 is about participatory events and one such event in particular but I'm going to try to make it a little bit more general so that people can use the same sort of principles for other things. And it's about participatory events and one set of tools to help run them and make their community stronger. Now what is a participatory event? It's an event where the line between organizer and attendee is blurred or nonexistent and at events where art and performance play a part the line between artists and audience is blurred. And of course the camp that we're at right now is a great example of a participatory event but that's not the event I will focus on because you're already here and you already know how this is but I will tell you about an event called the boardland with which I have been heavily involved in recent years. So this is the boardland. It's a participatory event in which the boardland organization brings only toilet waters, some heavy machinery and electricity and although we bring electricity the participants often even have to help roll out the 63 amp cables if they arrive early. Everything else from stage to structures to street lights and showers are brought and built by the participants themselves. And there are now over 3,000 of them. We do this event every year and many of them stay for eight or 10 days on site and some stay for up to 18 days. And much like camp here everyone pays their own membership and even the board of the organization pay to be there the same as everyone else. And it was started with a very specific purpose in mind and the purpose is to prototype our dreams and allow our imaginations to run free and try to bring dreams and realities closer together. And experimentation is at the very core of the boardland and we want to apply that not only to the art and the self-expression and the parties but to the community and the organization itself and again blurring the line between participant and organizer is in the DNA of the boardland. So let me just use a minute or two to show you rather than tell you what the boardland is. The boardland is moving things back and forth. It's building infrastructure. It's leaving a better trace in this case a temple that we left on site this year. It's communal effort here 50 people helping to raise the central tower of the temple. The boardland is art. It's kitchen conversations. It's dancing. It's midnight meditation. There's a lot of different sources of spiritual practice meditation yoga etc at the boardland plays a big part. The boardland is setting things on fire in this case an old piano while somebody was playing it. It's a pretty good concert. The boardland is gifting it's a completely gift oriented economy. There's nothing as bought or sold on site nothing at all so people bring the things that they want to give to others be it food or drinks or presents and they give them out creating abundance for the participants. The boardland is a sea of LEDs much like camp here. It's an improvised black metal band. It's engineering and it's peeing and if you see here the the balloons coming out of that toilet stall it's because a lot of the toilets are actually decorated a lot of the time by this a group that makes it into the art project to create a unique experience in each toilet stall and it's friendship and it's an online community and this is what I'm going to be focusing on during this talk because we've built a few custom-made tools for the boardland and other tools we've found dreams and realities and Lumio are the ones I'm going to focus on we built dreams we built realities Lumio we use me made by a great group in New Zealand and then we also use pre ticks that I know comes from here and key cloak but my focus tonight is going to be these three tools and before I move on to those specifically I want to throw us a little bit into another participatory event which is Burning Man and at Burning Man there is this saying that the playa provides and the playa being what people call a black rock desert and what do people mean when they say the playa provides what they mean is that there's this feeling of that you can very quickly find exactly what you need just by wandering around often before you even knew that you needed that thing and there are many reasons for why this is a common experience but I think that one of those reasons is that black rock city compared to a modernist city which is very straight roads and everything is sufficiently planned is a much denser network. Mealing that walking from A to B at Burning Man you're exposed to a much larger variety of people in places than you are in a modern structured city you have many more interactions in a given period of time meaning that everyone accumulates much more knowledge about what resources are available and where they are and simply put the network is denser so the number of jumps from you to what you need is perhaps smaller at Burning Man than it is usually the case in much of ordinary life. So I'm going to talk about a few design principles that I found useful in building tools for all in communities and thinking about how to use them. Based on my experience I'm going to make a case for that it's possible to nurture a connected community online by trying to build, maintain and map a dense network and I'm going to take us through three steps which are to increase the collision rate to make sure that good connections have a chance to last and grow and finally to map out the paths so that people can find their way to what they need. And first side a little bit of a segue I want to give us a stronger framework to build on and also because I find this example so incredibly interesting let me take you on a short detour to Central Asia and the Silk Road. The Silk Road was in fact not a single road at all it wasn't even a few roads it was a dense and dynamic network of thousands of routes through the Central Asian Highlands