 This is the OGM Thursday call on Thursday, September 24th, February 24th, 2022. In Portland it's snowing this morning, which is a little strange, but yeah. We've been having a cold snap. Last summer we had a heat dome. Right now we're having a cold snap and Judy's on the call and Judy we're having Minneapolis weather here in Portland. Hi Judy. Could you still connect to the audio? Judy, hi, good morning. We're having Minneapolis weather here in Portland today. It's snowing? Yeah. That's pretty unusual. Yeah. We have frost in San Rafael. Okay. Well, we got seven or eight inches. Well, it depends on where you are in the cities. Over on Monday we've got somewhere around 10 here in Woodbury, seven in St. Paul and so forth. It was a little spotty, but it's melting fairly fast or subliming probably more than melting. But it's, yeah, it's winter in Minnesota, but I'm surprised you're getting snow on the West Coast. That's pretty unusual. There's a, last summer we had the heat dome. Now we're getting like a cold cap, the polar vortex. I don't think this one's a polar vortex, but weather's getting strange and spooky. For a different week, we'll talk about ministry for the future and other sorts of things, climate. We have a different set of things, I think, on the table for our conversation today. And maybe a couple of things. One, we're not gonna talk about Russia launching an attack on Ukraine and possible implications and all of that, which is an important world event happening right now. I just want to take a breath over that because there's many different ways of seeing and interpreting what that is. Not many of them cheerful. Right. Second, I want to make room in this conversation for us to learn from the events that we're gonna study. And that may mean saying things to ourselves that we don't like hearing or that aren't sort of a conventional, normal take on what's happening. So I just totally want to make room for that because I think that it's an important part of how we function and it's a piece of what I was trying to do as kind of the convener of the community and things like that and to hold that space and make it work. And so kind of my goal here is what can we learn from these events? What sort of lessons are held in them? And then not just what can we learn but can we turn those lessons into some norms or artifacts or other kinds of things that are useful to our community and others? Because I think one of our major reasons for being together is not that we like to chat a lot which is actually a guilty pleasure, but that we would like to turn things out for the world and try to synthesize and make things more useful for others and so forth. And I think that's a very common thread for everybody who joins all of these calls. So with that, I think I'll go quiet for just a second and see who'd like to step in and just voice any lessons learned from... Oh, and Gil, so if you haven't been watching the OGM Google group mailing list, then you're not actually necessarily up to speed on the events that are going on. So I'm going to try to describe them. I'm unclear, I can describe them mutually. I'm going to try to describe them, but it's basically an old acquaintance of mine from the tech world. He and I had a catch-up call a few weeks ago. I think it was only a few weeks ago I'd have to check my calendar. And that went on eventfully and I described OGM and he said, I asked if he'd like to be on the list. He said, sure. And he and I are on a couple other lists. And so he joined the OGM list and then there was a quickly escalating set of interactions between him, Miles, Fidelman, and a few of our OGM members and then other OGM members sort of came in to moderate help, support, do whatever else. And then we had a really interesting set of things happen which sort of, and I don't know that they ended, but there was an interesting moment yesterday where Miles was like, take me off the list and I did with some misgivings. Well, with some misgivings, Ken, because he was both, I think, and one of the lessons I want to talk about, we'll get to in a second, but I just want to hear other people's lessons from this because, and philosophically, this group generally leans in a similar direction and what's funny here is that I think Miles very much leans in the same direction. Miles was pulling on the same rope just in a very strange way for us here. So Gill, if that hopefully sets a better expectation for what the conversation about, that's kind of our framing is the series of things that mostly played out on email. And I know that there were lots and lots of side emails provoked by this dynamic, these incidents, because I got a bunch of them and I know that a bunch of you got a bunch of them and I know that we were all trying to figure out what's going on and how do we deal with this? Jerry, I asked the question, because I just didn't know if you were referring to the immediate current events in the world or the events on OGM. So that clarifies, Ken only saw 498 of the emails. I only saw 493. I think I missed the first one that, I don't know, I saw the ruckus, but I don't know what the precipitation of the ruckus was. So maybe somebody could say that briefly and then I'll just sit back and... Does it matter? Did you say does it matter? I echo that thought. I don't think it matters. Yeah. So it matters in the sense that, in the sense that how this started might play a role in how everybody reacted, including Miles. So I don't know that we need to detail it, but I don't think it doesn't matter just my own take here. Is that, hey, and I don't mean he said, she said, I mean kind of something got started at the beginning of this that went off the rails. Let me clarify my asking that helps. I don't care what the content was, but clearly people got very, very tweaked very early on. I don't know why, because I didn't see the Miles messages. Can I jump in just because I've been absent from OGM for a number of months, literally, and just started to step back in this week. And yesterday's open call was quite, that dialogue that came out of some events was very uncharacteristic. And so I kind of feel like I have an outsider's, but insider's fresh perspective. And to me, it wasn't about the content, although that was partly what triggered it. It was more about the style of social interaction, what are our informal rules about the social contracts, we have with one another on how we're going to debate issues where we have differing points of view. And my sense was just that he had a particular point of view, but then he jumped in rather quickly with a very assertive, if not aggressive style of corresponding with people about the content. And it drifted away from the content and got into what kind of freedom of debate really exists if you can't get really energized about your polarized points of view. And so there was a grain of what he was saying that I agreed with, but it was very uncomfortable because it was not the sort of code of cordiality that OGM has in terms of how respectfully we debate with one another. That would have been my take on it. And I agree, Judy, I like what you said a lot. And also, I think he was raising a bunch of really useful, interesting questions. They just were raised in a way that wasn't working for how this group works and not necessarily in the world. But it was enormously disruptive to the group dynamic. John, do you wanna open up a bit of a meta-com... And actually, I think Stacey, did you raise your hand earlier or were you just agreeing? Oh, Judy said everything that... We're good. Let me go to Neil first and then John, Kelly, and see about sort of framing for this conversation. But go ahead, Neil. Hi, everybody, long time no see. I didn't read every email, but I've seen this dynamic 173 times, I think, in different groups I've been in over the years. I agree 100% with what John just said. We need a meta discussion first. One of the reasons I dropped out of OGM online conversations was because of a perception of a lack of directed focused action. It's nothing to do with the group, except it's everything to do with the group. And the meta perspective is who's in, who's out? Can disruption actually create innovation? Or is everything we're already doing already enough? If it's not, how do we disrupt coherence compassionately? If we're not playing by the unwritten rules that have never been put into a constitution, then how can we know that we're breaking those rules? If we are operating from a worldview that thinks it's bigger than everything that's going on here, how do we not feel threatened, challenged in our identity when somebody tries to shut us down? And if the group already has an overt, sorry, covert, not overt strategy for how it maintains its integrity around whatever center of gravity its worldviews are at, then it will be challenged by an innovative outsider who is obviously very articulate, very smart, knows what he's talking about. But for whatever reason, I didn't see the dynamic and I agree with Gill's question here. I'm interested to know what was it that triggered the nature of the threatening conversations in each direction? Because this is challenge, this is resurfacing trauma. This is resurfacing, I've been shut down before. This is your challenge in the culture of this group as I understand it, while it's never been clearly stated. So again, a whole bunch of unwritten rules and assumptions within a broader context of social ecological collapse. And are we doing enough? And if not, why not? And how do we challenge that? And then re-cohere. And so to me, this is very much around divergence and convergence and the pulse and the difficulties that people here will have in that if they are close or so close to and inside a culture which might be blind to its own inabilities. And that's no criticism of anybody here, but when I get to a group that can't see beyond the fact that they think they're already doing it and they're not, then I have