we create the conditions to enable a commons to arise. So that I would differentiate from commoning itself, the activity of maintaining a commons. And again, to beat that dead horse, it's not a set of policies but an activity, it's a process, an ongoing process that maintains and reproduces the commons over time. And Ostrom gives us these nice eight rules or as D'Medre pointed out earlier, kind of design properties or qualities that one might look for in order to determine whether or not a commons is going to be effective or is going to be sustainable including clear group boundaries, benefits being equivalent to costs, et cetera. I don't need to read the slide to you guys but these are the eight that we would look for in order to determine whether the commons is stable or should be expected to be stable. On the other hand, she also identifies threats to commons, in other words, ways in which the commons themselves collapse, rapid exogenous changes. In other words, the environment or the market in which the commons kind of exists within has some sort of change. It can challenge the adaptive capacity of the governance of the commons itself. Transmission failures. So when a commons is handed from one group of individuals to another group of individuals, a failure to translate or to help the next generation of leadership understand what the governing was based on in the first place. So this is whenever there are transitions or leadership transformations, it's important to notice this and to manage the transition from one regime to another regime. Programs that rely on blueprint thinking and easy access to external funds. Again, when we treat things as being simple as opposed to complex what we would expect to see is that the value of the commons would degrade because the value of the commons is not simply in the resources but it's in the negotiation of the resources that actually creates the value. Corruption and an operative behavior and then a whole set of things that I think are things that I heard in the last conversation. I hear many conversations, including being able to explore, expose accurate information, reduce conflicts and have conflict resolution mechanisms that people agree upon. Creating educational facilities, which we heard a little bit about in the last presentation as well. And then the last one has to do with these exogenous changes. So how is the organizations managing the commons creating resilience by creating some sort of capacity for absorbing those changes. Then I just have two more thoughts and then we're going to do ask me anything. The first thought is this, given the current date of the world. I think a brief application of commons theory to what's happening right now. And through Ostrom's own work could be useful to think through. The first thing is to say that Ostrom's first work prior to the commons and one of the ways that she came to understand the commons and the importance of community engagement in their and self organization. It was her study of police forces in the United States. And in those studies, what she found was very interesting. In particular, aggressive policing has a feedback loop that dampens the ability for the communities that those that are being policed to clearly express themselves and to control. The police forces in to such an extent that even adding more and more laws and disciplinary effects into the feedback loop doesn't actually improve the performance of the police in relationship to the communities. And this has a specific kind of action and the action in particular is that as police departments grow in size and create higher and higher amounts of hierarchy, the accuracy of information reported up those hierarchies is decreased. The other thing that ends up happening is that citizens become unaware of the individuals that are policing them. And they don't have direct interactions with them. So they can't create effective pressure on those, those police forces. And the result of that ends up being that informal control of police officers. In other words, the communities. Social norms as a way of controlling policing so you can imagine people standing on streets, shouting at police officers, not to kill them and things like this. Those are informal controls. They're not legal controls. They're the community expressing something specific. Those informal controls in these larger and larger police forces end up being less and less effective. And so the result of that is kind of a feedback loop that amplifies destructive behavior around the communities that the police are supposed to be protecting. So the result of this is kind of a rapid divergence and a collapse of the commons where the commons in this case is expressed by people's common security needs. Ostrom was very specific in her findings about this. She stated that she has never found a good example of a higher paid police force. She's never found a correlation between increasing the amount and funding amount of police officers and funding of police officers with the quality of the community's perception of security and therefore their ability to create a commons around their own self organized security. So she did find the opposite of this, which was that smaller organizations tended to create the space needed for communities to not only create their own self policing. In other words, the reduction of crime by actual citizens working to create better conditions and reduce the likelihood of crime. But also the feedback loops required in order to make sure that the police forces were under under the control of the communities that they were supposed to be managing. And so what she says basically is that the problem with a lot of current attempts to control. Well, actually, this is in the 70s, but a lot of the problems with trying to control policing are simply