 Good evening, all of them. Hello. This is OGM's weekly call on Thursday, May 18th, 2023. How is everybody? Good. Good. Good. We're sort of in a good place. We're not in a great place, it seems like, but we're not in a despondent end of planet kind of restaurant at the end of the universe place. So that's depends on the framework. It depends on the frame of reference for the conversation, Jerry. I've slept better this week than in many weeks and I'm massively dispirited by what comes over the transom from the outer world. Maybe we can eliminate the outer world. Before it eliminates us. I'm just saying it's like a defensive strategy, but maybe that could be our topic for today. So happy, I'm happy to sort of extrapolate or extend our recent topic from a couple weeks ago in the couple weeks before a wokeness and what does it mean and where is it going? But I'm happy also to go off road and to other territory. And there's plenty of things that matter to all of us. Eid and I and others have been on this sort of inquiry about what is the future of organizing, what is the future of coordinating activity in groups like ours? And how do we manage everything from tasks and participation to attribution and recompense in fast moving, evolving, loosely connected networks of smart people? Pete, correct, edit anything you wish to in that. Yeah, that's great. But that would be an interesting topic as well. Yeah, I'm drawn to that, Jerry. Much more than abstract discussion of an abstract concept like this sounds good. Although I find woking insanely tangible and present and not very I get that. I get that too. But but I totally get the woke weariness. In fact, it's a little bit that it's more that the question that you raised as you phrase it is very compelling and very important in my opinion. So pervades just about everything. So sounds great. So does that sound like a reasonable starting point? We have slight knots. Okay, good. I'm going to I'm going to do the hand wave thing just because I like it cool. Who would like and Pete, if you would like to like monologue for a little bit about how this fits for you and what you're trying and what you've seen and what you think and what you build and earth, moon, stars and Can I just ask a question before we get started? Yes. Has anybody been in contact with Judy Benham? I've emailed her a couple of times on her back. I noticed she has been on the calls. Just wanted to check in, you know, see how she's doing and anybody been talking to her lately? I have not lately. No. Okay. Thank you. Sorry, go ahead Pete. Let me let me tell you about Earth, Moon, Stars, Space real quick as a kind of a framework. This is a wiki that describes a small project. Basically, that's an idea. I don't know if it's a good idea or a bad idea. It's an interesting idea. The idea was what if we had something that looked a little like plaques, but it was actually little fiction, little piece of the fiction and hey, by the way, it would be okay if you'd used an AI to generate your little pieces of fiction. So that's the weird part. The other the other idea was that when you when you make your fiction, however, you make it make an image, at least one and then a little paragraph or two or three or 100, 100, 200 words. So I won't really describe. So think of that as a journal. Think of that as maybe an art journal or maybe an art community is a better way to think about it. And so this this wiki describes the organization that would publish such a journal. So a couple of things that are important when you describe an organization is the vision of it. There's this is kind of the vision of it. The main activity is publication of an art journal. And if I click over to the the an example prototype of it, we don't have to do that. The other things are who's who who does what so kind of like Marley and kind of like Pax, I guess. This has got roles kind of patterned after publishing. So there's authors or contributors and there's subscribers. Some some of the subscribers might pay some of the subscribers might not pay. I made the choice that subscribers so I'm the steward of this project right now. There's only one steward and it's me. I made the choice as steward that subscribers don't participate in governance. So the two things that that that role people can can push on they can participate in governance decide what the project is doing and they can participate in profit sharing. And when I say profit sharing a red flag should go up in your head like oh my God. This is capitalism. It sucks everything is going to be horrible. So let me see if I can get over to so this is another part of the vision. I guess the business model is focused on generating high quality stories stories is a technical term in this wiki that means 100 to 200 words of text and an image at least. So it's turned to maximize social good and not to maximize profit. It tries to be distributive of any profits but not extractive. So this is a little low profit and almost nonprofit kind of deal. I talk about how there's not a legal structure for this thing yet. So if subscribers come in they go to me and it would be nice if this had a favorable tax tax dance so maybe we need an LLC or something else but right now an expense would be taxes that I pay the big expenses running the good server which is about 10 bucks a month. So and then it says what we do with with income pay expenses then you then somebody the treasure currently me holds some currency reserves do a 10% donation to good 10% ties. Jordan calls us as a contribution to an ecosystem network. I mentioned Jordan Jordan and Lion's Berg are contemplating themselves as being an ecosystem network an organization as a meta organization that helps a bunch of tiny organizations work together and have things that you need as an as an organization. Bigger ones this one won't need it but bigger ones might even need things like HR or legal help or more things like that were especially participation in a network of you know other teams that do all kinds of stuff. Jay. You muted. Thank you. Sorry. Gil asked in the chat for a little more context for what you're doing because you've gone straight to details of a particular. Implement instantiation of a community or collaborative project do you mind weaving a little bit more texture from the high level down to here. Yeah and and and also Pete I mean Jerry posed a very broad and general question here we are in a specific project is there a particular. Ask that you are making of us or wire what I'm kind of disoriented. Yeah thanks. Thanks Gil. Yeah. It turns out. It turns out to be an interesting thing I've I've been working with and and and I apologize for kind of a rough entry. This is still a new project for me and so so this is an example of an autonomous organization and autonomous organization has a couple of classic kinds of things that it wants you want to describe who does what something that we don't think of as of usually for little projects is is describing the nuts and bolts of of you know things like assets. This this thing has very few assets but it has assets so let's talk about how those are owned and stuff like that. So in in a sense and maybe I can stop screen sharing. In a sense this is one thing that people have called little organizations like this are Dallas. So Dow comes with a heavyweight assumption that you're you're also or heavyweight connotation maybe it's better ways that that you're using mechanical means to make organizational decisions. Which is great for certain kinds of of dowes especially like cryptocurrency or those kind of oriented dowes. You write up smart contracts and and everything you do is mediated by a machine in a fairly trustless manner actually so this I think of this as maybe a lower case Dow instead of big letter Dow it's little little our Dow it says you know here's the way some people are working together. We're going to be an autonomous organization in the charter this this with wiki serves as a charter in this charter it says nobody owns this except the project the project owns all of the assets of this. So there are stewards and there are other kinds of participants but the assets are actually not something that you own and participants don't get equity. They get Pete Pete Pete could I could I interrupt you for a second it would be helpful to me I don't know about for anybody else would be helpful to me to understand what questions you're living in here or what sort of conversation you're inviting then I can listen more usefully to what you're describing as the the thing that we're looking at here so help me understand why we're talking about this here. The thanks another