to go. But I kick and scream until I go because I'm saying, guys, can't you see that if you could just get this a little bit of extra? Imagine what you could do. Imagine what we could do together if, you know, and that is a real frustration. And I've learned over time with my maturity to walk away. However, others will hang around long enough, especially if I think this is a new lever to pull with amazing potentials that I can see. And I'll bet you he could see the potentials that can't be realized because. And so again, that meta perspective says, zoom out, look at all the players and what is it we could be doing together better if we had a bit more direction or a bit more structure to governance and groups like this generally shy away from the more structured rules, more structured guidelines because that's where you are in terms of where we are in terms of the worldview. Thank you. Thanks, Neil. Makes a lot of sense. John and Ken. Good morning. Well, there's, I have the sense that there's two, well, there's a huge issue here, right? And it's beyond my capacity to deal with it in a responsibly succinct way in this little speech I'm gonna give. So instead of taking the big issue, I'm gonna compress it down to a menu of potential interventions. And I'm gonna steer away from the governance. We can come back to that. But I just wanna say, Jerry has on occasion said, okay, let's just stop. Let's just take a moment of silence. And I respect that. I think that's a, even if I might disagree about when and how long, the basic idea of, hey, let's stop and let's do something else for a short amount of time, a minute, I think that's appropriate. I think we might benefit by having multiple kinds of things like that. Palm is good, but you gotta have it ready in advance. It's kind of demanding. But here's another thought. I was trying to think of a kind of a preferencing survey. Kind of a, I don't wanna do a mood thing. I don't wanna say, well, how do you feel about this? You know, I mean, that's just not gonna work. But if somebody could put up a set of options and say, and you're not voting, you're not voting in terms of action. You're saying which of these things is closer to the truth? Or you're saying which of these things is the path of inquiry into what we're talking about that you think will be most fruitful? Now, I admit, it's a challenge to come up with those, you know, and to lay those out. Quick story, when I was doing more active consulting, we had a guy like Miles and he actually picked up his team and took them out of the room and said he was not gonna cooperate with the future mapping. And my bosses said, John, you go get him. You go talk those guys into coming back into the room. So I said, well, I don't know what you're talking about. So that was an interesting challenge. But you basically had to change, you had to address their criteria for not participating or for, you know, actively disrupting the group. And the way I went at it was I said, we will suffer from the absence of your insight. And we want it, it's not the solution for you to go to the cafeteria and not do this. It's a solution for you to say, what didn't we see and how can you put it into a scenario? And they kind of grumbled, but they came back into the room and they did it. But I'm thinking along those lines and just a further out notion, I think it's great if an individual can come up with this. We might even think about a breakout as the one minute or as the short alternative. In other words, all right, should we do a reconfigure breakout for five minutes? We all go into breakouts and we say, well, what's the path here? What's the pregnant path of inquiry here that would get us somewhere? All right, come on back. Anybody got a path? Any of the teams got a path you want to suggest? And I'm talking about team, I mean, two or three people. You don't need big teams. You only need, I think if you put it on one person, it's maybe too much pressure, but two people or three people could say, I think we should go this way. Yeah, I think we should go this way. All right, let's go that way. And this is now a direction of inquiry, not an action plan, not necessarily a governance solution, but we can come back and look at that. That's also a very good place to look. But anyhow, those are my menu options, suggested menu options, and they're free. You can do what you like with them. Thank you. Thanks, John. Ken, then Stuart. Good morning, good afternoon, where you might be evening, I think for Neil at this point or close to it. Nice to see you, Neil and some other folks I've been here for a while. My yay of in response to Miles's leaving is because he left of his own accord. I also feel that he should have hung around a week to work this out. I would have liked that very much, but I was also completely fed up with his bullshit. I'm just speaking out my opinion here. I very much agree with Neil that we have been extremely lucky in this group. We've found a group of people that get on well with each other that respect each other that have really, sometimes very challenging dialogues, but do so when I were no one's character is impugned and nobody gets personally attacked. And so when Miles started that, I found myself really upset. I recognize, as Neil points out, we do not have a bunch, we've got a lot of tacit agreements that are not explicit. So someone coming in does not know what the culture is and therefore they start launching. And when that happens, I think this is a great opportunity for us to pause and say what are the things that we wanna make, what are our tacit agreements we wanna make explicit so that new people coming in can go somewhere and look and say, okay, this is what I need to do if I wanna be here. And maybe even like a terms and agreements of if you're coming into this group, please read these and agree to abide by these rules. And if there's something you have a question about or you feel strongly should be altered, raise it. We'll be happy to talk about that and see what works. But I was in New York City, actually staying with Michael Grussman and Michael and I are now really good buds. We had a fantastic time together. And I started to see these emails because I was really not online very much. We were too busy talking. And I was like, where's all this fuck you and you critical motherfucker coming from? And no one ever talks like that on this list. And I found it offensive. And when people tried numerous times to say, hey, Miles, your way of showing up here is not working for a lot of folks. As Stacy says, he doubled down. He took a page out of the right wing playbook and just counter-attacked and hit back hard and compared himself to George Bernard Shaw. And he's looking for Gertrude Stein's salons and the all gulking round table. I'm like, you don't recognize what's here. You have no idea of the quality of people in this group. And what makes you think any of those people in the past would give you an invitation to show up the way you're behaving. You're smart, you have some really good ideas. But man, you obfuscate and put up this huge spray of thought terminating cliches, which we learned about yesterday from that call. So that, to me, just is something that I think in addition to our explicit agreements, we should think about when someone does behave in a manner that is clearly challenging to people like that, that we have some steps of, OK, several people have talked to you about this. We're going to meet you for three months, or we're going to censor you, or we're going to shun you, or we're going to expel you. There should be levels and steps, some kind of path, that there is a way that they can understand what the consequences are and make up their mind and say, yes, I recognize I'm behaving badly and I have remorse for that and I apologize. But man, this just this last thing has opened up a huge opportunity for us to learn. Thank you. Thanks, Ken. Stuart, and then let's pause and consider John's offer about how do we decide on the paths of inquiry into this question? And you're muted. Thank you. So I'm not going to say too much because I put most of what I had to say in an email that I sent yesterday on the list. But being fairly new to the group, yeah, you keep your mouth shut until you get a sense of what the rhythm is, what the culture is. That being said, somebody a few people ago, I don't know who was, used the word constitution. And it seems to me, in part, because this is actually one of the things I do and do well, that the group needs a constitution. In other words, I'm still not sure. So what is the vision and intention of this group? What's the goal here? One of the things that Miles brought up, and I think it was an important one, was the notion that I think he said that he heard a little grumbling because this group hasn't been able to do something, to produce something. And I think that may be an important piece, but that's part of the discussion that needs to have. What's our intention? What's our vision? What are the promises we make to each other about how we will be together, what role do people play? So I think it's important to actually have that. It doesn't have to be a big deal to do it. But I'm not even sure how long the group has been in existence. But it feels to me like this is a perfect opportunity, as Ken said, to make explicit what in part has been implicit, because that's where groups often get into trouble. Thanks, Stuart. And thanks also for the tons of resources you poured into the list and the work you've done. I think there's clearly a lot that is central to your life that is really useful to us here. So really appreciate that. Judy. We had a conversation yesterday in the Build OGM session that might be relevant to this particular topic. And it was around dimensions of OGM. And it's probably oversimplified vis-a-vis the conversation we're having right now. But we were framing the notion that there were different dimensions of OGM. One