and a merchant could not decide an exact route before they set out it wasn't possible what you needed to do was make your way on this resilient web of different possible connections step by step if one passage was blocked or otherwise unavailable there were other paths to choose from and of course this story might be familiar for people here because it's in the context of how packets are sent over the internet as well it's the same story so how do these networks arise you know I mean a lot of the time people talk about them as if they arose because of trade but Professor Michael Froschetti who has graciously lent me this slide and the next slide has built this very likely hypothesis that what drove the creation of the networks was migration of sheep okay sheep and nomads you might be thinking bear with me I'm going somewhere with this promise just trust me now in the spring nomads release herds of sheep for summer gracing in the Highland pastures over the Central Asian Highlands and these sheep would look for the best quality of grass and that would often be in pastures high up in the mountains so sometimes sheep from one side of the mountain another side of the mountain come to the same pasture and they meet and they sit there and you know eat grass for the summer then the nomads come to get their sheep they find their sheep at the same pasture and nomads from one side of the mountain and the other side of the mountain meet and understand that each other exists and a network a path is formed and Michael Froschetti was actually able to with simulations and then excavations prove that this is very likely the case trade did not come first trade was made possible because of the network and the network is formed by some completely different mechanism so what we learned from this is that it was not it wasn't planned but it arose from something else so how can we increase the density of our networks with the tools that we use online for for planning our events and coordinating our communities what could drive our networks to form and at the borderland one could argue that our sheep are dreams or art and how can we harness the way that art brings us together and projects brings us together and events bring us together to make our community stronger and more connected so we built a platform called dreams it's essentially an internal Kickstarter without actually handling any real money in the system just little tokens going back and forth and it allows participants to gather projects they want to bring to the borderland on this platform and every dream every dreamer that puts a dream on the platform gets a guide and the guide is just another community member another peer helping them to get the dream to a place where it's fulfilling the guidelines and it's likely to be funded and now we also use the dream platform to distribute the budget the entire art grant budget of the borderland it's crowdsourced to the participants themselves each of which get 10 tokens to distribute among the projects each token being worth some amount of money again there is no actual money this is not any crypto there are no transactions it's just little tokens it's voting basically and finally all the projects and camps are self-placed on a map so that also increases these connections between the different projects because they have to interact with each other when doing placement rather than having placement being done for them by some other group and this might seem chaotic but it drastically increases these connections and makes people talk to each other so this is how dreams looks it's very familiar it's very similar to crowd crowdfunding websites this is how it looks when you're looking at such a dream and in the admin view you see here you can you know enable granting or you can look at some safety documentation so forth a little bit of those features and what we did then this before a dream gets approved for the granting phase each dream is peer reviewed by another dreamer to make sure they meet the guidelines and that the budget of the dream makes sense and dreams are reviewed by posting comments and by this mechanism of startling little monsters so anyone can go in and you can click the you know a necessary material monster or the incomplete budget monster and that goes it gets read like that and gets startled until the dreamer sees it fixes the problem and calms the monster down that's another way in which you can promote this sort of collision action of people actually going and really reading about what is going to happen at the event and helping each other out then during the granting phase participant distribute a total of 10 tokens to the dreams they most want to see so how are we doing four years in well in 2016 around 70 percent of the total budget of the entire boardland event went to these participatory projects straight to funding the projects of participants but because infrastructure costs and venue rental don't scale linearly it's now around 50 but it's still a very high number thinking that you know this is not going to anything else but what the participants themselves want to bring and this year we distributed around 120 000 euros to about 190 projects and each project was granted from 100 euros for the smallest projects up to 10 000 euros for the biggest projects and participation in granting among the members of the boardland is now at around 50 percent having grown from we started at around 20 50 percent is around the same participation rate as us midterm elections horrible for midterm elections pretty good for participating in governance of what is essentially a big party but think about what it means that half of all participants spend time going through projects that are going to be at the boardland if 10 people in your camp have given grants and they have even vaguely remembered 10 different projects they looked at to give grants that means that in