level up. I've been I've been steeped in kind of the idea where the actually maybe it's it's vision or very very very strong intuition along with others that the way to move forward is to have small autonomous organizations that have strong social and other kinds of cohesion working in a decentralized way so tens or hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of small organizations team sized organizations with enough structure to do the things that they need to maintain themselves and operate with other I'll say Dow for now other Dow other autonomous organizations that's the that's the way this whole thing gets fixed so so then I've been I've been talking about this in OGM space for a while. I've been talking with and many of us have been talking with Jordan Sukut and their and his team in Linesburg. I've also been talking with a guy named David Bobel. His current organization is called map of the future and they're sponsored by another organization called Modi. There's other organizations to complexity adventure is another one that's kind of going on like this and complexity adventure interestingly enough sees itself. You can kind of compare with OGM. It's and it's you know 300 people or something like that it sees itself as both this autonomous organization and also an incubator for autonomous organizations. There's still they are never not very sharp with that definition they call their autonomous organizations teams and they don't have the idea of the all the structure that I was going through but to get stuff done you need to have I guess the social cohesion or whatever whatever is holding the organization together and however they make decisions you need to have you need to have a pretty good sense of what's going on that that team needs to have a pretty good charter constitution. It doesn't have to be specific the way that it's been stars is but if you Stuart actually we've talked a little bit about having Marley be one of these kinds of doubts and I actually gave an interesting presentation which I felt was mostly successful. I get too much with the stars too early for Marley Marley's taste but anyway Marley is obviously another thing where you'd want a Dow kind of thing and a Dow Dows where Marley project is going to organize publishing knowledge constructs for OGM maybe and you know anybody related to OGM and then each book project knowledge container could be its own Dow and then decentralizing decisions or decentralizing decisions the bio region so the first sub-dow of Marley is going to be a knowledge container about bioregions and food so it cares a lot about the way that we're thinking about bioregions and food where Marley the super project doesn't care about bioregions and food specifically it cares about publishing process so you want to abstract those things into two separate organizations the the way that we've been doing this in the past you get you get a one person thing or you get a few people working together with no structure or you get a big corporation and the big corporation makes all kinds of crazy decisions there's all kinds of weird overhead there's there's Kosas theory of the firm that says a big organization is actually a wondrous and beautiful thing because it reduces transaction costs inside the network what we've seen also is that it creates all kinds of weird you know weird stuff where it can't make the right decisions for the smaller parts of itself so a bunch of us are working on these frameworks Lionsberg has a lot of documentation about how to do this really very large literally a million words are in Lionsberg wiki at this point it's too much to read David Boval and his team David's been thinking about this for 20 years or something and he's thought a lot about you know a little autonomous organization needs these things different kinds of different kinds of balances of fiat balance and maybe other kinds mutual credit balance internally and maybe externally with other dows some legal structure that maps into you know LLCs or limited corporations or whatever so I see a lot of work in this and I don't see a lot of the structure getting codified into something and turns out I think I've I've not seen and I'm not trying to be both fall I just haven't seen it codified so small as Earth Moon Stars before and I've heard other people say kind of the same thing that's why I thought it would be interesting to go through the structure of it and it's it's in the weeds I understand that so that's kind of thing there's a lot of people working on this I see a lot of people picking up one part of the puzzle and saying alternative currency is the way and and actually there's this cryptocurrency thing that's even better than a regular alternative currency and we should use that and that's the solution to everything and they miss out defining roles there's people that say everything is a project and here's the roles and there should be a little project charter and we should have goals and things like that and they miss out health metrics or they miss out super organization kind of kinds of coordination things that you need how how are you going to make agreements across the organizations how are you going to take money for instance how you know you have to have a legal structure and bank account turns out more or less to take money how does that map into capitalism so interesting space thanks for laying around for a while apologies for the roughness thanks Pete I want to I know Stacy would like to jump in for a sec but I want to quickly crowdsource the I think Gil's request for one of the questions you're looking to answer is good if everybody could just type in what questions we think this kind of work is answering just into the chat just fill them I think that'll be helpful so let's just do that for a minute real quick that's very medical yeah but it's it's serious because maybe it's just me but this is felt like a very uncharacteristic Pete Kaminsky riff very different structure and mood to it than what I what I'm used to hearing from Pete interesting which suggests to me that something's got you there's something important in the behind this that has that has got you in a way that is not not just the explicit structures that you're laying out but something's got your attention your heart your passion in this that I haven't I don't know what it is yet. Yeah I'm going to I suspect that I suspect is giving rise to a very different kind of of layout of the story from you that I'm used to hearing from you I'm not saying that as a criticism at all I'm kind of fascinated and perplexed and suspect there's something more there to get out than what we're hearing so far. Yeah I'm going to echo what what Gil said and the question that I put in is what is Pete searching for and and and that's what I'm curious about what's what's driving that what's driving this what are you looking for. I'm looking for I'm looking for manageable templates for organizations. And not organization like how are we going to work together but organizations. How are we going to trust our team to work together and how can we trust and that other teams are self sufficient enough to exist and and interdependent inter sufficient enough to work with us. So so I know that I'm good at doing stuff and good at doing very specific things and bad at lots of lots of or you know not skilled at a bunch of stuff and I think all of us are in that same boat and so how do we how do we take the existing best you know best so the best technology we have right now for organizing people and getting stuff done is to have a corporation and and and it turns out that the bigger the corporation the better it works. Certainly it's it's yes in certain ways it's it's literally the fittest organization structure that we have. So so even though it's maladaptive in lots of ways the large corporate structure where you have 100,000 serfs working for you know a few thousand managers and and tens of thousands of shareholders. It's it has to you know that that form has taken over the planet and does horrible things to it because the maladaptive ways it works are really dangerous right they we've decided that they have to be chartered for profit. They have a fiduciary responsibility literally it's illegal for them not to try to extract as much as they can and return that extraction back to their shareholders. So it's an interesting interesting format organization and it's been super productive in some ways and super super super destructive in many ways as we all know. So how do we how do we outcompete that? What's what format of organization helps people make better decisions for for themselves for for people