 Okay, then I'll come back everyone to these void spaces of the internet into which we both have been forced to migrate. This is our last talk for today. How to solve conflict in a community of equals by Merlein. We'll talk about specifically how to solve conflict in a community in which there is no leader based on his own experiences from hacker camps and the hacker space in Chent and Belgium. So without further ado, Merlein, the stream is yours and start your talk. Thanks for the introduction. And thanks for having me here to share my experience. So to give a little bit of background about why I'm doing this talk. About seven or eight years ago, I came into hackers space again. At that time, it was still flourishing. But in 2014, the hacker space imploded because of internal conflict. And this is something that seems to happen a lot with hacker spaces and with other organizations which are less structured, don't have clear leadership or a clear hierarchy. But in 2014, one of the original founders of the hacker space started the ID to actually create workshops around finding a system to fix our community. I was very interested in that initiative. So I joined the workshops. And together with the other people from the hacker space, we started building a system that basically got the best out of people. But that was still very close to anarchy, a very chaotic system. This is my cat Simba. He will be also here for the talk probably. And throughout the year 2014, we started writing down how the system would work. First very informally. And in 2015, I decided to become a board member of hacker space. With the explicit goal to implement this system. And the first thing I did was basically change the role of board members into removing any of their leadership responsibilities. But keeping the goal of maintaining the core infrastructure of the hacker space and acting as a counselor in order to fix conflict. And it's the second role that I will talk about in this talk. Throughout the following years, we kept on hacking the system, hacking our own hacker space. And finally, everything we wrote down, we bundled it into the hacker space blueprint, which is basically a small booklet describing how to run a hacker space using duocracy. But it's written very generically so that it can also be used by other organizations, which want to know more about how to actually run a duocracy. How to run an organization where nobody is actually leading the organization. In 2019, throughout the previous years, the hacker space kept becoming better and better. And the environment and the atmosphere in the hacker space kept becoming better. But in 2019, we had this real point of like, this is the point at which the space is running itself. As a board, we don't need to actually intervene anymore. The only thing we need to do is make sure the bills are paid and make sure our internet still works. But the duocracy worked. And so I started, I organized a bunch of talks and discussions on our experience with building this community. And time and time again, I got the exact same question. How do you actually solve interpersonal conflict? And so as I said, the hacker space blueprint, it only talks about how to build this community of equals. It doesn't actually talk about how to solve conflict in this community. The only thing that's described in the hacker space blueprint is to use the private talk pattern. But it's not actually explained what the private talk pattern is. So in this talk, I will explain what the private talk pattern is and how to use it to solve conflict, solve conflict without having to use authority, without having to use explicit leadership or forcing people to fall in line. So the private talk pattern, we didn't invent it. This is an old hacker space pattern, which is something that a lot of people, a lot of different hacker spaces, noticed that they were using the exact same method in order to solve conflict in their hacker space. And so it became like a design pattern, a design pattern for hacker spaces. This is a good way to solve conflict. And so it works in two stages. The first stage is that when there is conflict, you first talk to the involved parties in private. You listen to them, you let them know how the group feels about their behavior, and you find, you try to find the root cause of the actual conflict that's going on. The second part is that you then moderate a discussion between the different parties involved in the conflict. The goal of this discussion is to help these parties understand each other and to discuss and write down concrete solutions. Now, I could end my talk here, but I don't think it would be very useful because there's actually a lot of, a lot of finesse to using this pattern well. And so I'm going to give more information about each stage and about the kind of mindset that you need in order to use this pattern. So the first question is obviously who should do this? Who should organize these talks? Well, you, you should do this because you're the person listening to this talk. You're clearly interested in how to solve this conflict. And so you're probably a very good person to actually organize this. There is no formal authority needed because this pattern is about offering your help. You're not forcing the conflict to be solved. You are not forcing people to solve conflict. You are going to people and you're saying, hey, look, it's clear that there is some conflict here. And this conflict is an issue to everyone involved. So can I help you solve this conflict? And when you open your help, most people actually accept it without questioning it. However, it's very important that the person who does this, they need to be seen as someone neutral to both parties. This is, this becomes an issue. For example, if you've already chosen sides in the conflict, then the other party will not see you as a trustworthy and neutral person. This can also be an issue if you're like very good friends with one of the parties of the conflict. Then again, the other party will not see you as neutral. The second thing is, is that you have to be prepared to listen. Everyone joins every conversation with a whole bunch of preconceptions, especially when a conversation is about conflict. Everybody has an idea in their head about what the issue is of the conflict and how it should be solved. However, a lot of times those issues tend to, those, those preconceptions, those preexisting ideas tend to be wrong. And