your in your camp you might have knowledge of up to a hundred different things just among the people in your camp before you even arrive and what does this mean more importantly you've interacted with people online who have built these projects meaning that the number of relationship between camps and the density of the entire network of the organization and community is much much higher and these relationships can now be used for other things much like the networks of the silk road to lend equipment to coordinate logistics plan events together and do other things together because you have these connections that you can start using them so here's one example of how we've applied this design principle to increase connection density in the first year we noticed that 40 percent of participants were giving all of their grants to a single dream instead of spreading it out a lot of the time probably they were giving it to their own dream or to a dream that was off their own camp so we tried setting a max of how many tokens you can give to a single dream starting at seven and what happened immediately is that it got more spread out people didn't just now give seven tokens and then leave the three tokens to be wasted they usually gave those three tokens away so you can see the the red line on the graph being how it was in 2018 and the blue one we tried to have five as the maximum pretty much the same result so i think we'll just stay there at maximum of five so we've talked about how to increase collision rate and how to sort of make people have to interact more with each other to form a denser network but this creates a lot of pretty loose connections how do you make these connections between people last and turn into paths of collaboration about things like infrastructure safety security and so forth how can you make the make use of these connections what do people need to be able to make use of these connections to do other things on the silk road important paths were reinforced by building caravanserai there were basically big stone structures built on important paths in the network at great effort hauling all these rocks high up into the highlands because you needed a place in which you could plan continuation of your journey a place where there was infrastructure where you can stock up of supplies find new companions to work with a place that keeps the culture and the sort of memes of the silk road that help you survive in it intact and reinforce those paths so our sort of digital caravanserai is Lumio and we've named our little instance of it boardland talk Lumio is great built by some great people in New Zealand I really recommend it especially if you need to make a lot of decisions together it's really good and I want to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about what I think really helps what sort of features really help when you're wanting to have a community interact with each other together and make connections last you need to be able to form subgroup somehow and you need to be able to collect and tag reference and link it's bizarre to think about that Facebook groups don't allow hyperlinks or don't allow you to link to a specific comment in a thread we used to have this stuff it was called bb bulletin forums and apparently most of people online now have forgotten how to do that you need to be able to move conversations around of course to fork conversations you need to be able to come back to a conversation maybe a year later and find it and if you want to make decisions together you need to be able to gather advice and make decisions and last but not least you need some way and to be able to formalize a social contract on the platform some way where people can agree on you know what are the rules of engagement in this group so just a little bit about that and also noting that Facebook has almost none of these features which is why things a lot of the time turn to shit when people try to use Facebook for this sort of coordination so this is how it looks this particular group in on boardland talk is very important it's where we make decisions transparently through a method called the advice process and it allows members of the community to step into decision making and change things when they feel there's a need to do so like I mentioned before the heart of the boardland is experimentation and that also goes for how we organize ourselves and make decisions and we come up with a process for governance that is mixing to walkercy that is the person who does the work calls the shots mixing that with conflict resolution practices and with some really good tools from a book called reinventing organizations by Frederick Lou we don't use the process he describes in that book of face value but we're definitely inspired by it so I'm bringing it up but these methods without the digital tools like Lumio and the other platforms to use would not have been possible to scale to an organization of 3,000 participants that sort of come and go in a flux that's completely reliant on having good online tools so here's an example of how borderland infrastructure is planned openly our main lead for building the power grid this year outlining his plans and asks camps to let them know where they will be placed so that he can plan accordingly and also if they need a lot more power than he might be expecting to let him know and to also comment on on the plans as they happen it's all happening transparently even to the outside world by the way and this advice process is one of my favorite examples one of the members thought it was unfair that his son would not be allowed to enter for free when he turned 13 just before the event started because he bought his membership when the when he was still 12 but then he turned 13 right before and the rule was that if you're 12 years old or younger you can go for free and he thought it would make more sense to allow