people in planet profit is you know maybe something that you don't don't want to be a super big part of you don't want to codify and I you know that I think so you've some of you heard my my super organism theory that individual people have this idea that a corporation is kind of just a big human but I think it's I think it's an evolved structure built out of many social structures underneath it that has decided that you know hey if I get bigger I get I win more and kind of like a super brain it has decided the roles of the game right profit is the most important thing because profit helps me grow bigger and then I win more and I keep doing that. So how do we you know how do we as humans construct ourselves into teams that can consolidate into teams of teams and teams of teams of teams into something that can move more agilely move with more consonants with reality and slowly eat away at these these big corporate monsters that have taken over our lives. Go ahead go Pete. Thank you for that. What what would you like us to discuss together here on this call about that given that I mean you've laid out there's a very big story. It's a good one lot there. What would be fruitful for us to spend the next you know 65 minutes talking about the leading edge of my my inquiry is maybe a way to answer that how can we how can we create essentially patterns pattern pattern libraries I guess how can we create pattern libraries that people can so I've been doing this for a long time and I and and I have a lot of experience. How can we transmit that kind of experience quickly to to a team so I I I hate it when I see a team of people trying to get together and to do something and they don't have a way to a way that has keeps going back for back to me for this. It's kind of like a team is kind of like a bunch of muscles and without the right skeleton for the muscles to pull against the right internal framework you just get a bunch of quivering you know you can get a lot of activity but you don't get a lot of action and so how can we describe kind of a minimal skeleton and how can we make that make sense how can we have a catalog a library of those how can you know how what what's so what's the minimum skeleton how can we translate that lift and shift it to other people so that they can have a running start instead of wandering around for a couple years. So let me interrupt you just for a second because this is coming to Gill and Pete call and I'd love to have Stacy jump in. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your patience Stacy. Sure. If I could just read from my notes what I was going to read at the Marley project which is a space that I feel like I've been given both the invitation and the legitimacy to lead. I want to just address some of that so what the first few sentences about organization which I'm very interested in helping to design says this dows are like constellations. Each member is like a star that can be drawn into many different constellations so that's drawing on I'm going to just use your son moving in stars theme because it fits into what I've been envisioning and I start with something that's called a cell it's a cell member brain and I won't go into all the different parts of it but it is very basic because I use the kiss approach to keep it simple stupid and my hope what I'm anticipating being that I've been in the matter project I have been back in 2019 surrounded by people in David's constellation. I'm hoping that the Marley project can be a space that actually functions as a Dow with dows within it both bigger and smaller. So within the Marley project we have the food thing which that project is considered a Dow and I won't go into the whole organization of it because that's for the Marley project but I just want to throw it out there that there may actually be another way and since we're creating something new rather than use an existing system that we know has maladaptive principles and trying to fix that maybe there's another way and I draw I put it when I put in the plex I specifically mentioned people's work like Stuart and Meg Wheatley and a Sharif Abdullah because those are all influences and threads that are within my thinking as well. So I hope anybody interested in the organization part within the kind of Marley container that I'm looking to present will come to the meeting. That's my piece. Thanks, Stacey. Would anyone else in the zoom like to jump in like maybe Stuart? Yeah, so what what what this call is invoking from me is when I was practicing law people would sometimes come and say we want to form a corporation and my response was always well go create something that's doing something and then we'll look at it and find the right kind of organizational structure for it and in some ways. You you you do get to create the kind of organizational structure that you want whatever it whatever it happens to be. I mean that's the kind of one of what I think is the beauties of of the model that I presented. Even though you everybody can't see the nuance of it, but it it it it's the container that holds how it is that people want to work together and you can create that you know very very fresh anything you want. There's there's nothing you have to put in or not put in. I also mentioned earlier in the chat be corpse. You know the be the be corp movement in terms of looking at triple bottom line and things of that nature so it's it's not like you know corporations are this big ominous bad guy and they've done a lot of bad things because of the articulation that Pete mentioned that the legal requirement to drive profits as the as the raison d'etre of the corporation. But yeah, create a structure that that that that works for the particular entity whatever it happens to be doing. Thanks story calls on the frame this. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm a product that so so my my my my thought is that and this is basically repeating what Stuart just said. You have to have a product and you have to have a market that you are that you're trying to approach and address and then you focus on shaping this product into a certain state of recognition. What is it now? What can it be what it's what is its potential and then you develop the organizational frame that you need to bring it to fruition and we have an astonishing volume of discussions on structure and organization and no handling revenues that are not apparent at this point and no all sorts of things but we really don't talk a whole lot about the creative intent here now and and any kind of product requires intent the creative intent and that needs to be formulated explained right so I mean I just pull out some chapters for a potential book on bio regions and you know what it could be where it could be explained but this may be the wrong direction right but so if we spend as much time as we do on talking about organizational structures instead about the creative intent here and where do we want to take this right then we can really shaping something and then at some point in time will say okay here's what we got how do we bring this to market or how do we know how do we publish this to whom and so so I'm I think we got this thing upside down now was before the card and all of those things you know we just need to develop this creative piece first right and that's have passionate conversations about what it is we're trying to accomplish here you know and then we can get involved and I'm not saying that this I mean Pete what you're doing is fantastic because you're providing you know an organizational frame to record the conversations to advance this model and and and and have a communications platform for the team this is fantastic right but that's really that's really the extent of it being useful at this point to advance our creative intentions and and you know if we could spend as much time as we do to talk about organizational framing to instead of creative intentions you know then we can really have shape a product and I've been observing now for for about several years now multiple attempts to get something going and to build something in this phase you know we haven't had a great deal of success to reach out you know with with with maybe maybe would like to engage and help you know. Pete the floor is yours. Thanks class I completely agree creative intent and vision is the most important thing and and maybe what I see is that one person's creative vision and intent isn't enough to bootstrap an organization so with the earth means starts structure it's it's intent is to start from one person's idea and have enough of a participation framework bootstrap from one person to