 Well, Mickey bribes the crowd I will get started is that time We are talking about scaling community conversations and decision-making. I am Ben Mellonson and Mickey Mets is out giving out candy and We are with the agaric We are we're with a garic. We're a worker owned cooperative Which means we do make? Democratic decisions internally, but we most of this presentation will not be drawing on our own Experiences because it's about democracy at scale and decision-making at scale and we are a cooperative of six people Just so what where we're coming from? of sort of a founding principle for our our cooperative and You know in our lives is having the most power possible to all you know Get it giving the most power possible to all people over their own lives And you know from doing websites that people can actually edit and you know online and are free software So they can do whatever they want with is important and you know These are the concepts of justice and liberty which I like to say that's pretty to say But it's hard to make sure you're talking about the same thing that you know justice and liberty can be very flowery and squishy And there's whole you know terrible economists who make a career of arguing that you know Liberty is the freedom for someone to do whatever they want with their own property no matter if other people are being Completely denied any freedom because of that So we are talking about group decision-making and basic thesis of that we're gonna get to is that group decision-making requires Conversation to influence the decision you need to be part of the conversation Conversations with a large number of people need to be moderated And if you don't have equal access to the conversation a fair share that is a fair share of control over the moderation You don't have equal say in the decision so Power is organization We are developers and designers and are fairly famously in our own self conception hard to organize you may have seen the slide or Just heard people likening managing developers or designers to herding cats But doesn't change the fact that you know our power in our community is the level of organization. We've achieved Sometimes through the code And so just knowledge is not power is mayor and keba a great organizer and prison abolitionist He's been working for you know transformative justice for a long time says it's you know organization is power not not simply knowledge Which is why we're talking about how to work together as a community So inevitably In any any Any movement any formation of people Inevitably there is going to be informal communication networks. And so Joe Freeman wrote about this in 1970s in in the context of the women's liberation movement in our resources slide Which you'll well we linked to at the end so don't worry about any citations or notes will all be online You know I I've just taken her quotes about the women's liberation movement and just put in the open-source software movement As a as a thing and it just reads exactly the same, but the point is that inevitably Informal communication networks of friends are Elitist and exclusive and so that for everyone to have an opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in Next act in it in its activities. The structure must be explicit Not implicit that's why we're talking about it And then sort of the weakest reason for having some form of democratic governance is still a pretty big one It's people having a feeling of influence of being heard which Not gonna just go around there and ask But it's been something that's been on the decline and the wane in in the Drupal community not feeling a lot of control So going to Drupal Drupal is not a democracy Having a Benevolent dictator for life model You know doesn't work so a A Nedger Rogers of chocolate lily has involved in the Drupal Association when it started in Europe and Proposed that it have a genuinely democratic structure and That didn't happen and you know like 12 no 15 years later we are still Yeah, no that long We are we are still having those effects so the the Drupal governance task force Which did a lot of work over end of 2017 and and through to the end of 2018 their very first recommendation Is begins having a BDFL model benefit benevolent a dictator for life model Means loyalty time and attention are divided The there is often frustration is pressure for change and decisions reach an individual bottleneck There is a strong feeling that any community change or action requires Dries approval be for commencing let alone expanding The project is bigger than one individual It's time to recognize that and place a community group at the center and this is a group that was Authorized and chosen by Dries But you know that Suggestion hasn't gone anywhere in the five months since it was made so it's sort of in the same thing It's and they they talk about this a lot in their report that You know people don't want to put a lot of work into Improving governance if you don't feel that it's it's gonna get somewhere. It's one of the the least returns So what has Drupal been doing and how has it been? running its Decision-making internally So the one of the things we have going for ourselves. I feel is that we Do not generally self-identify as a meritocracy Which is a start because the word meritocracy comes from a political satire It was never meant to be something we should aspire to the opposite a warning about how we rationalize what we believe we've earned and If that sentence doesn't seem applicable to you from the tech industry in its cycle of discussion and sexism racism and Occasionally classism even gets talked about Please read Garen means blog post that I took that from and then yeah just cartoon about how The the the effects of institutional racism and every other sort of Institutional and Continuing thing doesn't just go away and that if we as a community are at all serious about fairness It means looking beyond what? You know we you know what? It means doing a little bit of our part to make the world more just which isn't just saying that well in our community We're not going to Discriminate it means that we actually have to go farther and and work towards justice and try to bring resources to those who don't And also a community of equals needs with the non-hierarchal method of communication needs to control harassment Or you will slam your computer and go away, and we lose lots of other people, and that's another thing that especially the Beak fengen feminism discussion of meritocracy covers so we Identify a little bit more as