based on the fact that they over rely on what police departments can do in order to improve law enforcement and they don't focus enough on what citizens can do as co producers of community security and that a shift from increasing control of police forces as opposed to increasing community interaction in order to create safety is is an underexplored avenue. The last point that I want to make really quickly is this. Ostrom. Ostrom's view of the Commons has a very particular problematic that I think is worth pointing out and exploring really briefly. And what it is is this. Ostrom's ideas of Commons and communities are based in a basic observation, which is that communities are more likely to form if the individuals in those communities have homogenous views. In other words, people, you know, birds of a feather flock together is what we're trying to say here. And this is not good or bad necessarily. However, what we end up seeing is that communities that are heterogeneous have a harder time establishing Commons. And there's some really pernicious outcomes with this particular observation and one of the things to say is that at these various levels that we discussed where rules norms and policies are formed. We can see if there's if the originators of these various levels, the people who are involved in the original versions of these policies, for instance, were homogenous, there is a chance that those those individuals could have encoded racist sexist biased thoughts processes into the various levels inside the of these different parts of the organization. And the result of that is what we would call institutional racism and sexism and Commons itself does not resolve this problem, because it does not offer a way to think through how to create a Commons out of more heterogeneous concerns. So what will tend to occur without active engagement or active attempts to reduce this is that the homogenous majority will remove or race or exclude the other views from the Commons and therefore that exclusion leaves some people out of the of the equation, as we could, as we might say, resulting in institutional racism and sexism. And so, I think the major and I both would argue that allyship becomes a critical component of any individuals who would like to be involved in the active creation of rules as constitutional and collective agreement rules, especially, and that allyship involves using the privileged position that you get from being a member of the majority, making sure that honest voices are heard in the Commons and that not that the that the Commons are not overwhelmed by particular viewpoints, and that had non non non homogenous viewpoints aren't erased. Could be I'm not forwarding the slides I'm sorry, apologize. And that finally, we need to build up these platforms to actively empower others. And ideally, we want to encourage people involved in creating Commons to refuse to stay silent about the erasure and subjugation of other peoples. So just the last thing. When we look at this and we look at this multiple level idea inside of Commons we end up with a structure that says that when we're allying with people, we can ally with them at multiple levels for multiple purposes. And individual in order to make sure that their work is seen at in an institution, we could also ally with a cultural group in order to reduce individual oppression. So all of these different levels and these interactions offer opportunities for allies to exercise their privilege in order to make sure that the work and contributions of people who are not not viewed as being part of the Commons can then be invited into the Commons in a way that their viewpoints are not necessarily integrated, but that their arguments and needs are considered inside of the Commons and therefore maybe improve the Commons for a greater group of individuals. So I think that's us. Well, let me just tell you that was a tour de force and a wonderful thing and I think you've just pointed out a new hero for me Eleanor Ostrom going to be, I had wasn't aware of her work before today. So I think we all have a lot of homework and reading up on her. Unfortunately, I think I checked on Wikipedia and she's passed away, so I can't make her come and talk. So thank you for for doing that was really old goodness could be. Yeah, if I could add Diane she was the first woman if I if I if I believe to get the the the economics equivalent of the noble Nobel Nobel Prize. She got she got the she got the first woman to get a Nobel Prize in economics. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I don't know that it's quite I don't know that it quite have a noble prize in economics economics but it's right. Yeah, she was the first one to get it. Yeah. So it's really and I'm going to unmute my my co moderator here, Daniel, in case he wants to add anything in the cup. Lisa Marie, there's a couple of folks who've been chattering in the background to about this. I think that the work that you're doing is incredibly impactful and informs a lot of the work that we as community developers are doing and so thank you very much for for doing this and helping. One thing I wanted to say it and I always have to preface this is that Open Shift Commons is not was not created by community it is a informal structure that we have and we put in place and you know an aspirational goal is for it to be an actual Open Shift Commons. So I'm not trying to self aggrandize by talking about Commons when I be labeled Open Shift Commons but it is an aspirational goal to get there and to have some of these infrastructure and processes in place. One of the questions that that I have for you and that I think it is it revolves around and and you talked about the allyship and the diversity is the and the homogeneity usually of forming a Commons. You know that you that they're usually