enough to actually be doing something so so a different and and and I can also observe I know it sounds like especially me and then the organ that the conversations that I'm part of seem overweight with infrastructure and tooling and that kind of stuff and I totally get that that's you know it should be a hidden skeleton with a lot of muscles moving around it to get them. So part of the reason we talk a lot about tools infrastructure is because I'm a tools and infrastructure person. I don't mean that to be the most important thing the most important thing is what the organization is trying to get done but the a question that the answer I'm trying to get to is for the question why hasn't OGM gotten anything done or why OGM has got a lot of stuff done. Why hasn't it gotten more structured stuff done with the amazing creativity and vision that we have as individuals. So we have a we're overweight with creativity and vision which and I'm not saying overweight in a bad way even there it's it's a beautiful and a wonderful amazing thing. I love being in this rich soup of people who are creative and interesting and class here and an absolutely perfect example of somebody who has been saying the same creative vision for years. And we all listen. We all are interested enough to keep listening to ask questions to try to figure out I wish I could take you know I wish I could take some action that you know helps food security or or or planet or something like that and we never quite get enough structure to do anything. So how structure to get a little bit more structure so that the project is actually doing something together rather than just wishing. And that's kind of where where that's what I've been working on for a couple years with you. Thanks Pete and Gil we're getting a lot of your sniffles on coughs between things if you wouldn't mind muting between sessions when you talk but you've got the floor now. That that coughs came on faster than I could move I apologize but earlier we're getting your microphone is surprisingly good today. I've got new gadgets so I'm learning to calibrate them. Thank you for letting me know. So Pete you you my antenna really perked up a while back when you talked about pattern language and I think that's part of the quest that you're on here and a pattern language about the questions that you're asking of you know organizational form and structures and processes and coordination and value generation and value sharing and all those things as a library seems like a very powerful idea people who is anyone not familiar with Christopher Alexander's book pattern language. Okay Stacey have a look it's it's oriented around architecture and he he looked all over the world for what are the common elements in design and form how people do spaces and doors and windows and plazas and so forth and generated a library. It's like a fat book a library of things to look at and put together in various combinations and Pete that's that's one of the things I hear in what you're saying. And you're also I'm also hearing you communicate assessments that you have about forms that we see in the world now and we might have different opinions about those but that's cool but there's different forms me even corporation. The corporation is not the same as profit and corporations not the same as capitalism and corporation is not the same as hierarchy although that's the way we usually see it in the world. You know Mondragon is a corporation of 70,000 people organized in a really different way and there are other examples of that and so you know it seems to me that the that having a pattern language of the stuff that you're talking about is a really powerful stone dropped in the pond that can generate all kinds of ripples and creative opportunities for people rather than just you know. You know duplicating what all what's you know what's the norm or wondering what to do or you know kind of experimenting at random all the time we can build on what each other has done if we have a language to share about that so I think that's that's really a cool and interesting opportunity to you know and you've done that to some extent with the Earthman Stars thing is trying to pull out some some generalized elements Stewart's got that in his 10 elements and there's strikes me there's something to build out there which I'd be interested in playing with and you may know some folks may know that I've been paying a lot of attention to different organizational forms and cooperative ownership of business enterprises to get it one of the things that's often missing in the pattern library is how is people come together to do something and it generates value how is that value shared and it's a shared broadly or narrowly and I think that's one of the problems we have now to your question of why hasn't OGM gotten anything more structured done maybe it's because we don't want to maybe because we're anything around other things as this group I mean the this is a group full of people who are getting stuff done in other conversations this conversation as long as I've been involved and it seems to be a conversation about the conversation not about actually getting stuff done and that's not a criticism but it's you know it's what I see and yeah I'm done I'm done and I will meet Sherry thank you for the thanks Gil thank you Gil if I could just build off of what Gil's saying because I also want to address that and there is there is an element of that I think into maybe certain I'll just say Hank puts in the chat that they're somewhere where was it we're overweight with creativity and vision and I just want to say and I don't want to say because I'm trying to so I in my I call it an FM frequency which I'll explain in Marley but in the FM frequency it just feels like there's a lot of people and they're designing the coloring books but they want to give it to everybody all colored in already and we don't want the coloring books colored in so I just want to get that on the record thanks Stacy I like that analogy a lot a couple things some of you heard me talk about the next two stacks and Gil I'm trying to go back and address your bigger picture question here and I make the assertion we have a societal stack and an organizational stack and today in the west the societal stack is allegedly democracy but it's becoming a liberal democracy it's capitalism but it's this really vicious flavor of capitalism that's kind of eaten the system there's regulatory capture everywhere there's money is like preeminent and everything has to have a price though that's the societal stack and the org stack is kind of limited to C corpse or 501 C3's and the 501 C3's are busy trying to fix the shit that C corpse create because of the broken system above and I think the path we're all in in the middle of one of the things that's happening in this segment of human history is we're renegotiating the political contract and both of those stacks are going to change dramatically in a hundred years and the piece parts for the future are on the table right now we just don't know which things we're going to wind up adopting permanently and we're going to love and are going to become our dominant way of doing things and I think Pete's earth moon sun and stars is an exploration of a piece of the organizational stack of how does that work because one of the questions is hey if we were to wipe away what a C corp is and how it does and all kinds of things how would we like to arrange human beings to collaborate and to collaborate in a way where they were motivated to collaborate by which I don't just mean monetary reward or extrinsic reward I mean everything and so that they felt like there was a fair attribution or division of spoils if their if money entered the system so that money wouldn't corrupt or break the system and so that people could decide to put a lot of energy into a project because there was some money available because we still don't have the money for that and so we've been in today's world where money is a prerequisite etc etc so I've got in my brain a bunch of resources around what are the today's stacks what are the next stacks and then there's a whole bunch of efforts out there to build software platforms that are the next stacks so co-makeries disco co-op social co-op and collect them all in these thoughts and Pete's offer is one of for me one of those kinds Then, B-corps are just one of many different legal arrangements and it's a much more humane legal arrangement than a C-corp, but there are others. There are public benefit corporations, there's a series of little sliver, and all of these have almost no market share. They have not