a duocracy Angie Byron likes to use the term duocracy. I'm Really proud that I Suggested it stealing from other communities back in like 2008 But the idea is that you know you can you know the decisions are mostly made actually by people who just Step up and do something and so I actually want to so any so half of all open-source projects have only one Committer according to Olo and I don't have I Don't have a And the numbers for Drupal modules, but I think it's similar like vast majority will be one active maintainer and These projects don't have to worry about scaling community decision-making. There's one decision-maker maybe two and that's actually fantastic You know as you know, there's a bad side of like that seems like you know That's not the community power. We generally think about but the good thing is that Anything you can do entirely on your own is Something that you can just go and do and so Drupal's modular architecture has Has been what's enabled to have such a large community without having strong decision-making tools And that's and that so it's not the idea that and this is not like Surprising to us and a worker on cooperative like we don't take everything to a democratic vote Whoever is most affected or has the most skill goes ahead and and makes the decision So I do we do want to emphasize that a large part of Drupal's decision-making has been solved by Devolving and I mean I should also mention that in free software the ultimate Up, you know freedom is to fork You know, that's the point of free software and that the backdrop community has done this and in fact has really interesting Governance of their own like so they forked a community as well as the code And and are a place to look for for governance. So the inherent Freedom in In free software has already been exercised in Drupal and it's it's no longer just theoretical about You know, how how do you still have the freedom to make decisions? It's actually happened. So, you know that That's that's an important structural thing underlying Our community also, but there's still lots of matters where We have the need to make collective decisions and the good news is that despite you know, many talking about how Participated democracy and social equality can only work in a small community or activist group historically Quoting David Graeber and David one grow on how to change the course of human history is that the gallantarian cities and regional Confederacies are historically quite commonplace and actually gallantarian families and households are not and this is the Air Corps Confederacy, which is a Very large very horizontal Confederacy other historical examples one of the major problems of There are several major problems With governing people is whom you get to do it or rather who manages to get people to let them do it to them And this is Douglas Adams to summarize It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are It's a fact of those least seated to do it to summarize the summary anyone who is capable of getting the cells made ruler President should on no account be allowed to do the job and Summarize the summary of the summary people are the problem So the good news is that people are problematic in sort of consistent ways And there's all sorts of things we can do to make ourselves better And so this is the point where systems matter is you they can never just say at the individual level And so it's not the problem of who is benevolent dictator for life The problem is having a benevolent dictator for life structure Or you know in anything else the problem is generally not the people It's how we've set up the systems for how people work and so we touch on a few tiny subsets of You know Regular problems that people have and how to fix them so One of the basic problems is that no one cares about decision-making processes until there's something they don't like And So we're just going to talk about you know what kind of democracy what kind of the community decision-making do we want in place for when there is a problem You know for inspiration The zapatista Caracol Networks is sort of a modern one that's taking lots of inspiration from long-standing indigenous communities in southern Mexico and Has some similarities to some of the stuff we're talking about as far as being very clear about nested levels of decision-making and spheres of influence But we might as well just don't have much time here get straight to the tools So Lumio is a tool that makes democrat decision-making yeah makes do you want to Lumio is in a cooperative and they've just designed a wonderful tool for decision-making That allows everyone to either vote on it Yes, or no or to decide that they need more information before they can vote So it opens up a way you can discuss in a non-linear fashion and It because it's difficult how large can a group be before the design and format must change to accommodate a larger group The process for eight people to make a decision is Widely different than a process for 800,000 people to make a decision or for a whole Community that is a city to make a decision together So it must be modified and you have to realize when to modify that format When is it getting so exhaustive and complex that no one can understand the system? That is a real pitfall because people don't usually tell you that they just leave so Lumio.org and That that's in our resources links also And the people who made Lumio will be the first to tell you that there aren't technological fixes for human problems They have a great cooperative handbook and they're part of the Inspiral Network, which is a bunch of Cooperatives many of them cooperatives the network itself is not Formally cooperative, but that tries to solve a lot of community decision-making problems And they you know the bills of this software actually feel that it's you know best for you know groups of You know basically more than ten and less than a hundred And so one of the questions you know is you know when you have a large community is How do you make decisions and harkening back to Douglas Adams and you know, so Walt Kelly who always had his cartoon character? Declare that he wasn't didn't want to be president So that made everyone else want to make him elect them everywhere. Yeah, even more Every four years a series of cartoons about everyone else trying to get him elected while he tried to hide you know going to that there is a well-established approach to Making sure that those who seek power are not the ones you give power And the ancient Greeks Turned out thought about