more successful if they're everybody thinks alike or looks alike or is from the same background or whatever and what and and you know there's so many things that came up today. But one of the things that we all struggle with is especially an open source is this idea of meritocracy and and how that influences our ideas about how a project should be governed who should be the people that are considered the experts or putting the governance in place and and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about maybe what I would call the myth of meritocracy and how to create more open governance. I love the phrase that you had about problem revealers as well. I think that I want that card and that deck of cards for every everything that I go to. But I think that this is one of the things the meritocracy and the adaptive governance concepts are something that I'd like to hear a little bit more you guys talk about. So I can I can start and briefly give a quick response and then jade can extend that a little bit. So one of the things we think about and we always go give and I have been going back and forth on these ideas for a while now. And one of the things we think about from other work is that diverse systems are resilient system and being able to actually think in terms of introducing diversity. So one of the I was thinking about one of the patterns in some of the work that I was doing is permeability of the boundaries that you form. So in other words ensuring that the right voices are brought in is absolutely crucial and fundamental when you think about common in as a practice. And so one of the I think one of the ways you do that at least from the design only standpoint is that you acknowledge different forms and different levels of expertise. So you always leverage expertise and be aware that experts expertise presents itself in different forms. And so I'm being able to have thinking in terms of like governance and and ensuring that representation that that the governance is representative of all the people that are the core participants all the commoners in the comments is absolutely crucial. But then I'll see if jade has some thoughts around expanding that a little bit. So I think one of the things that I would point out really quickly is around expertise in particular is that experts and managers are are usually thought of in an efficiency mindset and what I mean by that is that the reason you bring in an expert is to make a decision quickly. And the reason why you elevate one expert over another expert is again, because by elevating them you can reduce the friction inside of an organization you can basically say, you know, whatever we're going to make a decision about DNS is to major gets to make the final call you can talk about all you want but the major is the one who makes the final call. It means that the major can actually just kind of cut the baby into whenever he wants, and that that results in faster decision making right. So all of this is based in an efficiency theory, where the whole point is to make the organization move faster, think faster act faster. What are the arguments of a commons is that it's not an efficiency based play. It's not an attempt to make decision making more efficient. It's actually an attempt to recognize the complexity of needs of different individuals inside of the inside of the commons group. Or it doesn't make it more efficient and actually makes those conversations, maybe possibly take longer. A result of that efficiency thinking and the relationship between that and meritocracy often ends up being that we measure individuals based on some sort of objective measurements in order to prove that they are the experts or not. And the result of that ends up being a shift from kind of these discourse based negotiations about how we would negotiate an agreement to a centralized governing mechanism where we determine who the expert is based on some sort of standardized system or or or however you might think of that. So I think I think to a certain extent the question is how how does one in a meritocracy recognize that the meritocracy itself is designed for specific reason. And that's not good or bad. But when we are trying to increase the requisite variety inside the organization and increase the differences in order to make the organization better, that meritocracy is actually probably usually counterproductive. We've also we also here, I think a mantra within, you know, open source and red hat and other organizations is that having homogeneous groups doesn't you don't get a lot of innovation in that as well. So it is this whole dynamic of innovation being driven by different opinions as well and different aspects. So there's there's a lot of nuances to the whole conversation around bringing people in to the community having their voices heard. So it's, this is, we have like, I don't know, I'm giving us for four more minutes to have this conversation. I'm wondering if Daniel or Lisa Marie had had something that they wanted to bring up. Well, I actually have a question for James and dementia and thank you for your amazing presentation. I was just listening to the hidden brains podcast that aired on the 12th just a couple days ago and they make a lot of the same points about the role the community plays the unconscious bias role the community plays to, you know, be an indicator of the unconscious bias and activities of the sea in police forces and things like that. So it's a fascinating podcast called the air we breathe. If you want some data that was from the IIT test that wasn't 50 years old. I encourage you to check that out. But my question for you, since you have a lot of community organizers and community members on this call today. What are you doing specifically with this data and how are you putting it back into recombin the