eaten the brains of capitalism and Western thinking yet. They're tiny little, they're basically the mammals under the dinosaur's toes. My hope is, if I had a magic button I could press, I would be like, hey, I'm going to force all C-corporations to go become something like B-corps or public benefit corporations to remove their forced desire, to remove their mandate to suck all the value out of everything they touch, every time they touch it, because hedge funds right now are destroying nursing homes, destroying all kinds of stuff, because they see money floating around, they're like, oh, how do we suck that out of the system? In so doing, they ruin a whole bunch of really interesting things that need to exist in the world. So I think they're mostly kind of predatory and not that helpful, and they're some of the big exemplars of capitalism. So one of the things that's coming to mind from watching our dynamic in Marley and in OGM largely spoken is how do we get just-in-time structure, so that somebody says, hey, let's put on a show, and if they were to do the show all by themselves, they would need no structure and they would put on some kind of structure that they're accustomed to. They'd be happy to do the work because they're passionate about it, and maybe they'd try to sell the work at the end, but they would own the work because they created the work and that's great. But we're trying to collaborate, we're trying to get more people in. And an important thing if we're going to create, for example, the quick first book is the moment somebody who's busy participating in deciding to put a lot of energy in says, hey, how do we do attribution on this, and what intellectual property regime is this book going to be published under? The moment some of those questions come up to important participants in the group, not just peripherally, and also I think maybe not just ex ante because this is the best thing to do because I like what Stuart said earlier, which is that the structure that's best for the project will emerge from the project as the project is built, if I'm paraphrasing you poorly, correct me, but basically, how can we be just-in-time about this so that as we, and when you have collaborators, the first thing is, well, where are we going to collaborate and how are we going to use this? And those are platform decisions, and we've been facing, we've been doing those all along and those are pretty, you know, we're pretty comfortable with because we have platforms we're used to, so that's kind of unconscious as it goes. But I think that finding a way to mesh the need for structure with the growth of a project as it kind of emerges and gets more complicated and as people jump in who have important questions that need to be addressed, I like that model and I've not seen it done well or anywhere, but I would be really happy to be in a community that's doing that. And also, once a community has figured out what its platform is and what its general ground rules are, then a lot of these things are just given. They're default settings for, OK, we're going to do a new project now and we're going to use the same default settings as we did for the last three projects and we're off and running. But we're at a period now where we're renegotiating how all this stuff works, so we need to figure out how this new thing works until we get settled with the new platform we're going to really like. And then the last thing, I love pattern languages and pattern libraries and I like Pete's distinction between the two. I find pattern, whatever's pattern L's to be a beautiful way to share distilled wisdom. That that's what I think of a pattern library or a pattern language as. It's like, how do I distill into the fewest words, the essence of a thing that's important for people to understand, to level up their behavior in democracy, in facilitating meetings, in soil fertility, in whatever else. And so beating and curating and gardening, these pattern libraries and pattern languages as we do the work feels to me like our gift to the commons for other people to figure out how the new stacks are going to organize and how we're all going to work together and how this collaboration thing is going to work and, hey, and that feels like a lot of work, but it's sort of slow work that builds over time. If you just keep doing it. So if you find, if you just, if you figure something out and solve something, you put it in a pattern language and you publish it out, that thing is on a wiki. So it's always going to be upgraded and made better. So that's kind of cool. And we can proceed that way. And I'm done with what I wanted to say. I'll go to Doug briefly and then back to Gill and Stuart. So earlier, somebody said something about that we are top heavy with creativity and lacking in structure. I think it's the other way around. And I think that this group, the strength was this ability to tolerate meandering and discover our minds and that the group has never been up for a project to do something. And, well, I think the point is just obvious. I'm going to say something that's kind of awkward. And that is, we used to have 40 people in this call. I remember that time. Why has it thinned out? I think because we are not, are not honoring our meandering protocol nearly enough. It's a personal opinion, but we'll see. Thank you for honoring our meanderability or our meandering superpowers. I really appreciate that. And why don't we slow the conversation down just a wee bit as we head around the turn. Gill and Stuart, you're next, but please take a little time stepping in. So I mostly come to this group for meandering. Maybe that has to do with when I showed up and what was going on then and what I've experienced here. But I find I experienced this group as mostly meandering with projects and stuff that talked about it. But I love it and I value it deeply. And, you know, I've got a potential conflict every Thursday morning and I've pushed the other ones away because I love being here with you all. I didn't, I don't think I was ever here when it was 40. So that's an interesting question, Doug. So, yeah, and meandering and creative meandering is an deeply important part of creativity and getting stuff done. Actually, it's a deeply important part of the highly structured getting stuff done. So yay for meandering. Let's have more meandering. That said, back to the question of just in time organizations, Jerry, thank you for the riff and rant and enthusiasm that you clearly displayed in that seems to me that just in time structures are going to happen better if there is a pattern library or pattern language or a shared set of stuff that the people coming together for the just in time organization can draw on because otherwise they're either going to make things spend a lot of time making things up from scratching and not drawing on shared knowledge, but maybe more importantly, there's going to be a poverty of what's possible. I've carried for a long time a quote from Kenneth Bolden who said that existence is proof of the possible. So part of my MO has been to show people, hey, here's something that already exists that you didn't think existed and anything was possible, but it exists. It's here. It's on the ground. You can look at it. You can visit it. You can test it evaluated to see if it's right for you. And the other quote that popped up Jerry as you were talking was, I think it's Mark Twain, maybe not. I mean, everything gets attributed to Mark Twain that if your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see all problems as nails. And so if your only tool is a corporation, that's the only thing you know about it. If you think it's the only thing that exists in the only way that large complex deep endeavors can be done, that's where you go. And, you know, the VC pattern language is a very narrow one. It's very effective for certain things, but it's very narrow. And so broadening the experience of what's possible, what works in which situations, what can be drawn on, I think it's an accelerator for just in time structures. And what my friend Larry Peterson used to call no profile organizations. And weaving meandering into getting things done in the ways that we really want and the ways that we really care about. Thank you. Thank you. I think I forgot what I was going to say. But one of the things that I picked picking up on what Gil just said, if we want to do anything, if and I'm okay either way, yes or no. Years ago, I wanted to make sure something got done. And for some reason, I've just moved off of that and it's okay to meander with smart people. But the kind of the template for, you know, in time organizational