when you actually listen to people, you can actually figure out what a root cause is. And you might be surprised. And the third thing is that it's very important to stay authentic because the people involved need to trust you. And the only way to get them to trust you is to show them that you're authentic and that you are genuinely willing to find a solution that benefits both parties. Then the next thing you need is, you need the right mindset. And the first part of the right mindset is that conflict needs to be solved. As humans, we have this tendency to, when we see conflict, to just try to ignore it and hope that it gets, it goes away by itself. For most reasonable humans, this is their first initial response. However, by ignoring conflict, you actually allow it to grow. And when it grows, it becomes more and more difficult to actually solve it because more and more people get involved. And it becomes harder and harder to find the actual root cause of the problem. So you need to solve it and you need to solve it as early as possible. It's much better to solve this conflict, to intervene too early than too late. Because given that this is a process that is beneficial to both sides, there is not really a downside to intervening too early. You're not forcing anybody to do anything. You just want to hear them out. You just want to know more about the conflict. Then the second thing is that the only people who can stop the conflict are those involved. I said that the first response is to ignore conflict. The first response is to ignore conflict when you're interacting with the people who are involved with the conflict. And then when you get to people who are not involved with the conflict, you start talking about it and you start discussing it and start discussing what might be done to actually solve the issue. And most of the times, these discussions happen without the people who are involved in the conflict or without the people that other people are having issues with. And this will almost certainly fail these attempts. Talking to third parties has very little value. You can do it in order to get some ideas, but you always need to include the people involved in the conflict in these discussions or your attempts will fail. Then the third mindset point is that the contributions of a single individual or a few individuals in your organization are never worth having that conflict. A lot of times, people in their head, they start to make a balance of like, yes, this person is creating conflict in our organization, but this person also contributes a lot to our organization. So in our heads, that gives them some kind of right to make conflict, but they are never worth it. You do not owe it to them to allow them to create conflict. If you are a parade that by talking to them about the conflict, they will lower their contributions, then you should know that you are trading short-term gains by compromising long-term viability. In the short term, they might keep contributing, but in the long term, this will poison your community and your community will not be long-term viable. Given that this is the track for hackers against climate change, climate change, for example, is an issue that requires long-term solutions and that requires communities who keep putting pressure on everyone over the long term. In terms of conflict, you should always optimize for long-term viability, not for short-term gains. The thing is that solving the conflict even becomes easier when these people are actually really contributing a lot to your organization because you can start your discussion by saying, we really value your contributions and we want to keep you here, and that's why we want to solve this conflict. You're not a bad person, you're clearly not a bad person. There's just this conflict that needs to be solved. The second part of the right mindset is that conflicts need to be solved, and you need to see solved as like solving a puzzle or solving a math equation. You can't force people to stop conflict. You need to figure out how the pieces are not connecting to each other and you need to figure out how you can connect the pieces in a way that the puzzle works. As an example, punishing people will get you nowhere. Even though it is like an innate response that we have when conflict arises, we want to see people punished, even though this doesn't actually improve the situation to punish people. When you dig deeper into the conflict, you see that most conflict is created by bad communication, by cultural differences, by differences in expectation, not by people being bad people. There's actually no reason to punish anyone when you're trying to solve a conflict. Every time you want to do a certain measure, like banning people from joining your community space for a while, you always need to ask yourself, how does this improve the situation? Temporary banning people can be very useful. It can be useful to de-escalate conflict. It can be useful to make sure that stuff doesn't blow up before it's addressed. But you should always do it in order to solve something, in order to get a certain result, not in order to punish people for what they have done. The whole point of this is that when conflict is solved, it's actually solved, everybody involved should win. Nobody should feel like they are the loser, because almost always people do not actually want conflict and people do not actually benefit from conflict. The third thing about having the right mindset is that you need to get into these kind of discussions and these kind of talks with people, with the mindset that most people are good. Hanlon's razor also says never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. It's a very complicated way to say that if you have two possible explanations for some of these behavior and one of those explanations is this person is trying to do bad things and the second explanation is this person is incredibly incompetent, then probably the explanation that involves incompetence will be the right explanation, because most people are good. So most of the times when you need to choose between these two explanations, choosing the incompetence one is the right one. And so when you are in talks with people, always in the back of your head, think about where can I find the incompetence? What is the incompetence that created this issue? And so I've talked about cultural differences, for example. Not being aware of cultural differences is an