all children who were at 12 at the beginning of the calendar year to be able to attend so he goes into the borderland advice process group and he starts that process he says I want to change this and then he seeks advice transparently in that group from people on whether he thinks they think that he can change this and then the decision is his to make completely and he made the decision to change it to a slightly different proposal than what he had first what he'd first meant to do but essentially he was able to do what he wanted and solved problem that he had and if you think that this process seems completely bizarre and you go like well that doesn't work for x y said maybe not but a lot of the time it does work and I can't now because of just the time constraints go into exactly how and all the different protocols but I recommend reinventing organizations that book and you can also have a look at talk.theboreland.se slash advice where you've sort of gathered those protocols and you might be able to answer your questions there or just contact me later if you want okay so how engaged are our members on talk or in governance in the blue graph you see the number of users who've interacted with some content at least once and today it's around 1800 users remember the event has 3000 participants and there are about 3600 users registered on the platform and the red graph you see that in the red graph what you see is the 30-day active users so users that have been active within 30 days and you see at any given point around 20 percent of our members this year were active in planning for the borderland up to three months in advance 20 percent were active at any given point in governance and in total of course more than 20 percent because they don't they don't overlap all the time and I want to show you something interesting here in 2018 we lost our location only seven weeks before the event and when that happened five different groups self-organized went out and started negotiating in five different locations um without having to ask the board for permission without having to ask anyone for permission they were able to go out and try to solve the problem that the community had eventually a new location was found um and in a month before the event all the plans had to be adapted to the new location which meant that the capacity had to grow very quickly of the organization to handle everything and because it's decentralized and because people don't have to be elected into positions of power and authority people could come in and fill vacancies that they saw were there and you can see that over by that little arrow over there when I were assessed five locations negotiated how activity on talk just shot up as people were trying to solve the problems of the organization so what's essentially happening I think is that people are reusing these networks that are built by dream prototyping to then use them for governance and infrastructure co-creation and this is a way in which the borderland differs from a lot of other participatory events you have a sort of three circles in which you can do co-creation you have the creative container the infrastructure container and the process container so this picture is made by my good friend Gustav who came up with this this classification and an event like Burning Man pretty much only allows co-creation in the creative container you're completely free to create and co-create inside of that and you can make pretty much any decision you want about the creative content but you are not able to co-create process or infrastructure and that's the gap we're trying to bridge to be able to live in the middle of all these circles and allow co-creation of all those containers at the same time so after having reinforced connections of course going back to the Silk Road once these caravans were out there once these paths were out there you need to map them because as a new person coming into this network you want to be able to look at them a little bit beforehand especially when they become very sprawling and important also for trade so of course people started mapping the paths from China to Europe and making maps how can we do the same thing in this context so we're trying this is a very complicated problem but we built a tool called realities basically it's a mix between a wiki a task manager and an organizational chart and what you do is you can define a need like power and that's defined in the green column there and then you can define a responsibility that completely or partially fulfills that need which is in that purple column and each responsibility has a realizer which is the person responsible for making that thing happen and the guide which is somebody who knows how something is done and what skills are necessary to be the person responsible for that so if a realizer suddenly drops out the the guide can find a new person and the guide is also tasked with checking in on the realizer to see that they're actually doing what they said they were going to do and finally defines them dependencies between responsibilities and we do this for three reasons first of all when you need to make a decision you need to know who is dependent on you who are the stakeholders in your thing so it's a good way to keep track of who are the people who I should ask for advice when I'm making a decision and it's the job of those other people to define that I depend on you so they go into realities and they can define that dependency we're still in the process of actually making this work but it's new and it's been this year used to a fair amount I would say the second thing is that by looking at a map of all the dependencies someone you and the organization can understand how things fit together and third we can identify critical responsibilities that a lot of people depend on in order to identify points of failure and to see that the people responsible