was the content itself, which falls into different categories. But it has to do with knowledge. But there's different types of content that might be specific facts or connections or background. But we could look at the two other subsets of OGM that has to do with the social connectivity, the types of organizations that connect with one another to try to accomplish things together similarly chosen goals. And the third one was sort of the philosophy behind why we're doing all of this in terms of what are the underpinnings of our foundational values that are causing us to attempt to work in these ways, in these paths for these outcomes, and so forth. And so it just seemed to me that we might want to look at how we think about OGM and maybe tagging dimensions so that you could actually go in and say, well, I really just want to know who else is working on X. And there'd be a subset of OGM architecture that would let you find other groups that are specifically interested in a certain subset of regenerative agriculture. So it's a kind of a complexify effect on the whole thing. At the same time, it might make it more useful to people over the longer haul. So I just wanted to share that conversation from yesterday. And if you've got more interest, we talked for a while about it. So go listen to that recording. Yeah, there's a good long conversation. I think it was Tuesday morning, right? Right. It was the Bill Doe GM call that started without me and just kept going and kept going. Yes, it did try to keep going. I had not thought it was going to play out that long, but it was an interesting conversation. Stacey's laughing. One good benefit of this incident is that it's got us talking about important things, which I think was part of the reason Miles was poking his stick into our ribs. And so I'm glad we're having this conversation. And I'm actually not happy that he's not in it. So, Sam. Juan, how are you doing? Yeah, so I just thought I had a little bit of a responsibility, even though I said this on the list, that probably in the past in OGM, there had been debates that maybe went in a combative direction, but didn't see what you all described here today emerge. And I feel like probably there's some responsibility on my part for taking it personally, like taking the nastiness that came out of the discussion personally and then reacting that way. And so if I hadn't have done that, you might not have seen this turn into what it did turn into, that I got, I actually, if you read what happened, which I'm not even recommending that people do, but if you did, you would see that I got quite combative back to the person. And then thought better about it later and thought, and actually said like I shouldn't have done that and tried to apologize to a lot of people who contacted me individually. And the reason that I'm bringing that up is if you try to talk about, maybe it will help, if you try to talk about trying to guide people in the community, maybe, I mean, the lesson that I learned is in this community, maybe don't take it, if we don't take things personally, then things probably won't devolve into that kind of nastiness, maybe, you know, maybe it will, but I thought I would at least just mention that, that I have, it's not just all Miles that caused that level of nastiness. I also got very defensive in like said nasty things to him and told him to, I actually was probably the first person to introduce the word of fuck into the discussion. And then maybe Miles, you know, took it from there. So I just thought I'd mentioned that. And but beyond that, I mean, I feel like I'm actually newer here than many people and felt like I understood the vibe and understood the culture, but not so much had been exposed to when things were not going in a good direction. But anyway, I should have known better than to take that personally. And so anyway, maybe that's helped the people and maybe it's not, but I thought I would mention that. The other thing is that when it comes, the other thought that I had related to, like if people try to do something is, I've noticed that people seem to either come up with a pre-ordained solution and try to route everyone into that, which seems to take away the agency of the other people. And some people are aligned with that and say like, that's cool. Let's just do what this one person has wants to make a North Star and try to attract everyone in that direction. Or maybe the people that aren't aligned with that begin to dance around the idea of partnering together and creating partnerships, but never actually like figure out what that's gonna be or what they would do with the partnership. I think I've seen, when I read all these different discussions that have been going on here, I see people propose directions and say like, let's partner around this and let's partner around that. I think to make a step forward and actually do things, if there are people here that want to do that, then support of creating real sustained partnerships where all of the participants have agency together is probably gonna help. And I talked a little bit with Ken about that yesterday. He took a little bit of time to chat with me. And anyway, that's the thought that I have around if people wanted to do things together, probably either just choosing one person as a leader and following their orders or figuring out how to bring everyone together in agency and partner are gonna get to that point, although maybe OGM doesn't have to do anything anyway. Really, I'm not saying there's some requirement. Maybe it actually helps everyone do something through the existence of a place to talk about things that we're doing. So, all right, I'm done, thanks. Sam, thank you. Just a couple of things before I pass the mic to Pete. First, thank you very much for what you just said and for acknowledging your role and how things escalated. And I felt like you'd been bounced. I felt like that Miles had been unnecessarily harsh with you and so you reacted more rigorously than I expected, but then you came back and apologized for it really explicitly and very kindly. And your demeanor on this list is always really thoughtful. And so if you spiked at some moment and came back and said, oops, I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to do that. That's like fabulous and I love that. And then kind of what happened was a little bit where things just went out of control because many of us then tried to sort of reign Miles in around it and he didn't listen to any of that at all. It wasn't really kind of connecting with any of the things we were saying. At least it didn't feel like it. But this raises really interesting questions like where's the boundary between a list where anything goes and a list where there are certain rules of decorum and or civility and what does that mean? When Miles said I equate civility with ill will, I was like, oh man, we are in really completely different territory. I do not want to be collaborating with people who think civility is in fact a disguise for Southern hospitality or fake friendship or whatever else that those are not the same thing in my head. But that opened a really interesting conversation we didn't get to have, right? Which is where are those boundaries? How do those things work? There are a bunch of social media that tried to make room for Trump when he got de-platformed on Twitter with, hey, anything goes over here. And mostly those fail. Mostly the platforms with no rules are like fry themselves in some way. But I think there's places for those kinds of things in the world. But there's a bunch of, and if anybody wants to type them in as they occur to you in the chat, that would be great. But there's a bunch of important conversations that spin out of this set of events that we ought to come back to over time. Pete and Michael and Allison. Thanks, Jay. And thanks, all. And thanks for having this conversation. Sam, I really appreciated what you said. And it means a lot to me that you... I wasn't happy to see that you got overexcited, but it was super, super like, it was extra good to see you pull back and say, hey, that was not cool and I didn't do it. And then to hear you say it on this call, just amazing. I wanted to not say anything. I kind of stayed out of this fray on purpose. And I kind of wanted to not say anything here because it's kind of not my fight. It's partly not my fight because I could kind of see this coming. And I learned, you know, 20, 25 years ago doing this kind of thing that a best thing to do is just kind of step away and let things cool down, right? I have to say, and I don't mean this in a mean way, but as somebody who's been doing mailing lists for 30 years, I'm kind of disappointed in the group. It's like, you know, what did we expect? You know, we don't have any rules. And I think it's really beautiful that we don't have any rules. It would be an interesting outcome to see that this event makes us so that we finally have to have terms and conditions or suggestive guidelines or, you know, codes of conduct or things like that. Maybe it's a maturity thing. Maybe we're finally kind of big enough or attractive enough to trolls, people who would be troll-like, excuse me, Mr. Miles. You know, maybe we're big enough that we need a code of conduct. One of the beauties, I think, of OGM as it has been for a couple of years is that we have a really permeable, almost to the point of essentially no membrane, you know. So, and I think we all enjoy that. I think we've loved it and I think we've taken advantage of it. We, each of us perhaps transgresses a little bit in a way that we maybe transgresses the wrong word, but we lean into the fact that we can be more intimate and more trusting and more caring and things like that because we don't have rules about it. Rules kind of, you know, break, it's always a little perturbing to me to see a rule because that means that somebody had to say, well, we can't trust ourselves or we can't trust