incompetence. Not having the right communication skills is an incompetence. It's if you try to search for the incompetence, most of the time you will get to the root cause of the conflict. So the first step in the private talk pattern is the private talks, the individual talks. The goal of the private talks are first to let a person vent, because in the end we want the two involved parties to talk to each other. But that's not possible if there are too many emotions. So these individual talks are in order to let these emotions out and make sure that these people are heard. When they are heard, when they vent these emotions to you and they have the feeling that they are heard by you, then these emotions will become smaller. And then in next talks they will be able to have more rational and less emotional and less explosive conversations. The second goal of these individual talks is to build trust and understanding. And this has to be both ways. You have to be able to trust them, and they have to be able to trust you. And this understanding is very important. First of all, you need to understand their point of view. This doesn't need to be on a level of like I would do the exact same thing if I was in your place, but you need to understand why they are doing it. And then second of all, they also need to have some kind of understanding of what the problem is from the other side, like as outsiders. How do you look at this problem? Then the last step of these individual talks is to find a root cause, find a root cause of the conflict. So a lot of times, and I've seen this happen a lot in hacker spaces, a lot of times when you look at the surface of the conflict, it seems to be that it's about certain behavior. Like this person said, this person was very dismissive of my work, for example. But then when you dig deeper, you find out that there are actually other problems which cause this. A lot of the times, some of the root causes that these people don't actually trust each other. One of the ways to find this out is to ask a person. So say the other person said something that hurt you. If somebody else would say the exact same thing, if a friend of you would say the exact same thing, how would you interpret it then? Would you interpret it differently? And if they would interpret it differently, then you know that the root cause is not this communication, but the root cause is the actual trust. The root cause is that everything the other person says is seen through a very negative light. Everything the other person said is interpreted in the most negative way possible. And so if that is the root cause, then you just need to build trust between these people and that will solve most of the conflict. So then some practical tips for these individual talks. First of all, it needs to happen in a neutral place. If you have like a clubhouse or a place that you frequently gather, you can't do the private talks there. You need to do it somewhere else. It's better if the place is public in the worst case for everybody's safety, but also because it helps people have some level of control over their emotions. For example, a local bar or a comic cafe or a board game club is always very good. Find something that these people are comfortable with. Second of all, you always have to do these talks either face to face away from keyboard or by using a good video chat solution because body language and tone is incredibly important. You need to be able to see each other. You need to be able to see each other facial expressions and you need to hear the tone of each other's voice. And the quality needs to be good. First of all, in order to have this extra channel of communication and second of all, in order to remove the frustration because these kind of private talks can be very frustrating and can be very taxing both to the person involved in the conflict and the person who wants to solve the conflict. And so having decent audio and video makes sure that removes that frustration. And so then you can focus on the frustration of the conversation itself. Third of all, always take notes during this conversation. It helps build trust. It shows them that you're actually taking what they are saying seriously and it can be very useful to reflect on the conversation afterwards. Then you can initiate a private talk simply by being direct and authentic. Just say, I'd like to talk to you in private to understand this issue better. Things like, I'd like to help and I want to understand your point of view. Those are very good things to say in order to initiate a conversation. Make sure that it's very clear to them that you are there to help them too. It's also important to be authentic and to be humble. Don't say things that you don't actually mean. However, you have to get into the conversation with the mindset to listen, with the intention to listen. And so this might be, this can be a bit controversial. These two things might be against each other because it's very hard when you see a conflict to get into this first conversation with the idea of, I don't actually understand what a conflict is about. But even if you think that you know what the conflict is about, very often when you try to find a root cause of the conflict, you find out that it's actually something else that is different from what you thought. And so be humble about your own knowledge about the conflict. Then the individual talk itself. First, it's very important to explain that they are valued. Try to think about the valuable things that this person brings to your community or the valuable work that they are doing. And then second of all, just ask them to explain their point of view and listen. Let them blow off steam and start to build trust by showing them that you want to understand them by validating their feelings. But stay authentic and don't pick sides. It's very important not to pick sides. It's very important not to pick sides because otherwise people will think that you are not neutral and it will be a lot harder to fix this conflict. Then towards the end of the conversation, try to find the actual root causes of the conflict and summarize them. Summarize them verbally and try to write them down. And ask the other person's opinion about do you agree that this is the root cause? This really requires digging deeper. I explained the example before where a lot of times when somebody doesn't trust somebody else, they will start to interpret any communication in the worst way