for those have everything they need in time so it has a little graph it's very experimental and rough still but here you can basically see people on the outermost ring and then the ring within that are responsibilities that have been claimed by someone and the inner ring are responsibilities that are not yet claimed so you can see things like how the guide edges are drawn around the board so you see there that somebody up there who doesn't have a lot of their own responsibilities might be guiding quite a lot but here you have something that's even more interesting which is the dependency edges and if you look at that up in the left corner there you can visually see that there is something critical going on there and you can sort of identify these hotspots of where you might have points of failure whether you should pay attention to and in this case what that responsibility is is the event permit application a lot depends on it and it depends on a lot of other things so we should make sure that Peter who's in charge of that has everything he needs to to do his job and what is this for I mean essentially if you have a decentralized organization and you've decided that you don't have the sort of normal hierarchies and people elected into positions it makes it very hard for you to be able to have this an organizational chart and those are useful for people coming into an organization to understand who does what so this is a little bit what you can do to replace that but also of course organizational charts are not true an organizational chart looks more like that in reality you have a lot of more connections that are perhaps a lot more important than what you actually see in the clean chart yeah there are a lot of really good ones in that one all right so come through to mapping the paths and just want to reiterate the things that we gone through the idea is to increase collision rate and then reinforce those connections and then map out those paths and in closing we started this project called participio to collect other useful tools for participatory organizations of course dreams and realities lumio and others and we're gonna basically use some of the funding that we've had we've we got some funding last year to push into some of the development of these projects and we also push them to a few other projects also doing really interesting stuff for participatory culture and organizations and there are now eight different events at least that I know about that use one or some combination of these three tools and they range from Germany to Israel Austria Sweden Norway and you see the the orange dots there they don't actually use the dreams platform but they use the methodology and just use a spreadsheet because they're really small events but they use essentially exactly the same idea and just closing I want to give a really honorable mention to often or try thousands which is a really really great platform that does similar things but in a very different way where you essentially define resources events and places and then you can mix those together in order to create a participatory festival for example in a city so I'd really recommend going and checking that out as well it's a very different way to to do similar things another really interesting tool is that is do create it's essentially an open source task manager with a little bit of bells and whistles that helps you do it well for for participatory organizations and that is it I'm planning this participial project on this URL so you can go check it out there ask questions find the git repo and I'm also at who you at edsriders.eu so you can ask me questions there and I think that's it for me thank you very much thank you well thank you thank you very much do we have any questions from the audience does anybody want to know over there and you'll have to speak into my microphone please thanks for the the great talk one thing that was a bit unclear to me is that it's it's decentralized and there's nobody being voted position and I was wondering how you then decide on competence like if somebody shows up and says hey I want to do the power grid but he has no experience with it for example how do you organize or deal with this so this is where two things come in one that we have this guide position meaning that there's supposed to be someone in place who knows what skills are required who can talk to that person and say listen I'm not sure if you can do this the second part is that there to make any decision you must seek advice so when this person comes in and start making decisions they're going to go around and seeking advice from stakeholders hopefully those stakeholders for pretty quickly figure out that this person does not understand what they're doing and they'll talk to them and maybe find someone else that can do it instead this has happened and that's sort of how it goes it's a little bit of a soft way to do it yeah thank you is there another question okay so there's a the exact question I was I was thinking when you looked at it like what's the what's the discovery mechanism for stakeholders in that graph of people like is it based on the dependencies was it where does it come from how do you know who to ask for advice where do you find them so this is yeah the part of it that's a little bit of magic and this is also why when you say that anyone can make a decision about anything it's not necessarily that simple because you have to be in a place in the organization where you actually do understand these things but that is also a little bit of a safeguard because it means that it's very hard to start making decisions without first getting to know people and getting to understand the organization but realities is also supposed to help you with that by defining those dependencies so that you can see at least some list of stakeholders and maybe ask those stakeholders if there are other people