structure is what I've been kind of offering up as a way of, you know, creating a structure for a particular project. The other thought that comes up, it was, you know, how do we trust in working with people? Because trust often comes up as a critical component. And my way of thinking, it comes up as a matter of experience over time. And it's not something that you can push the river on. You have to have an experience of working with someone so that you can realize that you're on the same page, that there's a shared value set and, you know, trust is something that just develops from working together over time, being together over time. That's it. Thanks, Dewey. And I mostly agree with what you just said, but I think you can push the activities in order to catalyze the trust building. Yeah. But you can't order up trust. Right. That doesn't work. A trust is an indirect thing. And the moment somebody says, trust me, your little BS radar should be going, going bright red. I am not a crook. Scott, yeah, but we don't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore. So that doesn't work. That's right. Even, even Agnew is not too bad. There's a movie. There's a movie coming out of Bob's of negativity. Exactly. There is a movie coming out about the Watergate burglars and stuff, which looks pretty, pretty interesting. It's out. Cool. It's a series, I think. Oh, right. Right, right, right, right. They made it into a series. And playing Howard Hunt has got to be a hood. Yeah, with Woody Harrelson. I forget who he plays. He could be Hunt. Or Liddy. He might be Liddy. No, he's Hunt. I just dropped this TED Talk into the text and I put it, I posted it to the list. It's really, it's 15 minutes. This woman is a Harvard Business School professor. It's the best talk on trust I've ever seen. Please watch it when you have a chance. Thanks, Ken. Scott, you've got the floor at whatever pace you'd like to step in. You're likely to need to unmute. So that, that trust talk is better than Jerry's? How dare you? Honestly, it is. Damn it. All right. So, I'm echoing Doug. Because I believe I was around towards the beginning of all this adventure back in early pandemic nymphs. And I do recall the 40 people. And I don't know if 40 is the exact number, but it was a screen full and more. You had to scroll to see everybody. And so I thought, how do I, how do I provide a perspective on that? So I went back and at one point, there was a question that went out. Let's see. Dated November 28th, 2020. What is OGM to me? And that was a prompt that was out. And many of us chose to think about it and answer it. And I'm going to read what I wrote because it's probably the best way of doing this. And it's not very long. So what is OGM to me? OGM is a live video chat. With 10 to I wrote 30, so that maybe it wasn't 40, but 30 is still a lot. A live video chat with 10 to 30 participants recorded for later viewing by anyone in which the participants share their love of exploring and connecting interesting ideas, people and projects. It's facilitated live by Jerry and each gathering dynamically flows between free ranging and focused as he gently guides the floor through his active intuitive awareness. Little stuff down here. Another highlighted passage. It's the open real time generative wisdom of the collective experience and imaginations of the participants. This is what respectful, engaging, thoughtful, open discussion looks like. And I remember at the time. This was again three years ago, a little less than three. This was the question to the group was what are we doing? What are our projects? Why aren't we achieving anything? And it caused a rift and we lost people. Now they've split off and all these little other groups started to started to form. And I remember interacting with a bunch of them who I haven't seen. On this call in years. And then they kind of splintered off and went in their own ways. But what I remember was that. Similar to what I think Doug said, that was what. That wasn't what OGM was to me. Now it might have been for other people. This is about getting something accomplished. And to me, it was about what I had said. It's the. Process of discussing things in an open forum and seeing what people are up to. People who are involved in some really cool stuff, might I say, you know, that I'm not involved in at all. And. It was that. I was just a really nice way to. Well, as I think Jerry has said about the Twitter feed, you know, there's it's like you dip into the river and then you kind of dip out again, you know, the variation of that, right? And that's what this felt like. To me, you know, it's not it's not a job. It's something I do voluntarily. I take some time and come here because I'm hoping for. I'm hoping to get something, you know, as somebody puts a link and I think, oh, that's kind of cool. Or someone has a way of thinking about something that that I hadn't thought of before. And. And that that's what I get out of it. And so. I don't know. I just wanted to echo that as another vote, not vote, another. Another perspective that seems to rhyme with Doug's and and many of you. And I think that you can have both of this this wanting to discuss and wanting to create something tangible and and make this into more. But I see that as a it's a divide that has has always kind of been there because we keep talking about it. And so at some level, it's it's still there. And unfortunately, fewer people are interested in that just because of the numbers. That's only one data point, but, you know, to. To Doug's point. So that that's all for me. Thanks, Scott, Stacey, Pete, can take your time. Thank you, Scott, just to connect that to the meandering and trust. So I came in similar to Scott, except for me, it was an opportunity to learn from people who had a lot of experience and knew about things that I hadn't been exposed to. And now with the Marley project, I feel like I'm taking that and finding a little play space where maybe I could design a combination that keeps the conversation and the social components that I was drawn to that the people that remain here are drawn to but move it into action. And the thing is I don't want to do the thing. I just want to design it because I feel to quote our past president in a good way. I feel like I know the best people. And and you have the best words. But because of who I am in particular and my internal makings up, that trust piece is built in to the with the people I surround myself with. So those relationships and the the understanding of that flow of trust, whatever it may be, is clear and that's very helpful for at least my half of the part, the system I want to design. And with that, I then know that I can then trust Pete to go and do that stuff and I could trust Jerry to go and do that stuff and to overlay and overlap where the rest of us all have our pieces in all the different. Ways, so I don't know if that makes a hundred percent sense. I do want to say one more thing since I trust everybody here. So that you know about me, part of my who I am or whatever my role is requires that I hold many, many, many pieces of information all at the same time. And so what I've learned to do is I have to sort of organize using letters and that may seem strange to people on the outside that don't know what's going on in my head, but that's like an organizing. So that's why, you know, if we have like the S protocol or you were saying you said before I smiled when you said something language and you said the L, you know, so just so I just wanted to explain that and get that on the record. So I'm looking to being in Marley and meandering. I did not know that. That's cool. And then a tiny reflection on meandering before because I'm noticing that over time, we've structured our calls. We now alternate between a check and call that has a very particular structure and a topic call where we try to find our way to a topic and we're kind of frustrated if we don't have a topic beforehand and then we spend some time trying to get rest of our way to a topic. All those all of those things are not meandering really necessarily. So it might be interesting to reintroduce some meandering protocol, which is a more of a more of a non protocol. But I and just personally, I adore meandering conversations. I love the dip and stir method of conversation. I love meandering, too. And I've always thought of it. OGM is really interesting because it's not really an organization. It's it's more like a zone of attraction. People who are are kind of like minded and want to learn more curious, thoughtful. And I love that about OGM. And I think it's it's super power. There aren't many places