possible. And so in order to dig deeper to figure out if this is the cause, you can ask if your friend would say the exact same thing. Would you have the same reaction? Most of the time then people answer no, no. And if I would think maybe I misunderstood it, because this is my friend, they don't want to say something so negative about me. Then this point is optional, but it can be useful to explain other people's views. If you already have some idea of other people's views, it can be useful to also discuss this in this conversation, in this first initial conversation. And especially explain your views. Like this conflict is dragging our community down. This is the reason why I want to solve this conflict. And finally, ask them how they think it could be solved. Sometimes these are completely ridiculous ideas, but sometimes they also have some very good ideas about how the conflict could be solved. The second step in the private talk pattern is the discussion of the two parties together. Never do a group discussion. I would try to always do it with two people. And the goal of this discussion is to get these people talking to each other. Because a lot of the times, a lot of conflict is created by people not communicating properly with each other. And that at a certain point, the communication just stops completely. And that's the point where stuff starts to explode. The second goal is to work towards understanding each other's viewpoints. But this requires people to actually talk to each other. And then the third goal is to define concrete steps to solve the issue. It's very important that these steps are concrete so that you can later coach them and see if these steps are being followed. So the set of the discussion is the same as the set of the individual talks with the distinction that it's very important to be the first person there. If it's in a real life location, come there 30 minutes beforehand or come there on time, depending on if it's common in your culture to be on time or not. Or if it's an online video call, make sure you're the first person that initiates the call. Because if these two people are there without you, it will become very awkward. Then the course of the discussion. The first thing you need to do in this discussion is to explain the root cause. And then discuss and write down concrete steps to fix the conflict. They need to be concrete because you need to be able to track progress. And every party needs to be... There can be no confusion about whether or not there is progress. If the steps are not concrete enough, then you can start to have a discussion about whether or not there is actual progress about whether or not the steps are being followed. If they're concrete enough, then there's no discussion. A bad kind of concrete step is keep the desks more clean. Clean desks in hackers' faces specifically, clean desks are often an issue. But one of the big issues is that people's ideas and people's expectations of how clean the desks should be are very different. And so keep the desks more clean will mean different things to different people. So make it concrete. For example, clean the desks completely every time you leave the space. This step is something that might be overshooting. So in hackers' faces, for example, it's often allowed to have some clutter on a desk if you're working on a long-term project. But there are always people who have... Who succeed that limit. Who leave way too much clutter on desks and who take up all the desks in the entire space. Having a clean desk, having them clean the desk completely every time they leave the space, is something that is like an overshoot. It is too clean than what we actually want as a space. But it is that way because that makes it much, much easier to track progress. That makes it much more concrete. If they are out of the space and the desk is still cluttered, then they didn't do it. Then they broke their promise. Another good step is when this person says something to me, and I think it's insulting, talk to it, talk about it to another person. And maybe the other person can translate what the person means. If during the discussion you see that these people really start to communicate very well, then a step could be when I think you are insulting me, I will say it to you and then we can discuss it together and then we can clear it out that they don't actually mean it in an insulting way. Finally, understanding each other and having that discussion and starting communication is often already a very big part of the solution. So if you don't have a lot of clear steps, that might not be such a big issue because simply talking to each other solves a lot of issues. I think 90% of all teen drama series would be solved by just having the characters talk to each other. And this is sadly the case in real life too. So after the discussion, write down the concrete steps that you agreed upon in the discussion and send it to everyone. Send it to everyone involved. Send a short description of this was the core issue. This was a root cause of the conflict and this is what we're going to do to address it. Put it on paper. Even though you don't have any authority, even though they don't have to follow it, simply having it written down and having them agree upon it during the discussion will make it much more official for themselves. You don't need authority for this. Second of all, it's very useful to keep coaching and do the follow-up. Make sure that the conversation between these two people keeps going. Otherwise, the anger and frustration will start to get bottled up again and then at a certain point they will start to interpret all communication again very, very negatively and then the conflict happens again. So the overall idea of the private talk pattern is that most interpersonal conflict is solved by talking to each other. However, emotions make that very, very hard because people just stop talking to each other because they're afraid of the confrontation and because when they talk to each other, the emotions make stuff explode. And so, first you do the initial private talk where you get out all the emotions and you make sure that you make it clear that you understand them and that you hear them. And then during the second talk you get these people together and you get them to talk to each other. A second smaller idea of the private talk pattern is that conflict is extremely hard to solve in a group. During meetings, meetings are one of the worst places to solve conflict. Having private personal talks is much, much better than doing it in a group. So I have to add a disclaimer to this. I started the talk by saying most people are good. Well, some people are bad. If people have genuine malicious intent or are inherently incompatible with your community, you have to kick them out. The private talk pattern will make it very clear who is like this. The private, after going through this entire process, it will be clear whether or not these people actually have genuine malicious intentions or whether these people are inherently incompatible. If it's the case, kick them out. But again, you're not kicking them out to punish them. You're simply kicking them out to protect the community. Most times, the community is the common of the organization. You might have a certain goal, but you can only reach that goal when you have a healthy community. And so, in order to protect this community, you need to make harsh decisions and kick people out. Of course, given that these communities are, for example, run on democracy or run on consensus decision making, you can't decide to kick them out yourselves. But use the processes that are in your community to kick people out when, after this process, it's very, very clear that they are inherently incompatible. So, thanks for listening to the talk. I hope it was useful and I hope some people can solve some conflict in their communities. Obviously, this entire talk was based on my own experience with Hackerspace Gent in Belgium. And so, your mileage may vary. This worked for us. This worked very well for us. Every time we tried it, it actually worked. But tweak it, make it your own, make it so it works for your communities too. My name is Merlène Seepert. I'm from Hackerspace Gent in Belgium. If you want to know how to build a community of equals, go to hackerspace.design and read the Hackerspace Blueprint. And it also has links to other talks I did about democracy. And then finally, this talk was partly inspired by a video by Jonah Bacon, a new way to look at conflict resolution. Surprisingly, I think a few months ago, he released that video. And surprisingly, the process that he used in professional organizations and companies to do conflict resolution looks a lot like the private talk pattern. Jonah Bacon was the former community manager of the Ubuntu Linux project. And so, he's a very experienced person and knows a lot about how to build communities. So, if there are any questions, let's hear them. Okay. Thank you for your talk, Merlène. There are indeed a great many questions. And the first is you've mentioned repeatedly that this is, of course, based on your own personal experience. But would you think that this model or something like it could also work on a larger level, on a perhaps regional or even super regional scale? I'm going to interpret that question as like having different countries, solving conflict between different countries. I'm not sure. I'm not sure because this matter is specifically for interpersonal conflict, conflict between different people. Although the idea of finding the root cause is still very useful. I'm not sure if it's possible because you can't talk to a country as an individual. A country is composed of many different people. And so, the total behavior of this country is some emerges from the behavior of all the individuals. And it's very, very hard to find a single individual that you can talk to that represents this total group. I'm not sure if the question was actually meant that way. If it wasn't, please write it again in the chat and I'll ask it again in a more specific way. And the next question is, what if we don't have a common basis for such a system anymore? And we cannot start with personal conversations anymore, because just letting things implode and then start rebuilding everything from scratch is probably usually not an option. So would you have any ideas on how one could proceed then? I'm also not a big fan of starting completely new. What we did is that we actually didn't start from zero. During the Hacker Space workshops, we started from the system that we had. And we started to think about what do we like about the current system and what do we dislike about the current system. And we started to gradually change it. And throughout the years, with gradual changes, and by keep having these Hacker Space workshops every single time when we encounter issues, we were able to gradually change and improve our community. So even though the big implosion happened in 2014, the big resurgence didn't happen at once. It happened over the course of a few years. And it happened by slightly improving it and slightly changing the system every year. And it took a very long time in order to make that complete change. So my concrete advice is to start doing workshops in order to fix the system, in order to fix your community. Start doing workshops and see what comes out of those workshops. Okay, so at least hope is not lost, I guess, even if it can be difficult. And then the next question is, isn't it a problem that you mentioned always identifying a root cause of a problem? What do you do if the cause of a root problem is somehow subjective and cannot be agreed upon? What should one do then? I think there always needs to be some common base. And in our Hacker Space, the common base is that the Hacker Space itself and the Hacker Space community is the thing that we need to protect. And so if there is ambiguity of the cause of the conflict, then we simply start to look at what behavior is advantageous to our Hacker Space and what behavior isn't. And we use that as the common ground. And we start to build from there. Depending on what the goal is of your community, the common base will be different. But I think in every community, there will be this common base, even if the common base is simply that it's the existence of the community is the thing that everybody wants. Okay, then thank you again for your great talk. There is one last question, which is someone wanting to see the cat again. The what? The cat. They're sadly not here anymore. It seems they've gone downstairs. Okay, so all we have is this waving cat in my screen, which is, well, we'll have to make two. Okay, thank you for your talk. And have fun at the remote experience online and everyone watching this, of course. This was our last talk for today. We'll see you again tomorrow. Until then, and happy hacking.