that they think you should talk to there is a space for informality yeah can you give an example of like conflict resolution on this platform or whether you had any kind of drama should show happening and how did you solve that right thanks yeah so conflict resolution is completely vital for this thing to work if you don't have that the whole thing collapses because if one person makes a decision and another person makes a decision about the same thing and they can't agree then you have a conflict and you need a way to solve that we have a conflict resolution escalation that starts with those two people just talk while examining their own drives and try to look at themselves and why they are in this conflict the second escalation goes to having a impartial mediator someone who knows conflict resolution get these two people in a video chat and try to get them to resolve the conflict using those tools they can escalate up to a further level which is a tribunal where they both pick a person that represents them and then they both agree on a third person and that little tribunal makes the decision the fourth escalation step it just goes to the board of the organization we've never gone further than the second because we've never done a tribunal but it's also a community of hippies they're pretty good at at chilling out when necessary okay and do we have a signal angel is there a question from the internet who who doesn't look like anybody else want to know anything here we go i understood that you have a board so what happens if the board disappears will the event still happening or it will just disappear well i'm not sure how it could disappear but um i guess what you mean if they just leave so the boardland is organized by a non-profit association based in sweden um what happens if the board leaves is that the members of the organization who are the people who had memberships to the last event call a new annual general meeting and elect a new board so the the members are in the end um the highest position of authority and there's an annual general meeting every year where the board is elected by the members okay thank you anybody else want to know anything i sort of have to squint below the brim of my hat no three two one okay there's one there oh over there hang on um with people being able to choose the jobs that they do sort of you know ad hoc do you notice that um people select the same jobs year over year or that there's a lot of turnover between who takes on what responsibilities and yeah it's very different for different people i mean i've gone through a lot of different roles of responsibility myself i like to change a lot other people just staying the same thing i mean i actually think personally that we should aim for people not being in the exactly same job for more than about three years we're not shooting rockets to mars here like you don't need that long to be able to learn how to do these things and i think it's better for the organization to get new blood into doing things so we don't get stagnant that but that's just my two cents okay three two one well come out here hi uh i'm into borderland this year really good right nice um i'm asking um you had it a few few years before how did you develop how did you how did you end up with this like how did the decision process and yeah talk about that yeah thanks um so the decision to go towards this decentralized device process thing um was made in 2015 by the annual general meeting that year um and then there wasn't really any plan for how to do this online there wasn't any plan for dreams there was nothing of that there was essentially just a feeling of that it wasn't sustainable or interesting for the board to keep making and calling all the shots about everything and it sort of just grew out from there um there was a period in the beginning where um we had people being very evangelical about this reinventing organizations book and then it became almost like a war about the uh you know validity of the exact protocol that they defined in that book and that wasn't useful at all so we stopped using the terminology that the lu used in that book which is teal we just banned the word we said we're not doing teal we're doing our own thing we're just inspired by that um and then a lot has really happened with running into points of failure you see something um that doesn't work when you have uh no systems in place which is essentially how we started we just said everyone can make a decision about anything go and then things started going wrong and you start understanding how do we fix this how do we fix that because in the end the really vital thing in order to make this work is to accept that there might not be a border land and that would be fine i mean if there is no border land then the organization has not wanted a border land enough for it to happen otherwise it would have sort of worked out to fix it and if there isn't a border land one year well if the organization is strong enough it will survive that there will be a border land next year in the end it's a big party in the field a lot of people would be sad but it's not the end of the world the stakes are low so that has been a good way to do it and i think it might have been a lot harder if the stakes were much higher and if the stakes are much higher in the organization you probably have to pay a lot more attention to things not breaking but we have a luxury so we can experiment yeah you probably also have problems when it scales into large we have realized that we'll go up to 17k participants yeah those structures begin to become very unhandable sort of yeah yeah as long as it's small it's very neat and doesn't scale always that well okay um three to one we have one more question no do i miss out anybody okay well thank you very much for coming and telling us all about and let's have one final big hand for Hughie from Iceland thank you