communities and the work can we specifically do as community organizers. So I think in terms of my work, I think the work in terms of like the data specifically what's been done there is actually I have since shifted away to other work. So I was actually not deeply entrenched in that I have to make sure that I say that pretty clearly. So my work was tangential to that. So I was a researcher working with that team. So I was embedded in the team and working closely with them. So but, you know, and I'll go out on a limb and say, So a lot of the work that's been done with with hack Oregon, which is a case that I shared with you, it's still being carried forward. So the data that's been that's been bucketed and contained and contextualized it's been shared directly with the community. So they have hack Oregon has a platform and he has it's actually works closely with a group of community activists with that actually visualizes the data and puts it out there in the community. So that's still ongoing, but it's not work I'm directly connected to. So I'm not anymore, at least. And so, but it's still it's it's a very, very much community facing. They've actually built a broader civic organization that actually governs how that data is shared as well. I think another really quick comment that I would make is that policing shows some of these negative feedback loops, these pernicious feedback loops. And one of them is that over policing of people of color creates more data about people of color than people who are white. Yeah. And the result of that is that people then start making arguments about where criminality lays based on the amount of data available, which is a skewed data set to begin with, because of the original governing and operating procedures that created the data to begin with. And so in result, you end up having to have the activity of commonings there, the activity of recombining there is to re problematize the data set in a way that people see that it's not objective. And therefore it can't be used as a way of negotiating a more secure system, because it doesn't accurately represent the system in the first place. And things like that that we see throughout organizations in different ways, where people kind of claim to be being objective because they have data, when they have not examined the way in which the data has been produced and reproduced in the first place is one of the reasons why this activity of commoning, thinking about data, thinking about how data can be opened and whether or not it is biased or not ends up becoming incredibly difficult to work with but incredibly important. And I think, you know, that goes right down to things like IBM saying that they're not going to do facial recognition anymore, because of things exactly like this. And those are the governing decisions that will actually create new conditions and prevent the creation of this biased data in the first place and that stuff that we need to look at. Yeah, and if I can add to that, someone once said that the data bears the truth that you give it. And I actually worked closely with, you know, another academic Dr. Johanna Borner. And we cannot investigate it, design as symbolic violence and symbolic violence is a term that was coined by Pierre Bourdieu, that talks about the in perceptible forms of power, forms of violence. That are caused by power differentials and power in differences within structures and communities and societies. And so when you think about that, just to kind of piggyback off of what Jay was talking about, the representation is absolutely crucial, right? Making sure that the data that you are presenting and you're sharing actually bears the truth that is missing. So I shared earlier the work of Mimi Onoha about the missing data sets where the stories that have been built around the data that's been shared is not consistent because the representation is not proper. It's not, it's improper representation there. So I think it's really, you know, I think it's really important, a really important point to you mentioned, Lisa Marie, making sure that those forms of symbolic violence is not perpetuated by just inadequate representation and lack of diversity. Awesome. Well, we could have another hour just on open data. I have a group coming in a little bit later this week talking about a COVID-19 open data project that's happening up here in Canada. And we've been having a discussion right about this too, is that like the metadata around race and, you know, because of healthcare and privacy issues and stuff like that, they can't, they don't have access to it. Or if they do, it's in Stats Canada and it's really, you know, combining data sets and to create real true data is that's accurate and reflective of what's actually happening on the ground. You see that in so many things, whether it's policing or COVID or pretty much, you know, any data. I love the quote that you just gave there, I probably can't paraphrase it right, but I think that was dead on in terms of, you know, you can trust the data, but you really need to understand where it's coming from and what the biases are in creating that and using that to judge or make decisions without knowing that is really one of the more dangerous things we can do. So I can't tell you how grateful I am for this amazing conversation and for everybody for participating in it. We're running a little bit behind today, so I am going to make you guys come back again soon and give you, you know, another hour to talk about this as we have on Fridays. We do stuff with Jave's team, the GTO office, so we have a forum for that on Friday. So maybe we'll just have you back again this coming Friday. Jave makes me do things and I do things. That's what we like about Jave, so that's wonderful. But right now what I'd like to do is say thank you very much.