where it's just. A an attraction to a loose, not even a loose set of ideas. It's not a set of ideas and attraction to each other and attraction, attraction to meandering, things like that. And yet I have to observe as someone who's manored meandered with you all for a couple of years. I feel like there are some high points that we've all come to know about. Food security, carbon, climate change. I know that some of us, well. Some of us are very passionate about it. About particular parts of it. And I think we've all observed that that passion isn't. It's not personally motivated. It's not personally motivated. It's not craving. It's oh my God, we've got to pull together all of us on this planet to get some really important things done. So while I would love to meander and just meander. I think I I've seen enough people in our tribe. Try to meander towards, try to try to move towards, try to stop meandering and move themselves towards a goal of a better planet and better people. And try to encourage others of us to move with them. And I don't really care if OGM gets things done. I do care that people with a passion. For doing. To better humanity to better themselves and ourselves. I am motivated to help those people. Succeed and to bring more of us with them. And so how do we do that? Open question. Two more quick things. Maybe we used to have 30 people here because all of those 30 people or 60 people that we do a pool of 30 people. We're stuck at home because of a pandemic. And zoom was their, their outlet. So maybe it's not a surprise that there are fewer of us now. I don't know. I wanted to pick up on Stuart and trust. And trust was. Trust is a big part of the organizational structure pattern library I'm working on. And I've been wrestling with this. What does trust mean? How do we trust each other? Since, you know, since my days in Silicon Valley 20, 30 years ago. Because without trust, you can't get anything done. And trust is really hard. And, and in our society, we actually have some kind of trust shortcuts that we try to take. And, and they're, they're kind of productive. So, you know, I'm, I'm, I imagine, you know, I'm, I'm signing up with a 100,000 person company. Can I trust them with my life? I'm going to be spending a lot of time with these people. Can I trust them with my life? Can I trust them with my life? Can I trust them with my life? I'm going to be spending a lot of time with these people. Can I trust them with my investment in what they're doing? And the default answer is, well, you have to sign up with a big company so that you'll be safe and secure and blah, blah, blah. Look the other way when they're doing stuff that, that is not trustful. When they're doing bad things, ignore it. So, so we have a lot of. So trust is super important. Totally get it. Totally agree. And, and how can we make. Well, let me, let me post this into the chat. And let me talk to us a little bit. Having, having formed many, many, many startup teams over the years. A way to start a discussion of how are we going to work together is to say, huh, I don't know if I can trust you. I trust parts of what you, I like what you say, but I don't trust you completely. So, you know, let's keep talking about this trust thing or whatever it means. It turns out after thinking about it, there's, there's places where we can come to a quick agreement with some, with some simple boundaries about what we do together. You know, hey, if we templatize, we can, we can, we can. You know, if we do something that we do together, you know, hey, if we templatize, you know, certain things, let's have provisional trust. So let's pick the things that are easy to have trust or easy to kind of templatize trust for. And then let's also be aware that there are really, really hard things to be trustful about. Can I be honest with you? Can I, can I tell you something that I think will hurt you? Can I, you know, that kind of stuff, that we can't templatize, but maybe if we at least kind of talk about the different kinds of trust that we'll need to, to utilize as we come together to negotiate, to grow and, and learn the things that we can create a quick framework for, create those frameworks and understand that there are other things, let's articulate the things where we need to grow. We can't trust each other until we've seen how we work in good times and bad times and things like that. And it takes years to do that. So, so just having a framework for how we negotiate this thing trust. Early on in my days, my observation about trust was people would say, well, I don't trust you or I do trust you. And then that blanket covered everything, right? It turns out that there's lots of, lots of variability to trust and lots of different places that you need to trust people. And some of them are easier and some of them are harder. Sorry to kind of repeat myself. For those of us who've been through this process before, let's also kind of make, so EMS, interestingly enough, is kind of a way to pick the most contentious places. How do we, you know, how do we resource things? What do we do with value we create? Let's put those kind of front and center of our organizational thought and start to, start to write things down about the trickiest parts. So, so I feel like, you know, 30 or 40 years ago, if somebody said, hey, Pete, you know, when you trust somebody, it turns out that, you know, one of the biggest things is what they're going to do with your time and attention. And when the organization makes money where it's going to go, I don't like that those things are kind of most important, but they're super, super important, and especially in the world that we live in where we all have to fend for ourselves, kind of, with making sure that our money is taken care of or that people are treating us fairly when they accumulate resources, you know, flag those as things that you want to be really careful about. So, you know, older Pete telling younger Pete, hey, these are things where people have wildly varying ideas of, you know, what's right and what's appropriate. Those are the things where you have to be super, super careful about. And some of the other things like how are we going to decide what we're going to have for lunch today. And, and, you know, that's not the important thing. The important thing is if I give my time and attention to you, what are you going to do with it? And how are we going to, you know, work that, that together? I started working with groups about 35 years ago. And one thing I noticed, I used to run the, I was the county coordinator for the Marin County Buddhist Peace Fellowship. And we had a very large group joining us. And we spent several weeks filling out flip chart after flip chart with things we could work on. And the minute we chose one thing to work on, 70% of the people in the group left. And I've noticed this is a dynamic in groups that pops up all the time. People are happy to be in the, the ideation, the creation stage. Let's think of what we can do. And as soon as you choose something, that's not my thing. I'm out of here. And so I think it's, it's a given in group situations that it's incredibly hard. What if Abel can say, you know, you can't fool all the people. They can't please all the people all the time either. Right. So what's juicy enough to attract a core, you know, critical mass to get something done. And go with that and not worry about what happened to all the people. Or figure out what else can we do? Can we work on multiple projects? It sounds like Pete's putting something out that lets us, let's us choose several different paths with a structure underneath to hold them together. I don't have any answer here. It's just an observation of mine that this is an ongoing dynamic in every group I've ever been part of that is other than a work team or they're charged with doing something. But as soon as you choose one thing, a bunch of people say, yeah, I'm not, I'm not something I'm not going to be there. So I think that's one reason why several of us in this group come back because we're basically just here for the meander. So many people have said it's really, it's easy to hang out in the meander. It's much more difficult to hang out when people are working on something that really isn't your thing. So that's my observation. Thank the floor is yours when everyone's stepping. Well, I think this has been another wonderful conversation, which we've had about 20 times in the past. So let me try to do some meta commenting on it. I certainly come here for the meandering. I love it. I also really enjoy getting lost and being lost. But that's another thing. I enjoy that in the physical