humanity or whatever. So we're gonna make a fricking rule and there's the rule, you know. I really, really, really love it when we can be so sensitive and subtle with each other that we don't have to have rules, that we can kind of negotiate things in real time. And that's one of the things I've loved about OGM. But kind of, kind of there's a maturity step where you say, okay, I'm gonna be open to everything. I'm gonna be kind of this, you know, I'm gonna have kind of Zen interaction with the world. But then if somebody comes and challenges me, there's an immaturity when we said, oh my gosh, this is bad, you know, because it's like, well, what did you expect? You know, if you're doing this Zen thing out in the world every once in a while, a whirling dervish is gonna come along and, you know, upset the apricot. And if that's the point at which you go, oh my gosh, I thought we had this social contract where we were all cool with each other and stuff like that, I would have loved to have seen the group level up and do a meta thing, right? I think we failed at the meta thing. It's, we failed to absorb the whirling dervish. And, you know, the wind ripped into something that should have been diavenous and strong and it kind of whipped into a tissue paper that tore itself apart. And I was like, this sucks, you know? So I guess maybe the thing that I hope we can do is not have an immediate reaction, not necessarily make rules, even though rules would make it a lot easier to go forward in the future. And especially to have kind of meta consideration around what we wanted to have happen and what we want to do and what happens in the world. And not everything is going to be pleasant, you know, and what happens when things aren't pleasant? Do we cry and, you know, take our ball and go home or, you know, like start stopping people around and say, hey, you got to get out of my face because you're just too loud. It's like that, you know, we missed it. We got overheated. We got into boy mode. So one of the weird technology things I've realized about mailing lists, especially in the early days, we had like social conventions and stuff that protected in some sense and made mailing lists more kind of elastic and able to absorb things and everybody knew Neticut stuff. And they also knew not to feed trolls. And, you know, there's a bunch of just stuff that you learned early on as you entered email space to do or not to do to kind of tamp down social situations. We've lost that, you know, over the past 30 years. For the past 10 years, we work with mailing lists differently. So for me, we also have an email list as the sharp edge to technology. It's got a lot of good things. It's super easy to engage. It's super hard to have extra bandwidth. It's super hard to tease out the different threads of a conversation. It's super hard to have something that we should have had in this conversation for two years. A little gentle thing going at thread going on in the background. Here's what I think OGM is about. Here's how we have a little bit of a fight and then get over it. And here's how as a group, we react when an interloper comes in, right? As a group, not as individuals in a group, but as a group, right? We kind of, we took the ease of use and the comfortability of email and we used that as a benefit. We didn't take on the responsibility for figuring out how to manage our conversations and manage group dynamics in an email list. And then we got bit in the butt by it because we hadn't set up that resilience. Email lists I think are a hard place to set up that resilience. A forum is better and a chat system is better. So I've got a thing with Jerry. We have kind of, it's become kind of a running joke. It's like the mailing list is kind of a buzz saw waiting to happen for me. And I think personally, I don't suggest this for the group personally. I think we should shut down the mailing list. I think it should be an announce only thing. I don't think it's a good place for conversation. But that hasn't turned into, we didn't use the forum very well. We kind of use the chat system. We're using the mailing list like it's a good place to chat and maybe it is. Maybe that's what the group wants. But then there's kind of a responsibility that we have to not go to pieces when the thing that has happened. By the way, this dynamic happens regularly in mailing lists going back 30 years or 40 years. And it's a feature of the mailing list. It's social dynamics and the technology. And it could have been predicted. It has predicted. It has happened a lot. And the fact that we didn't know that as a group is, I don't know, maybe it's too much to say that we should have known that in the front and going into it, but it's not a surprise. And this is picking up a sharp edge object and using it when it's friendly to use and then getting cut by it when you run into the unfriendly edge case shouldn't be a surprise. And we shouldn't get mad at the tool and we shouldn't get mad at the circumstances which caused the tool to bite us in the butt. So thanks. Thank you very much. A lot, a couple of things I wanna interject real quick. One, back in 1995-ish, I took a workshop at the Omega Institute run by Scott Peck about his book, The Different Drum, which is about community building. And I had several very profound experiences there. But his framework kind of says that most communities are kind of in what he calls pseudo-community. They're not really communities. And if things got hard, people would leave. And online, by the way, voice action exit, what is it? Online leaving is really easy. You just stop participating, you're gone. You don't have to bump into those people in the hallway or at the supermarket or whatever else. But during our workshop, a bee got into, we were broken into two big groups of 55. It was a pretty large workshop. And a bee got into our room and then a guy got up and went over and whacked it. And a woman got upset. And that tipped us into chaos in the room. And it was really, really, really interesting because his stage is our pseudo-community, chaos, emptying and true community. And one of the things I learned from the workshop, I think, was that it takes crises to actually forge community. That if we don't go through some events that are significant and figure out how we respond during events and all that kind of stuff, we're just kind of faking it as we go. And there are things you can do to accelerate that or to bypass that and dive more deeply, more quickly. And we haven't done that, partly because we're like this really emergent thing. One of the things I'm experimenting with in our conversations here is what does emergence look like? And many of us have deep, big projects that each of us is already working in and doing. And this is kind of the confluence of those projects. I used the metaphor of an estuary early on that the estuaries were where salt water meets fresh water where there's lots of interesting life forms. It's nutrient rich, but it's chaotic. There's all kinds of things going on. So we're a little bit like that. The tools affect this a lot. I happen to really like mailing lists. And Pete and I, every couple months, have this back and forth about just making an announcement list. I tried a bunch and several of us have tried and Rob O'Keefe tried to get us over into discourse a lot and did a really good job of tending over there. And I didn't go over into discourse, but I tried to move us over into matter most channels where we could separate out. What is OGM and what are we about? It has a channel. And then we could have a channel for these other sorts of discussions that's not working. And partly it's not working because email is just so easily available and accessible, which may be one of its downfalls, right? And then I'll say that sometimes there's really, really simple clever hacks that improve discourse. So I'm forgetting where the story was, but one of the online forums that's done really well removed, oh, this is in V-Taiwan. I'm pretty sure this comes from V-Taiwan and their efforts at civic participation in public democracy. They removed the reply button on their comments board. So you couldn't reply to somebody else's comment. You had to post a new comment and elevating new participation to a new comment and making it a wee bit harder to have sort of a food fight on the comment board actually changed the tone of discourse. And some of these things are just simple, like programmer interface interaction design steps that are known but obscure in different places that we might avail ourselves of. And we haven't sort of stepped into that world of kind of redesigning how our conversations work and all of that. Sorry, that was longer than I expected, but I just wanted to put those things in the conversation. Now back to Michael Allison Stewart. Oh, and a really quick request. When you have the floor, if you raise your hand, if you can keep your hand raised until the end of your conversation, then I can look up near the camera towards you. Otherwise, Pete, you were at the bottom of my screen and I was like, ah, man, now I'm looking down. And you can't move people when there's hands raised in the room. So really tiny thing, but I love being able to look closer. Sorry to cut in. I have to leave. It's dinnertime here and I actually got online an hour early because I had the time mixed up. So forgive me for that. Lovely to see you all here. Just one little thing as a marine biologist, estuaries are not just pretty places with lots of biodiversity. On the spring tides, when the salt water comes in and fills the freshwater pools, it kills everything in those pools. When the freshwater goes the other way with floods, it kills everything in the salt water. And so the boundaries are not just a straight line. They're actually flexible boundaries depending on the flux and the flows. And so this is a really critical thing to recognize. The diversity occurs on the boundaries of these fluxes and flows. If it's all the same, then it's not a very diverse ecosystem. So you actually need to create opportunities for disruption to enable evolution to happen. But at the same time, you have to zoom out to watch the individuals and how they participate in order to allow the system to evolve and holding the meta view is hard if you're actually one of the people in the flock. So lots of love to you all. And I look forward to seeing where it goes from here. Take care, all the best. Thank you, that was really useful. Michael, over to you. Well, since I put my hand up, he'd said a big chunk of what I had wanted to say. I said a little bit of it in comments in the chat for those of you who are there. But I was really struck in this as an onlooker that we can't each only control what we can control and we can control our participation in things. And I felt like we made this a much bigger migration than it needed to be. And I think Sam was, what was happening between Sam and Miles was unfortunate. But I really wonder if nobody else had piped up at all if, you know, Miles had said what he said, Sam had said what he said, and then Sam had made the graceful apology that he did. And there were already intervening volleys from others of us whether this whole thing might have died. And obviously, Miles is a person who like took this on and put up his shields and started throwing spears and defended himself and turned it into this big thing. But we did circle him and go after him. And maybe he loved it, I don't know, but we did that and do we wanna do that or do we wanna figure out how to not do that and see these things coming? So that's one thought I wanted to share. And the other is, you know, akin to what Pete was saying, I do think an email chain is inherently not a great thing, not a great way for conversations like the ones we have to take place in that somebody was saying earlier, Jerry, I think it might have been you. You know, gee, I wish that, or maybe it was John, something about, you know, upvoting the good behavior and I'm probably not quoting well, but being able to say, oh, this is something we wanna talk about, let's gather around this and that if you have a bulletin board, and I don't mean this in the electronic sense, in the digital sense though, it is somewhat true there too. If you have a bulletin board where a bunch of people put up a bunch of thoughts and a mirror board might be like this. If a bunch of people gather around one of those thoughts and start commenting on it because they think it's interesting and it bubbles up and becomes a center of attention, that's a great thing. And if somebody has an obnoxious thought that gets ignored, that sort of takes care of itself. When you have all those things happening in a sequence and the obnoxious thing is front and center and people gather around that in the sequence and blow it up, what do you expect? I mean, this is gonna happen. And I'm glad, saying in the chat too, I'm glad that Miles is in here because circling around Miles is to me not the point. I think looking at what we did and how we work and what might be better about the way we approach things like this is really worthwhile. And I think everybody who was in this was in it with good intent. We didn't like the way that Miles talked to Sam. There was snark there, but I think the way we handled it created a bigger thing than it should have. That was what I had to say, along with endorsing most of everything that Pete said. Thanks, Michael. And I feel like I'm too close in to see as Neil was describing to see the dynamics, but I know that it escalated in ways. And I know that I and several other people were trying really hard to de-escalate and just bring this back down. That wasn't working for any of us because every attempt, and there were a bunch of other sort of jabs in the middle of it, but every attempt to sort of de-escalate was met with like, nope, not gonna talk about that. I'll talk about this other thing. Well, let me just, I just wanna reply to that. Yeah. That what you're referring to as de-escalation was done. It's sort of like the attempts at de-escalation were criticism and calling out in front of the entire group, as opposed to, I mean, if you think of this in a sort of human sense, like, you know, one person, and in this case, Sam in a way was that person, you know, saying, hey, hey, man, that wasn't cool. Let's just talk about this and let's, I'm sorry I reacted that way, but you upset me. And it might've in a real physical group ended up just being something between, you know, between Miles and Sam and the group acknowledging it, but silently. And in this case, it was like competitive de-escalation. You know, we were all, oh, like, you know, this one's attempt to de-escalate didn't work. So let me try my attempt to de-escalation. And there was, you know, it was somewhat performative. And honestly, Jerry, you were silent for a long time. And then, you know, waited in and your voice, obviously here carries a lot of weight and it really became what everything was about in this email chain, it probably was already. So I'm just calling attention to that. I'm just calling attention to, you know, the way we behave. And I don't think it requires, I do think there's something to what you had said earlier or somebody had said earlier about having some clearer purpose stated and clearer rules of the road, but not even rules. Just like, this is what we're doing. You know, this is just like, you know, we talk about at times, you know, this is church. You know, we come here to like, you know, we're not actively pursuing a specific goal. We're generally aligned around these beliefs and we're tossing around and bringing to attention different things that different ones of us are doing and, you know, trying to support each other. And that's what we do. And so if you're expecting like a product to emerge from this, maybe you'll be disappointed if you're expecting, you know, just, just here's what to expect and not about rules. Anyway, I'm going on too long, but. Michael, thank you. And I'm clearly guilty of having done the focus. The title of my email to the list was intentionally you comma miles, partly because he had set himself into the group with like a flag and the banner and the flaming torch or something like that it felt like. And I was like, it's kind of fair game because he seems to be playing that role. And I may be totally mistaken by that. I'm leery of rule books and constitutions and other sorts of things, but I think we need some explicitness. I like Chris expressions of intention. I just put Netflix's expense and timekeeping policy act in Netflix's best interests five words, which is about intention and then leads to interesting places. But as I think very useful shorthand for how we go about doing this, avoiding, hey, you need to book this many hours and this many, you know, this here's the accounting system for sick pay and sick days and sick hours and all that kind of stuff. And here's the kind of note we will accept and the kind of note we won't take when you miss a day of school or whatever other kind of enforcement mechanisms there are. And there's a long conversation that we had about that. And we haven't talked much about high functioning rulesets or guidelines for communities, which exist out there in the world. There's a bunch of those. Allison Stewart-San. Thank you. It's nice to hear you all. I certainly wasn't, I'm glad I wasn't part of the quagmire that had happened into the group, but I'm hearing a lot of ownership from members, a lot of concern and a lot of desire to understand how to do better. And what indeed is the purpose of the group that this seems to invite some discourse about if there's an action focus, how to state a purpose together, how does one's individual purpose meet in with the group purpose at any given time? How do we communicate those things? I think, and I've noticed in the chat to some interesting allusions to natural systems and the rules, biological, physical rules that might be guiding us naturally. And so it makes me think about Eleanor Ostrom, of course, and like there are just natural rules. And as I try to teach my young people in an emergent economy about where we're headed and how to wrap our brains around what it is that we're actually talking about. Gil, you were there in a conversation. You get people talking about economics and you get somebody who's worked in finance is gonna throw out some numbers about what finance is. Is it 7% of the economy? Is it 34% a week? What are the, what are, what are we even talking about? And so framing and defining and questioning in order to get to the intention or the need of the person. And I know that that sounds like I'd mentioned in the chat this nonviolent communications perspective, but I think that really that's also just a natural rule. We have needs, that's our life force. It's to be creative and to be engaged and to feel like we are impacting and connecting through the impact in a positive way. But whatever energy trigger we're getting if the only experience that we might have is that negative energy trigger, then that's what we're gonna go for. But that is actually that energy trigger is potential energy for something that's emergent. When I had first come into the group I remember one of the first conversations this was in the heat of the vaccine dialogue and somebody had popped in to say they were just appalled because some people they had previously worked with were not willing to get a vaccine and they couldn't imagine working with these people any longer on solving global issues. And I was kind of like, whoa, wait, wow, is that? Where were at with a bunch of adults in a group called Open Global Mind? I can't work with this person because they're making a personal choice that I don't align with. And so it's nice that this conversation is coming up but it's nice that there's lots of ownership and I think that when it comes to rules instead of explicit rules it's really like understanding this implicit rules of maybe NVC as a models of framework which is simply what is the need that's trying to be expressed? And if that person isn't skillful at getting to that need to what extent can I? Because everything is mirrors and projection. And so my own reactivity to the challenges that they're experiencing is reflecting the degree to which that reactivity and that challenge exists within me as well, right? And so I mean, there's so much ownership about it and of course it will happen and it's actually, it is okay to remove from the group to self-remove or to remove somebody else even if the goals and the purpose are continuously being disrupted but maybe that brings us back then too to what is the purpose? And it's to connect, it's to maybe be explicit maybe being explicit about that would help guide and along the way. And I think I'm trying to, I don't know what I'm trying to, I mean, I think but there's something here for me at least that I'm noticing is when I'm trying to get my young people and other groups to think optimally it's how to notice our senses. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Jeremy Lent but through his latest book, Web of Meaning there was a bit of research about how many judges they were studied the judges and if they had not had a lunch break they were more likely to punish the defendant and if they had just had a lunch they were more likely to equip them. So things that we think that we're making very objective decisions are really arbitrary based upon our internal ecology. And so how do we get into touch with detangling our assumptions about others, taking things personally and see that really what we're dealing with at any given point in time is the opportunity to get towards a nugget of truth that's right there in the charge and allow that emergence to take us possibly towards- Jeremy Lent, Web of Meaning. Yeah. All right, anyway. I'm still wondering about my purpose here but I think that at least in the morning I can fit it in while people are running off to school before I start my work day. I can feel inspired. I can network with folks. I can test out some ideas and who knows what will come with that but I'm grateful to all of your self reflection and high aspirations. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Alison, very much. Stuart and Sam. Yeah. I just wanted to point out the difference in bandwidth between a virtual forum and one in real time. If we were all together in a room this might have ended very, very quickly by someone, you know, smiling by a touch, by a sense of, hey, we don't do it this way. There's a much different way of doing it. And the message that met a message may have been received and things might have quieted down. So the point of that is to recognize that we really need to be much more intentional and mindful about communicating in this forum, especially when stuff starts to get a little edgy or when there's disagreement so that it doesn't move into the armed conflict. I think that there are both implicit and explicit ways of articulating how we wanna be with each other. And the last thing I wanna say and I'm not sure what the connection is but while we're talking about what was fomented here there's a real tyrant out in the world who was just creating absolute chaos in terms of a world order at so many different levels. Unfortunately, I need to run and I look forward to listening to the remainder of the call. Thank you. Thanks, George. Thanks for your contribution, Sam. Oh, yeah. Well, listening to all of this, it got me thinking about for several years I participated in an online community called Brainstorms that was founded by Howard Rangold. And the people there reminded me a lot of the people that are here and I'm still connected to a lot of those people and that's probably how I ended up here. I would imagine that maybe some of you were part of Brainstorms, I can't recall because I haven't participated in a while but the reason I brought it up is when Howard created that online discussion he kind of, he and the other people that worked with him decided to set a bunch of rules, you know? And that's one way of doing it. And so you would, with those rules set it would literally read these rules when you entered the community and understand that this was intended to be kind of like, it was considered to be like the home of the people that were already present when you're entering and you wouldn't come into someone's home and start knocking all the furniture over and calling them jerks and so on and they would just kind of set that tone for you but they would actually do something about it if you broke those rules. And so you could, so basically if you're a new participant there you could predict what's going to happen if you kind of started to break the norms and the culture that was in that community. And I feel like given that this community didn't have rules, I feel like actually it was, the response was pretty okay compared, I saw when people actually did the same kind of thing in Howard Reingold's Brainstorms and what they would come and would just warn people they'd say, this is your first warning, you're going to be kicked out of this group if you keep acting that way. But I'm not saying that this is what OGM should do at all. I'm just saying like that's one way of solving the problem. And also definitely that whole discussion was happening in a forum software but it doesn't really matter whether it's happening in forum or email list or whatever. They tried to shape it so that you would understand like you're not in person, this is not going to be an in-person interaction. You're going to be reading this and it's going to be coming intimately from your mind into words and everyone's going to see all of your words. And so basically there's like more transparency around it. So in the case where we don't have rules and someone else brought up Ostrom and the commons and I think if you read the case studies that Ostrom did, what happened every time the pattern that she found was that if people didn't have an existing rule set they would do exactly what we're doing and recognize first like there's this common thing that we are all sharing and begin to realize like how can you keep this, sustain this or how can you ruin it by whatever actions you might take and start talking together about like what does that mean for all of us? All right, we're all using this commons. How are we going to work together to sustain and maintain that? That's the pattern that she described in her and that she codified into the work that she did in the books that she wrote and all that kind of stuff. Her and her husband, both, she just wanted to observe how people were doing this. And so I feel like that's what you all are doing right now. And I also feel like when issue came up in the community, given that there was no like protocol for how to deal with it, I try to suggest that people move on but some people voice privately to me or publicly, they're like, no, I'm kind of, this is important, we feel like this, we need to address what happened here. And I feel like it kind of went organically. So some of what Michael Grossman said happened but since no one person was like in charge of how everyone's reacting to the situation, then things just unfolded. And I feel like in the end the community was able to heal itself and things probably didn't go the way that everyone would hope that it would. But also if you wanna create a commons approach to it, then everything that everyone here is talking about now is probably gonna be the way to do it, to actually discuss and decide together, recognize what the shared resource is and then figure out how you can either keep growing it or how you can destroy it. And I don't really, I don't think there's any fundamental answer other than maybe looking at that. So I just wanted to say that in reaction to some of the things that folks were talking about here. Thanks, Sam. Two things, maybe synthesizing a little bit of what we've come to so far, two things to put in. One is I asked in the chat like what is it that we're nurturing here? And I think, I think, and we've had many a conversation over two years almost about what is OGM? What is our purpose? How do you OGM, OGM-ing as a verb, et cetera, et cetera? What is OGM-ing? And I think one of the things that we're actually nurturing here is this little flickering conversation in the middle of the group that many of us find really fruitful, useful, warm. It's like a campfire and productive in some sense because I think it feeds many of our own projects where we run away from here and go do our own thing in other kinds of places. And in part, OGM is trying to do more things and build some stuff in the middle. And that's flimsy and in the middle and not very well organized, but the conversation is warm but not hot in a way that is convivial and so forth. And the second thought is, and what happened when Miles stepped in in the way he stepped in was, I think he was damaging that conviviality. I think he actually, his demeanor really put a dent in he harsh the chill is I think what one person wrote back on the list. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, and I think he was doing so intentionally and with his own set of guidelines for behaving and getting things done in the world, which was like, hey, we need to figure out, like I've been in, I think the unspoken narrative and he was a little bit explicit about this was, I've been in so many conversations that have a really nice time and go no place. And you all look like one of those and hey, I'm gonna like drop, there's a breed of dog called a turn spit, which was bred intentionally as a small dog to turn the spit in a roasting fireplace for cooking in inns in Europe. I don't know what country they come from, might have been Holland, might have been England and you drop a hot coal into the little Turner with where the dog is because that keeps the dog running on the to turn to keep your roast turning on the fire. And I think he was dropping a hot coal into our conversation quite intentionally because that's his demeanor. And all of us were like, wait, wait, wait, we don't we don't harsh that way. That's not the vibe. That's not the way we wanna do it. And he was raising a series of really interesting questions and important questions for us. And maybe this is me, but when the process breaks, I pay attention to process and then go back to the important questions. And that's me. And that happens in my personal life too. Like when process breaks, I go handle process and try to get back into a place where we can understand each other. And then I worry about, okay, how do we get more things done? What are the rule sets we should hang by the door? Where's our door? How are we, where are we holding this conversation? All those other kinds of things. So then there's a couple of thoughts I wanted to put in. What does that mean us? Anyone who hasn't stepped in the conversation and would like to take a turn, please do, Stacy. So to go back to this idea of rules and gently pushing. I mentioned earlier in another place that for me, this was a really difficult process. At first, I didn't wanna jump in because I was aware that I may be breaking rules by diverting the conversation. And it was really hard for me. And when I finally did jump in, I received a lot of private correspondences that I was doing a good job and going in the right direction. And then somebody privately emailed me in a way that made me feel like I was gently being told that I was breaking the rules. And that was really difficult for me because I felt what I was doing was right and I was being told, don't do that. So I just wanna put that out there because we have to balance our behaviors. And like Neil said, there are boundaries and it's amorphous. Thanks. Thanks, Stacy. And I think from the start of OGM, given it's more or less shared objectives, which is its own interesting conversation, but we've always known and thought that people, we bounce in, we would bump into people who felt acted, believed very differently from more or less the rough consensus of this group and that we would then have to deal. And I think that's a piece of what happened here. And it wasn't so much on objectives, it was on process. But there was a piece of that. Well, Pete's asking in the chat, if you didn't give a shit about us, why did we give a shit about him? Why did we get so upset if he was literally meaningless to us? For me, it was because his mere presence sent a chilling effect through the room. And I had been trying for the previous month to pull together one of these calls where we were talking about our process and where we were doing exactly the opposite, which was how do we improve our process to make room for people who don't feel like they can speak up for room for people who are underrepresented, room for people who are intimidated by a bunch of people posting fancy stuff about studies and philosophy and whatnot. Like, I was actually actively heading in the other direction. And then here comes this guy with a wrecking ball. And I personally felt enormous empathy for the people who might not want to speak on this list again, never mind the ones who left because of his approach and attitude. Because who wants to be the next person in the crosshairs of the flamethrower? Like almost nobody. So, Pete, please. It was just words. Yeah. Why would somebody, especially like maybe there's a, maybe there's a theory here that he was of low emotional affect and didn't know he was a bull in a china shop and wasn't absorptive of our entities to be nicer, right? Why would that have a chilling effect on a room? So, my argument here is that as a group, we don't have a kind of cohesion that can have curiosity about something like Miles rather than reaction. We had an angry reaction to somebody who was literally, all he did was type words and send them into the ether. And that was like, oh my God, the world has fallen because he said some things. It's like, as a group, I think we failed at group cohesion there. And what happened was, I think, I didn't follow this very carefully and I apologize for my anti-empathy in even caring about this whole thread. But we failed at group cohesion and what happened more or less was Miles' perturbance set off one or two of us and that set off others of us and that set off others of us. It caused a chain reaction where if we had acted cohesively, if we had a sense of the group rather than of ourselves, we would have just kind of watched him like barge into the middle of this thing and spout. One or two of us would have said, hey Miles, this is really curious or this is really interesting, tell me more or hey Miles, I'm not sure this conversation fits this group. Maybe we, maybe you're just too disruptive and we're not interested in talking. We got into it kind of individually in Tel-Mell and it was a tempest in a teapot kind of. It wasn't to take a real world example, it wasn't missiles coming into the middle of our towns. He didn't literally blow anybody up. He didn't literally kill anybody. He didn't literally, it was just fricking words. We overreacted and I think part of the way we overreacted was it was enough to bubble us up. We did a chain reaction but I think we should really think about why we overreacted rather than talking about how terrible Miles was. Miles is the least important part of this whole conversation to me, right? And all I hear is Miles did this and Miles did that and Miles didn't listen to us and we tried to tell Miles and it's like Frick, why is Miles the center of this conversation rather than the group? The group and its reactions and how we hold cohesion, how we hold each other, how we're curious about perturbation rather than defensive is where I'm at. Thanks. Pete, thank you. Couple of things. I love why didn't we respond with curiosity instead of anger? I do think words matter a whole bunch because we've been here almost two years and all we've done is words. Like we've got words, words got us where we are and my metaphor is... Words matter when they matter but they don't have to matter. Oh yeah and like accept things and let things run off your back is I think a good way to go about things. I think words mattered. We thought Miles's words, oh my gosh, Miles's words matter to somebody else in the group. He's gonna hurt somebody else. I have to go protect them. There was a lot of that. There was a lot of that. Was that wrong? I'm gonna say a word and I don't mean it in a mean way. It's a sign to me of group immaturity and I think as individuals, we have a lot of maturity. As a group, we didn't have trust that all of us together would say, oh, that's interesting rather than a bunch of us for whatever reason and I have to say, by the way, speaking as a guy, a lot of the reaction was the guy thing, right? A lot of us reacted because we thought we wanted to protect everybody else and we didn't trust that everybody else could protect themselves, that everybody else would know what was going on, that everybody else would see a bunch of what we think of. Like in this group, we've talked about it as his words didn't have meaning or didn't have context. It didn't understand us, right? They shouldn't have bothered us and they did, but I think it was back proxy. Yeah, so I'm kind of trying to hold a community here and I was getting a whole bunch of side traffic from people extremely irritated and upset by the whole thing. Now, whether that happened when the escalation happened and everybody started jumping in, I don't know. I should go back and look. But I was extremely conscious and this may be an error on my part, but I was extremely conscious that a bunch of people might not want to post or talk on this list ever again if they knew that Miles was still on the list and might jump on them at any moment. And when I took Miles off the list at his request last night, I then told the community he's no longer on the list because unless everybody knows that he's actually functionally not on the list, everybody's like, he's gonna jump out from behind the curtain at any moment. And I'm again, personalizing in this to Miles. But I think I agree with what you're saying, Pete, in the sense of our response was immature. It was a bit of the response of when somebody from outside comes over and picks on one of the community and everybody surrounds them and says, you're a bully, you're a bully, stop, stop, stop, go away or something like that. We did that. Now, if we had an explicit set of guidelines, however firm or however gentle and generic, do you think that Miles sort of responded to one of us pointing to the guidelines and saying, hey dude, this is how we operate your breaking rule set? I think it doesn't matter. And I apologize to the folks with raised hands. So I'm gonna jump in here. I'm thinking of a socialist that I've been on forever that died because of Facebook. Facebook, I hate you because of that. It was one of the things, so one of the things that happened was every once in a while, two people would get in a fight, two people who were memberless members would get in a fight and everybody kind of rolls their eyes. And some people would go, hey, you know, you and you, this is bullshit. I'm gonna put down my computer, I'm gonna come back in a week and I hope you guys have settled it by then, right? So another thing that happened, often was an interloper would come in and spout nonsense and much like Miles. And everybody knew to just, and I don't even know if email systems do this anymore, but everybody knew, you just like mute the guy. It's like, okay, this is one of those, somebody just bought something really stinky into the room. You have the technology just to literally not see that ever again, right? And then for the really, really, really stinky people, what would happen is a few people would engage like we engaged Miles. And then people would say, you know, hey, Pete, please stop replying to Miles or I'm gonna have to mute you as well, right? And I don't wanna mute you, but I don't wanna see anything from Miles and you're feeding into my filters, right? So we don't, so the whole Miles situation with the technology of 1995 would have just blown over. It would have blown through and blown over and nobody would have cared. And Miles would have been shouting into the wind and interestingly enough on that list that I'm on, there were two or three people who would be like, oh my God, this is the most exciting thing ever. I love what Miles is saying or I love teasing him or I love, you know, I love when he teases me or whatever, right? And it's like, okay, whatever, I'm glad I don't have to see that. So it's this weird thing where it feels like, you know, we're boiled by this tempest and a teapot. It's like, I don't know why we're doing that. Why are we talking about guidelines when we don't even need that? So I guess maybe the thing to do is, you know, level up our use of the technology and only a little bit, right? And this kind of thing doesn't have to be a problem. Pete, thank you for what you just said, a bunch of light bulbs went off in my head because of how you said it and what you said. I appreciate that a lot. And I think I was under the impression that you would love us to have some written guidelines and that that's really important to hang by the door, but I didn't hear you just say that. No, I would hate that. Okay, I mean, that is actually, and I think it was Stuart talking about Howard, that's the classic thing to do, right? And actually when I see a little nascent community forming, it's like, you guys need codes of conduct, by the way, either because of an interloper or because of some guy is gonna do some classically guy-stupid thing and then you need to be able to point to the rules on the wall and say, hey, don't be that guy. A thing I love about OGM is that we haven't done that and we haven't needed to do that. And it would make me sad actually to say that, okay, well, we've finally grown up to the point where we have strange things happening and we have to have rules. Rules to me are a sign of, so there's the immaturity of you don't even need rules. You don't realize you need rules. And then another level of maturity and immaturity is, well, we found out because of a mild situation that we need rules. Somebody posts a sign someplace that says, don't spit on the sidewalk. It's like, okay, well, that meant that somebody was stupid enough to spit on the sidewalk at some point and then we made rules. The level of maturity above rules is, everybody knows what to do kind of magically and socially. Social cohesion and unwritten rules is, to me, a sign of maturity above rules. And that's where I like to live. I like to live with people who know what to do rather than living with people who have to be told what to do by rules because the rules are always stupid in some way, right? There's gonna be a case where you need to break a rule and then you're either breaking a rule and that should be a rule that you should never break rules or you can't do the thing that you wanted to. So social convention and unwritten rules, unspoken rules and compassionate discussion about, and what happens when you've matured into a society that doesn't need rules is not that you never have conflict and not that somebody doesn't do wrong things but that you can have mature conversations around it. The people involved, one of them says to the other one of them, hey, can we go discuss this over drinks over here? And then the discussion might get really heated. It might be like, you were an idiot to me. You hurt me, you hurt that other person. I can't believe you did that. Why did you do that? And you have a discussion about what happened, right? And you come to some understanding of what happened. You probably apologize to each other. You agree not to do it again, whatever. Maybe you come back to the group and you tell the group that that night in community circle around the campfire. By the way, I worked it out with Jim because I thought Jim had stepped on my foot because he was a nasty bastard. It turned out that he's got a bum knee and he stumbled onto me and we worked it out or Jim has agreed never to do that thing where he likes to go up and punch people because he thinks it's funny, you know? I finally, we talked about it. I told him that it's not funny. It doesn't, you know, it hurts me, it doesn't, you know? And he's agreed not to do it again, right? So it's not that I don't like rules but when you write them down, you've failed. You've failed to be a society, I think. Really quickly, I'm gonna share screen with my brain because I put this link in the chat earlier. This is an important piece for me. We passed laws and imposed rules when discourse fails and this is supporting what Pete is saying right now. It's under my beliefs, et cetera, et cetera. So I'll stop the share. And I'd love to go to Stacy and Doug to take us out of the call because we're sort of at our time. Thank you, Pete. I really agree with everything that you said. And so I also wanna point out a distinction because what caused me to chime in is when a third person came in and mischaracterized Sam, and I didn't think at that point as a community that he was in the right place to clear up that misinterpretation. Specifically, it was said that Sam wouldn't listen to any critique that didn't agree with him. Something to that effect. And to me, that was missiles, not intentional missiles but that was a moment that I think it was worthwhile to step in just to clear that up if nothing else. So I just wanted to make that distinction. Thanks, Stacy. Doug, I think you'll, and Michael, if you'd like to step in as well, let me know you were in the queue earlier but I just wanna make sure to pick up Doug because he hadn't spoken yet, but let me know after. Well, my not speaking has been in a way of saying what I think about this conversation. I'm gonna put it like this. Every one of us has a consciousness that's floating on a cauldron of hot emotions. And we keep that controlled. And part of the problem for me with this group is that people talk too long, which I think is a way of avoiding their own cauldron. I like it when the cauldron leaks through because it's a message from the world and worth understanding. And my own participation here is, I'm so interested in what people are thinking about. So if they do things that get in the way of keeping me from grasping what they're thinking about like perseverating in their speech, I pull back and hope for greater clarity and a little bit more emotion. Doug, thank you. And I think that's a really nice end note because it's gonna have a bunch of us reflect on. I thank you all for being here. And I don't mean just today. Pete and others have put ways that we might level up our community and our way of being together here that we should think about. It would be nice if we use some of the Mattermost Channels to discuss some of these topics as well. That might be a more grounded and civil place to have the discussion and easier to sort of go back and see what we said and how we said it. So if we could take this over, Pete, what's the best Mattermost channel do you think for this sort of topic? I think it's OGM calls right now. Just the OGM calls, okay. So the same place where I post, I will post this recording later today to that channel. Let's use that channel to talk about this. Michael, did you wanna step in at all? I did just wanna say on that, that in the Mattermost Channels, one of the advantages is if something happens in one discussion in one channel, it's not dominant. So I almost think the multi-channel availability is a good thing. If you wanna have a discussion about like, this discussion purported to be about, open source business models. And if there had been an open source business model conversation where everybody was there for that and there had been a bad exchange, we wouldn't all have seen it and leapt in. And it might have governed itself a little bit more easily. The other thing that I wanted to say about Mattermost is let's use those emojis. Let's upvote stuff and what I wish about Mattermost and what I was talking about about people gathering around the post is that you could say, okay, what's loved right now? What are people gravitating toward? And you can see that there's activity in a particular channel and that's good, but it could be good or bad. Anyway, just wanna say that about how we could gather in Mattermost. Thank you, I appreciate that. I think that's the Mattermost. I agree. Judy, you've got the last word. Just one quick comment. I love the idea of doing most of this in Mattermost, especially because we can sort into channels, but I would caution that we need to be careful about how many channels we end up having because it could easily proliferate and subdivide and become very complicated. And I'm not the expert at dealing with that, but I just wanna suggest that we give some thought to specific channels defined in certain specific ways or something that's not too constraining, but doesn't allow proliferation of thousands of channels. Thanks, and Pete occasionally goes and weeds channels and tries to take any channels that are not active. Not yet, but it's coming up. Pete intends occasionally to weed the channels and... I like channel proliferation. Another thing about channels is that you can have rules about a channel. I think rules are a good thing for a channel, right? This is the channel where we talk about open source monetization. And then when it goes off the rails, it's like, that's a great conversation and it's not here. It's over in the other room. Sweet. All right, everybody. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Really nice to see you all. Thank you, everyone. Ciao.