this and acted on it and it's called sortition in modern terms. It's usually meant Taking from the group of people in a community Just a random selection of them and giving them the time and the resources to make Decisions on behalf of the community So it's it's not, you know, whoever happens to volunteer. It's actually a random selection and Then giving people the skills and the time and the resources to make decisions and then at some point You know in a set time you change that and it's Got a lot of good approaches reducing corruption. I'm a lot of good Things for making sure you're inclusive and not just you know taking the people who have the most time and resources and another application of you know, so the same idea is You know just the technical hack to allow large To have us let us have large genuinely free and fair communities Is to have a randomly selected group of people make decision on whether a particular message should be pushed out the whole group So sort of sortition light in the sense that you know, it's not a lot of time and resources You're giving people but you're just sharing the work of deciding what communication goes out and That's fundamental level and we're going to try to go quickly. So there's time for questions here and Visions unite which is a project that I'm part of will be an incubator and ongoing communication tool set for all kinds of cooperative ventures that need or want to scale and want that you know kind of put the community in charge of the the Communication aspect of things sort of is the precursor to being able to have And then Another sort of modern twist on some of these ancient things of idea of nesting and there's done a good Job of defining it and I think is a really good fit for volunteer heavy projects like Drupal in that it's it's a lot easier to Yeah, to you know when when when your company or something it's like everyone's being paid everyone has time and So it's sort of sociocracy is basically sort of a balance between the or has potential for balancing between the self-selected aspect of of duocracy and Having some sort of representative democratic control. So it's just a structure You know and emphasizes learning and evolving clear just decisions and then a fractal circle structure Which is is sort of the key to devolving power And also, you know anyone actually doing the implementing has that Control so everyone gets a say in the direction condition of their work and you know No one I'll get to say they're just following orders the structure is a bunch of of circles each link to one or more Other circles by a double link side, you know groups connected There's in each group one person is representative to another group And not every group has to be connected only groups that generally have to work together and each group makes its own decisions and then You know that goes to the others and so it's not like a pure hierarchy It's whichever groups in their work relationships have to work together all decisions made within circles are made by consent Which is a term they use for consensus and it's basically the same thing, but they want to emphasize that not everyone You know has to be In chart, you know in in agreement with the collective decision. They're just not going to block it But as developers we need to understand that the decisions need to include The people who will be using this software or whatever it is that you're building Without them You're just back to a hierarchy of telling people what to do So setting up the structure for everyone to be able to participate is Important on going discussion Exactly has anyone heard of the platform cooperative ism movement No, there's a handbook about it It's about building platforms that are owned by the people that use them like an uber owned by the drivers and This is definitely a way of Getting everyone to put in their their ideas because the the platform is used by all So recently the platform cooperative Movement has gotten a million dollar grant to create a toolkit Platform cooperative toolkit, which does include some software, but it's mostly the resources a person would need to start a platform like they're Finding out about local government structures. What what forms do they need to fill what legal aid will they need? Those type of things that are scattered, you know, they're all publicly available, but it's so scattered It would take you maybe months to organize that and yeah, exactly a minute corollary of Making sure that everyone gets to be heard from is that not every decision Is one that everyone needs to weigh in and also that you need to actively include the Yeah, the users and the platform cooperative movement provides an approach to that Yeah, so all day long people technologists are demanding that people use our software use the software But I don't see anyone telling everyone to go meet their neighbors and find out what they need Which is where it should start From from the cooperative movement David Hammers states if we're not focused on building things that scale We're not building institutions that change society if we're not building institutions that change society We're not doing what we need to do at this historical moment in time So that's why we're both involved with Jutopia, which is like five people involved grander ideas and That has all kinds of big decisions to make and not all that much structure yet, so Secret plan to rule the world Build the web, you know for Jutopia's build a platform Serving sites for grassroots groups use the revenue to build make it the best platform and use that revenue to build a powerful communication network under democratic control, but you know, that's side project and there's lots of really exciting projects and Yeah, Mickey talks about the building blocks of freedom free software cooperative platform solidarity economy and personal power, but we'll Yeah, without personal power, none of this will work If you don't encourage other people to gain their personal power, they will not be putting in their vote They will be abstaining usually or like on the fringe of this So that's most important to encourage people to get their own personal power and to be able to use it And that takes a group effort. Yeah, so we see just intersections between Like our free software communities and all these other groups. They're working for a more just world and ultimately a more You know giving people more power for their own lives And this is a lot of exciting work in the solidarity economy too, but yes, we will go to questions Questions. Yes Sure. Yeah, it's being recorded So and we can't forget those without internet access too in this whole thing So we don't have time to talk about it, but please think that Hi, Wes from third and Grove. I'm just curious because some other open source projects have kind of a Commercial structure and then the open source version What are some of the pros and cons of that approach for an open source project? Yeah Revenue streams are really great But usually that that bifurcates Things so you essentially, you know have a commercial project that is not accountable to the community That's that's controlling things. So Yeah, what we're really talking about is how to have you know with the platform cooperatives is how to have a revenue stream that is accountable to the community and your Drupalus is I think it's better off in not having You know in that in that you could like take out the top 10 companies as big and concentrated as many mergers We know you could take out the top and companies and there's still be a huge Drupal ecosystem And that's a very very few projects of any kind that can say that So I think we actually benefit from the fact that it we didn't start with that model Dries was a PhD student Couldn't start a company for the first six years or so of Drupal and and we grew this huge ecosystem You know before there was Aquia so as much as you know some people outside Drupal think of aqua equal Drupal people in Drupal Don't really think of that because we we are familiar with it. And so Yeah, just real quickly, you know Drupal is this interesting thing and that's though that you know threes is You know it has control of the code and you know tries to separate that from his role at Aquia And again, I think he does that better than anybody Could but it's just not something that structurally you should have And then the Drupal association, you know, which you sort of think of as representing the community actually has sort of this narrow Charter to handle sort of the events and some of the infrastructure stuff and have no influence over the code So, you know, we sort of have like sort of a hole in In in sort of the heart of what we would have which where some other things would have a very similar split and that they'd have The Drupal association and then they just have a company basically that's making most decisions about the code And we have something that's sort of similar, but it's a little bit, you know, we We don't we keep it, you know conceptually separate, you know, it's not a company It's threes as an individual who then appoints the people who have a final say of the code. Yes, sorry What wanted to say, I really liked how you how you put it all together. Thanks Thank you. So beginning of the year I started to work for a company where we use holocracy, which is kind of similar Sociocracy but a license model What I really like is that With the consent over consensus approach, we can really take decisions fast and where where they matter Do you see us in the Drupal community being able to implement such practices or what would be your roadmap to Get better at those practices one of the things that we're doing in Boston is there's a wonderful group called Ujima The Ujima project is working to revitalize areas of town that have gone crazy and defunct And they're working with community members to actually rate the businesses as to whether they're good for the community or not Good for the community So this is a practice that should be put in place in every community where you are looking at are there extractive businesses Taking stuff out of the community or are they putting in so engaging with people who are not Drupal or anything nothing to do with Drupal but that are in your local government structure is extremely important Well, yeah the solidarity economy and so that we do trade we Do business with those that are doing good for the community and the extractive businesses we talked to them I do see that. Yeah, like Mickey said that some are better opportunities are probably outside of Drupal Mostly though, I think that you know, we don't have a lot of governance defined This is a do-walk or see moment where you know any individual Project within Drupal Can try to do that. So, you know with the Drotopia project we're building on Drupal 8 We're not forking the software, but we're trying to have a revenue model and the governance model that That allows for this. So I do think I think that the you know Yeah, I mean it makes sense. You don't expect something to just say well, I will go adopt this radical You know new approach, you know, even though like, you know Zappos does holocracy and stuff It's like it's not that radical, but it's still not done a lot. So there's not a lot of examples You know that people from Drupal's perspective can easily see and so, you know Why adopt something that's not tested it is sort of on us as the community to put into practice the things we want to see So I think that it's got to be from the ground up and we can start to do this in specific projects I mean, you know there's actually a lot of opportunity for this because like there's still a lot of unofficial infrastructure in Drupal a little less than historically, you know more is under the Drupal Association, but Like slack like all of that huge amount of community conversation that's going on is Completely outside the Drupal Association right now and the people who run the slacks are you know, you know, basically voluntarily trying to you know working with the community working group and working with all that too Which is again like in a weird space with the Not quite under the Drupal Association that thing which is again why we've proposed there is those proposed So anyhow, there's the Drupal governance issues link link from here and we'll we'll keep updating these with resources Since so yeah, please throw your mail in there if you want to keep getting updates. Trust us It'll be like every year and a half. We actually ever email anybody never happens But yeah, I do I do think there are there are opportunities and just quickly on sociocracy and holocracy Holocracy does yeah puts a few twists on sociocracy including putting a stronger emphasis on the organization So I actually do think holocracy might not in many case be a better fit for a company that has sort of a strong Specific mission and sociocracy might be a better option for communities that that you know is a bit more fractal Thank you for the question Great We're out time. Yes. So yeah, we are at time But any other questions, please come up. Thank you