world. And I enjoy it in the intellectual world. And I've never left an OGM ball with less energy than I had when I went into it. I always leave it more energy. I always leave with the wonderful things I never thought of or heard of before. And I think that's one of the great things about the way these call is developed. I must say I've also volunteered for working groups in a number of OGM projects, style things, but because of time zone differences and age differences and energy differences, I can't always carry through. So I can definitely say I think that there's several types of people who attend these calls, people who just want the intellectual stimulation and the meandering and people who are very hungry to do things. And I think that's great. I always cite OGM calls when I'm talking with other people and try to encourage more Europeans to join because that's a different perspective. Aside from the gender perspective and the age perspective, we need a European and an African and an Asian perspective too. So, you know, getting back to what was being said, I think for me personally, I think that's one of the things that's part of my work for the last three or four years is how to leverage your collective creative intent. I've got a lot of questions about it, not so many answers. Jerry, you cited I don't remember if it was Stuart or Scott in saying let it emerge as we do it. That's always been one of my mottos. I totally agree with Gill and Doug, who both said in different words, do the people on the school really want to do things together? Well, some do and some are more interested in the meandering. And I put the paraphrase quote in the chat earlier from one of the better OGM, not better, but, most memorable OGM calls. I attended about nine months ago about what OGM is. Someone said, I think it was close, but I can't really remember. OGM is midwifing what's trying to be born. So let me just conclude this meta comment by saying, as we move with meandering towards creating pattern law, towards creating pattern libraries, book projects and tools for thought and lots of other things. Yeah, let's go for it. And either contribute, take part, meander and come away enriched. That's my part. Thank you. I want to repeat something that I said in the chat and then comment on some of the last couple of comments. I'm, like several people have said, I'm delighted with the meandering and midwifing. I find it just, you know, rich and very inviting. And I have the image of, you know, a budding of, you know, like a single cell organism preproducing and budding off or, you know, plants shooting out buds. It's rich, fertile environment and things come from this and may, you know, there are projects and groups and more that I can keep track of. I have no idea how you guys do all the meetings that you do every week. And I think that's great. Can I think I think it was you who said I'm sorry who was said but the choosing to take part in a project means making a commitment to that project and it means deciding not to do other things. And so people have their filters and processes for that. And, you know, we, I don't join all the things that fascinate me because I can't. I try to think of which are the ones that do there have been relatively few from here that have called on my active participation. But I'm very enriched by everything that's going on. The pattern language pattern library pattern toolkit thing actually does call to me and Peter'd love to talk with you more about that. I've been doing, as I mentioned, you know, both been looking a lot at corporate forum and cooperative ownership and been working on what I guess is going to be a book at some point on the structural defects of capitalism cap hyphenated capitalism. And what that can disclose about what we might do and so I see the pattern language of possibilities resonating in me as a as a complement to that. And that's there because I think, you know, be corpse and social investment and enterprise and what stuff is not getting at all the problems. And so I've been trying to actually I guess I guess I'm building a library of a diagnosis about what's broke in the current game as a guide to where we might build so I think it's just fine that the group shrinks. Maybe it's because of the pandemic rhythms. I think it's just fine that there are projects that involve a few people or many people. And I'll just close by one more quote Jerry I know this quote is accurate I don't know if the existence is proof of the possible quote was from anywhere except maybe me. But I read a book years ago called the seven rules of entrepreneurship again I'm Steven brand. And the first rule was do a project with the smallest possible group of people with the highest possible agreement. And what they're trying to do as a guide for building something so I'm not looking for numbers I'm looking for passion and clarity and commitment at the root of things and let's have many of them and let's have them interconnect which is one of the things that this is not just me entering. This is cross fertilization. This is mutual support. This is sharing of resource like hey, I heard you talk about that did you know about this other thing we enrich each other in our separate games, as well as in our games together and I'm grateful to all of you. So, set. I'm going to have to bounce right at the half hour so we either fold the collar can pass it to somebody I know that can usually has to leave at the half hour as well so someone else would like to keep talking raise your hand, and I will pass you the con as I drop off at the at the half. And I put in polarity management in the chat and structure is a lever it's a design variable, and we can add structures subtract structures we wish. But we don't, but, but the choice of structure or not structure or goals or not calls isn't a binary on off. It's a polarity to manage. And one way that this group could structure that polarity is to say that the Thursday calls are very intentionally me and recalls and that's where we mix remix and lightly weave and try to form connections. And I'm really happy that I know a bunch of people who've met here and gone off and done things and they've been too busy to show up for the Thursday calls which does not make me unhappy. It makes me happy they had a place to meet and that they heard something in the room that caused them to go Oh, you and I need to talk and then they go have another talk and then they're off and running that that makes me really really happy. Because rubbing people together is something I've always loved doing. Not in that other way you might be thinking. And then, and then the project calls and Marley is the most project we call we have right now, aside from tft mapping and a couple other things that are also very project oriented. Those groups can have agreements and, and, and be much more goal oriented and that's a terrific thing. And I, and to me that that means that people can choose which conversations are going. There's a bunch of people who show up for free Jerry spent on Mondays who were never in the Thursday calls. They don't show up here and that's cool too and they're part of the community and we're just you know tapping into it in different ways in different parts. I don't see that as a big problem reunion would be cool. It's a good idea Scott, thank you. What do you think about that. That'd be great. I'd love to see all these people who went off and did that stuff and come back and say, here's the report from the field because I have no idea. I love the idea. Cool. And so I'm going to drop off in a sec. Who would like the calm as I fall off. And Stacy, it I'll pass it to you. No. No, I was saying goodbye. Okay, good. So we let's just wrap the call then. You want to hear a poem. Quick one, throw yourself like seed, shake off this sadness and recover your spirit sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate that brushes your heel as it turns going by the man and the man who wants to live as the man in whom life is abundant. Now you're only giving food to that final pain, which is slowly winding you into the nets of death, but to live is to work. And the only thing which lasts is the work. Start then turn to the work. Throw yourself like seed as you walk and into your own field. Don't turn your face to that which would turn it to death. Do not let the past way down your motion. Leave what's alive in the furrow. What's dead in yourself for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds for your work you will one day be able to gather yourself. Miguel day. Have a great week everybody. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody.