 Back today everyone, welcome to the other edition of our Tuesday luncheon series. Just a couple of brief announcements before we get right on into it. So first and foremost, next week we are following Tuesday's luncheon with a Benjamin Klein affiliate, Kendra Albert, who will discuss how, I guess, introducing legal terms of art in votes for their ways, but often in the first rule law, known as legal talismans, impact online platforms. Now we can move beyond legalities, this seems that I'm not considering all users to be more inclusive in that way. So I want to message that they be there at the same time, same space here at 12 next week, Tuesday. And also it's important to note that these luncheons are live webcasts and are available to the public. So if you have something that you don't quite want to be mentioned, well, you can figure that. And at this moment I will introduce you all to LV Bill. Are you moderated exactly? Hi everyone. Well, I'm very happy to be introducing Samer Hassan, who is a Berkman Klein fellow, like myself. He's also a PhD and professor at the Universidad de Complutense in Madrid, Spain. And just to give a little small introduction, I have known Samer for about a year now. And I just have to say that he's one of the most thoughtful and generous teachers that I've come across who can really teach about technology in a way that is giving and that helps you understand it from wherever you are. And I think it's incredibly valuable and a wonderful quality to have in our community. He works on communities usually decentralized that are working together to build technology that can help increase knowledge and solve problems. And he's going to talk with us today about how that actually works. It's an art and a science and it's never so simple as just crowdsource it or just throw a bunch of people in a room and they'll figure it out. It's tough. So he's going to talk to us about some of those challenges and solutions and then we'll have a conversation. Thanks so much, Larry. So thanks everybody for coming. Before starting, I want to acknowledge that this research has been done under the frame of the European funded project peer-to-peer value, where several Bergman claim fellows actually have participated already. And the project deals with communities related to the commons. I guess many of you would be familiar with the concept. We know the commons like open accessible resources that are available to everyone or to at least our community whose ownership is shared across multiple people. We can think about very quickly about digital commons, such as Wikipedia, but we can think about culture, music, of nature. And there are communities that generate or nurture or maintain these commons. Typically we coin this concept of commons-based production. We can very quickly think of open source software as collaborative communities that get together and build software that with an open license belongs to everyone. Or Wikipedia where many people follow a similar process to build an encyclopedia. But there are many others that are less known. We can do the same process to build a map like in a state map or electronics like in Arduino. But we can also think about physical spaces that belong to the community that would be more than urban commons. And that a community nurtures and maintains and self-manages like in a fab lab where people collaborate together to build stuff. And it's in one of these spaces I want to tell a small personal story. A few years ago I was living in Madrid, my hometown in Spain. And there we have Tabacalera. It's a fantastic space, 3,000 square meters or less, where a lot of things are happening all the time. It's a very vibrant community. We have theater but also a community garden. We have a fab lab, we have a hack lab. People experiment there. It's very volunteer driven. It belonged to the Ministry of Culture but it was leased to the community, to the neighborhood. And through a friend I knew the space and started going there and collaborating slowly more and more. And very quickly became addicted to it. And I started going to meetings weekly in that space, joined several commissions, assemblies. I got more and more engaged in this community. Until of course conflicts started to appear because every time that we put a lot of humans together to collaborate and organize, there are disagreements, there are conflicts, this is natural, it happens all the time. Some are smaller than others, but they happen and more or less I could manage somehow. I facilitated and mediated in some of them. You know, I was very involved, it was not, but I mean, I move forward. And my initial passion drove me to assume more and more responsibilities in this space. And I would get more and more concerned with whatever happens in Telakalera. And slowly I would grow anxious with whatever is happening in the space. Or we have another conflict and this is tiring and this is frustrating. Or why people are not participating enough? We should all participate much more and this is so frustrating because we are killing ourselves here and still people don't participate. What's going on with these guys? Whatever. And eventually got burned out. After two years and a half of being very, very involved, I was like sick of it. I had to move away and like other friends before me, I stopped being that involved in the community. Probably you have heard this story before. Probably you have experienced it personally or some friends that have. This is very common in volunteer-run communities that are managing some kind of peer-produced or distributed organization. Because these communities are not uniformly distributed. The workload or the time and effort that everyone puts is not the same. It varies. It's unequal. It's an unequal distribution. The network that we create in these communities is more similar to that network behind me. There are some nodes that are more central than others. There are some people that are investing a lot of effort and time and others that still have a lot of value but are more peripheral in the community. So whenever we have issues and one of these central nodes leaves, it can be because a person is burned out, but it can also be because I'm changing country or because I'm starting a family or because of any reason I stop collaborating. And this person has a lot of connections or a lot of knowledge of the community. And it can threaten the sustainability of the community. It can actually be dangerous for the resilience of the community when these things happen. Our research shows that these communities have very low rotation rates. There are no mechanisms for rotation. So when I'm tired, a formal mechanism that would be prepared for when this happens for another person to take my role. Also, we know that these people that are core pushers, core contributors, we know that they want to delegate. They are overwhelmed with this stuff. So they want to delegate. But at the same time, it's difficult to delegate because you have a very clear vision of what the community should become according to you. So when you try to delegate, the others will not do it exactly the same way that you would. Especially if you're a perfectionist, it's like you would do it better. And even when you want to, many people that would love to contribute, they are sometimes confused, sometimes lost. They don't know exactly how to contribute. They don't know how to participate. So it's complicated. This happens because these communities follow one 990 distribution. We call it the power law in the distribution of workload, of effort. So we have a few people that are core contributors that are pushing forward the community. We call it the 1%, the core. We have a 9% of occasional contributors that are sometimes collaborating, but not as engaged. They might be comfortable there. It's not that they are wanting to become ones. They might not. And there are a 90% of people that are more users. They don't need to be passive because they can be talking about it. They can be tweeting about it. They can be pushing other people to collaborate or even doing very small things themselves, but really anything. They are not creating content. And the percentages don't need to be exactly like that. It's just a pneumotechnic rule, but frequently it follows this power law, this distribution of effort. There is plenty of research in peer production. We have a lot of good social research that is studying these communities. We know we have typologies. We have understood these roles and the revolution over time in online communities, in online-of-line communities. This actually is very studied. However, most of the social research is not focusing on doing interventions. It's not focusing on improving or working on improving the challenges that these communities are facing. It's not a saliva thing, although in peer-to-peer value we wanted to do social research that does help with the challenges that we detect. We wanted to intervene and build some kind of solutions to those challenges detected. So how could we do that? We decided to use a methodology, Lean Development, that probably some of you are familiar with. It's called Lean Startup or Lean UX or Lean Design. It has whatever, Lean. This is very common across startups nowadays. Silicon Valley is full of Lean experts, whatever. The idea here is to do some kind of social research typically much more informal than what we would be used to. And in a lean way, in a fast way. Why? Because typically we would build a staff with putting a lot of effort, a lot of time, a lot of investment in building something, and after it fails. So before reaching to the point that it will fail, if it's going to fail, let's know it as soon as possible. So we try to test ideas very, very quickly. We do some research, quick prototype, we test the idea with people, and if it doesn't work, we move on. Again and again and again. It's a very hypothesis-driven cycle in which you have some hypotheses, you design an experiment, you test, you get some insights, and you generate new hypotheses. It's agile and iterative and incremental cycle in which the idea is to reduce waste, like not build things that people do not want. Focus on what the people need. What I just described, the idea is fail fast, fail cheap, fail often. So with the sequence of failures, eventually you reach something that has some value for the target. What I just described is basically a scientific method. Hypothesis, design experiments, tests, insights. Social researchers, their tests would be to go to do fieldwork, to do interviews, to do a survey. Here they would do some of that, but they would also do, we would also do a paper prototype, for example, and take it to a community or a more complex prototype with some designs and take it to the community and test it and see if it resonates, if it works. It's very common that lean developers that are very commonly not experienced social researchers, they would do something very informal, try it out. It's not as solid as the social research that social researchers, professional academics, have. But it does focus on, it's very pragmatic and it focuses on the needs of the target. And there are many ways of trying to learn what are the needs of the target that you are studying and that you want to reduce something for them. So that's what we did and we did workshops. There are like design thinking techniques or user-centered design techniques or trying to extract this knowledge, this collective intelligence from the communities that we were studying. We used a lot of posits. We used, but also surveys and interviews, not only workshops. We tried to understand their needs, their gains, their pains of their internal processes until we eventually characterized the roles that we had. The one nine and ninety that we talked before, we tried to extract more knowledge from these roles to understand what are their needs of these roles. So we would encourage you to think of a community that you have participated in and your role within it. For instance, in the baccalaureate I belonged to the one percent. It was very clear I was a core contributor pushing with a lot of commitment, a lot of hours every week invested in this community. In Wikipedia I have been a nine percent an occasional contributor for already six or seven years. It's not that I am a core contributor in Wikipedia. I'm not spending hours every week at all. Just from time to time, when I'm reading an article and I see something that can be improved, I edit it and I improve it and I save it. Very occasionally, sometimes I spend months without contributing, sometimes I contribute frequently. And especially, I belong to a ninety percent of many communities. For example, I'm a user of Firefox. I might encourage people to use Firefox. I may talk about it, but I am definitely not contributing to develop its code. I'm not creating Firefox. So I belong to the ninety percent. And let's say consuming the resource. The same would, I could say it from my internet movie database. There is a lot of people, a vibrant community working there, but I am not one of them. I would belong to the ninety percent of the community of IMDB. Or WikiHow, like the one I mentioned before. So how can we characterize these needs of these three roles? We can think of the one percent. And they, as I was saying before, they want to delegate and share some responsibilities. But it's actually a bit difficult to do that for them. They want to ensure that things are done the right way, according to their vision. Right is something very subjective, that they strongly believe in. And they are concerned about the community in a macro way, like they are concerned about its sustainability. The nine percent, the occasional contributors, they want to help others. They want to help the community move forward. And sometimes they want to lead their own initiatives within their communities. But at the same time they want recognition for what they are doing. They want their reputation to reflect their contribution that they are doing. Because typically the one percent is very visible. They are the core. They are, let's say, popular or famous across the community, but not necessarily the ones in the nine percent. And the nineties, these users or visitors or audience, they want to check if their values are aligned with those in the community, and typically explore what's going on. Maybe just to consume it, but also some of them might want to be aware of how to get started if they wanted to contribute a bit. They are pretty lost from the perspective of the contributors. They are far from them, typically. So thinking about that, we thought, okay, if we can smooth this curve, we know that the power law happens. But what if we could push more users to contribute occasionally and more occasional contributors to push forward their own initiatives? Then we would reduce the frustration of not contributing enough, and at the same time the frustration of the people are not doing enough. So we would reduce these feelings of frustration and guilt. We would reduce the dependency of the few, distribute a bit more the workload, and hopefully to increase the sustainability of these communities. It's basically a problem of participation. To increase the participation within these communities. So with this aim, we decided, okay, let's diverge. Let's explore the space of possible solutions now that we have characterized properly these roles. And typically the startup would do this very fast because they don't have time. Basically, their money will run out in X months. We didn't have that problem, so we could explore properly the space. And for example, we would see that the 1% are absolutely consumed by communication. They are sick of so many meetings all the time. There are so many emails, right? I'm sure this is familiar to many of you. And they would want accessible and concise communication. So we tried with a prototype that is a dashboard of the community where they can see if there are new people active this week with a metaphor of a plant reflecting the health of the community. We tried to play with that. Or for example, with the 90%, we saw that they want the reputation from their contributions. They want to feel valued within the community. So we did a small prototype of a thanks app. So people could thanks each other the contributions that they are having to see how this plays out. And we would take it to good communities and experiment with them and see their reactions and write it down. Kind of interviews guided with prototypes. We tried too much needs from different roles. For example, we know that the 1% doesn't want to explain again and again the same things, but also they would want to help people that are stuck. And the 9s, the vocational contributors, they would want to learn some things. So we created a quick prototype in which it would have some explanations that someone that wants to do something very pragmatic, very driven by the learning by doing, let's say. So someone could learn from it and chat directly with the proposer of this group in order to solve doubts or whatever. We tried, for example, too much 9s with 90s. So the 9s are concerned with the community to be more inclusive and the 90s are lost and they want to find information. So we did a small prototype for welcoming participants. So it's smooth for the newcomers to arrive and to meet someone depending on their interest. Okay, we explored a lot. We work on this and other prototypes. Time to converge after one year of exploration. So we developed what today we call team. In team, we tried to build an app for communities for the three roles. So for example, people in the 1%, we know that they want to share responsibilities, as we said before, and they want people to know what needs to be done and to know how to do things so they don't need to explain again and again the same thing. So we facilitate in team to share a photo of whatever you are working on in your small group or whatever and put some information about this, how to start contributing in that context. How to start like the first steps to move on, right? To move forward there. Writing a bit of the vision and a bit of how you're going to move forward. So the 9s that they want to collaborate, they want to have a meaningful contribution and at the same time they are a bit insecure on how to participate. We have each of these projects that have a very clear way of starting. We have some tasks, some clear actual needs that this group has. So there is a very pragmatic way of approaching the collective and contributing in this specific way. So for example, I want to contribute, I don't know how. I see that there is a task, they need a new logo. I'm a designer, okay, I don't know how this works but I know how to make a logo. I can contribute there. Or they need a space, okay, I know how to deal with that. The 9s are typically inspired by some of the core contributors so they would be able to see a profile of contributors there, see in which projects are they working and even contact them and have some interaction. It's very easy for them to lead their own initiative so the same process that one did of creating a group, an organizational organizer can also do it. So if they are pushing their own initiative they basically are taking away load from the 1% so they are not the ones that have to constantly do it. At the same time, we have the 90s that they are lost. They don't know what's going on or how to get started. So we gave them a very quick way of exploring the community through a gallery of images of this community and each image is a group that you can get in and see how to start contributing. So trying to reduce the barriers for participation. This is a website, an app that is currently working. If you want to try it out, this would be the URL. There is an Android app also, whatever. And even though it's very driven by research, we can communicate it as one. Community space run by volunteers can be beautiful because people are always trying to help. Hi, how can I help? Well, what are you interested in? I don't know. What's going on here? There's so many things. Getting involved is more than waiting around or doing tasks. It's sharing a vision for a space. That's why we built Team, a visual way to get people involved. Team helps everyone see the big picture, all of the projects happening in one place. Organizers can post photos of projects, making it easy for new people to join. You can also add details, to-dos, and links to documents or other tools for the job and spread the word. And because anyone can become an organizer, Team makes it easy to start a new project too. Team helps organizers sustain and grow their community space. From do it yourself to do it together. Use Team with your community and show people how you grow. So, could Team be useful in a context, you know? If that's the case, I would be interested to know. And also, how could we generate new outcomes from the research that we are doing? Maybe not for building software necessarily, but to have an outcome that affects or intervenes in some way in the community or in the target that you are studying. It might be in the form of policy. It might be in the form of recommendations. But I would like to trigger somehow that discussion. And that's it. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Summer. I'm going to do that thing where I ask the first question. Please do. I'm really curious. So, I think almost everybody here knows Global Voices, which is a big decentralized community of bloggers that I work with. And I'm in the core team of Global Voices, so I'm at 1% only in that sense. And so, watching, hearing you talk about this stuff over the last year and watching the presentation is super interesting because I can apply it very precisely to my own community and work. One of the questions that comes to mind for me is the question about vision and what happens to a community over time? Because a vision and an ethos, a mission, those kinds of things that bring people together, often in a general or more abstract way, people really do feel they belong together to do this thing. But over time, the particulars of what that really means and what kinds of activities it should drive us to do together can change. And sort of thinking about this structure, I guess, I wonder how do you work with the 1,990 or to improve that, you know, to make the line look a little bit more like it did on that graph that you showed so that the vision can evolve over time. And like what happens when people come into the, you know, make their way into the 9% and they really care about some part of it and they're doing a really good job. But then there's other pieces that kind of get lost or people start to, you know, leadership doesn't necessarily mean that the vision stays as it was. So do you get what I'm saying? Does that make sense? Okay, it's a very good question, not easy to answer. In social movements theory, there is something called the, I don't remember exactly the concept, I think it was like the founder crisis in which a collective typically after some time has a crisis in which the group is evolving further than what the founders had in mind, founder or founders, so there is typically a crisis in which either the founder adapts or the founder leaves, mostly, or the collective collapses. There are like, in open source software, this is typically solved with a fork, like a division split in the community in which some people would continue in that direction, others are continuing in that direction whereas the threat of the forks, of having a fork, pushes the community to keep a consensus, right? A bottom-up dynamic consensus of, okay, let's push it this direction so the community doesn't split and stuff like that. So of course there are top-down and bottom-up processes going on there, but definitely in this kind of communities, if the community is not agreeing somehow on parts of the vision, probably this would naturally evolve to dropping those parts unless there is way of re-adapting the vision collectively and there are dynamics for that, there are actually processes to rebuild the vision of a collective that is coming apart. So I don't know if it's helpful, but it's a challenging moment, definitely. I mean, typically starting one of these processes would help because when you actually do the effort on working on the vision thing, you realize that maybe I'm not putting effort here in the practice, but this I also value it and your actions may change after this process. Hi, Summer, thank you so much. That was great. Can you talk to us a bit about, in more detail about your experiments and particularly about the data you got? For example, did certain platform changes that you made effectively, did some of these techniques move people from the 90% into the nine and from the nine into the one? Did you find that some were more effective than others? I imagine there's a lot to say about that, but the more, the better. We have done research that has been mostly qualitative, so small scale, and we have evidence that, for example, some people in the 90s, if you give them tasks that are quite simple, they would actually start contributing. We have some evidence of that, and we have evidence of people that they are not very engaged, but they would want to push this initiative that they are feeling very personal, and they would actually, if it's facilitated, they would trigger participation. But this is evidence that we are collecting from interviews, from the prototype testing, is not that the app, we have been running it for already one year, and I can tell you, oh yes, this triggered 50% of the people here to move in that direction, because we don't have a still data. I don't know if it's useful. In a lot of the communities I'm thinking of, in this 190-90 model, the big difference between ones and nines is that ones are often getting paid, and so just thinking about the ways that we might be able to create a different structure if it's 5, 15, 80 or whatever that is, I'm just wondering if you thought at all about how the nature of a, for instance, like a non-profit organization, how this might affect employment strategies or just sort of the dynamics between a core team that might be getting paid versus volunteers, and how this might be able to create more of a fluid dynamic in which people can more easily move from volunteer into paid work or even the other way, so any thoughts you have on that? The economic sustainability of these communities is very challenging. Many of them, there is no people getting paid at all. In others, there would be more umbrella communities in which a core is pushing, it's facilitating the umbrella in which you would see different communities within it and each of them with a 190, and this is a common pattern. The 1% of the umbrella, let's say, is paid, but the 1% of the small communities are not paid, they are fully continued, and their role is very appreciated by the community. In smaller projects, the fact that some are paid and some are not, it happens, although sometimes it creates a lot of tension, because especially if some of the 1% is paid and some of the 1% is not, it's like, well, then I stop contributing if I'm not getting paid, right? And then it's disrupting the collaborative feeling of this. Because I'm not doing it anymore for this, I am in my free time because I'm passionate and whatever, but if I can live from this, I want to live from this, and if not, then I will stop contributing, right? So it disrupts. To introduce money sometimes it disrupts, so it has to be very well communicated, very well acknowledged, and it's complicated. Still, there are nice efforts in which money is distributed, not concentrated so much on the 1%, but value is distributed somehow. There are some experiments around that, I'm actually very interested in the economic sustainability of these communities, and how can we distribute value so it reaches not only the one, but also contributes from the nines and even farther. But it's definitely an open question. Hi, Summer. I very much enjoyed the talk, and one of the things that I was thinking about is in relation to the 1% versus or working with the 9%, in my own experience, I've sort of realized I think there might be these like two buckets of issues, and I think one bucket that you've probably seen is the project management knowledge transfer that you talked about in your presentation and making sure everybody's on the same page and knowing what you want. And then I think there's also something around like authority issues where people in the 9% might not feel like they are empowered to make certain decisions or do certain things. And so I was just curious how you feel that mix kind of plays out in getting a 9% person. Do they usually feel like it's more of a knowledge problem or more of an authority problem? Or is it like different in each scenario? What have you found in that area? I think both are true. Like we were seeing one of the characteristics of the 9% are insecure contributing. They might be insecure because how will I lead an initiative? I don't know enough, right? I don't have the authority. I don't have the reputation for that. And at the same time, they might not know enough and they would feel they would also frequently as the 1,990 structure is not a model that contributors of the communities have in their heads. So they would feel guilty for not contributing as much as that person. And a lot of nasty feelings are going around all the time, right? Because I should know more of the internal critics of each person. I should know more. I should engage more. I should be more brave and push this forward. But how I can if I don't have such an authority or such a reputation or such a whatever. I think both are barriers for contributing more and typically leaving, I mean, very clear the rules of how anyone can lead and horizontalizing, let's say, the process would help them to get more empowered. Also in more offline scenarios, the typical trainings for empowering them to learning how to facilitate or to learning how to push forward the communities or to whatever. This usually helps, right? So it's to reduce the barrier of knowledge, typically. Also giving them reputation, it's giving them some authority over what they are doing. What's your opinion on mentorship programs? Like you got the most well-repti, the guy that has the most kind of knowledge or is the leader of such community, and you get them to mentor some volunteers or people that are trying to get in the quote but they don't have the facility to actually get into that knowledge. What do you say about mentorship, like bare mentorship or something like that? I don't have much data from that. I don't think we have tested mentorship as such. Still, I would see it as a positive way of breaking this barrier of participation, right? Not necessarily always the founder with someone because it would be like very slow. But it's typical, for example, in Lean, per programming, like two people, one knows more than the other, and they would pair and program together. Not necessarily one knowing everything and the other one not knowing anything, but actually pairing people to do stuff. And this actually works, this actually works pretty good. I'm asking because I observed the Ethereum community since the beginning. I think that the most open-source software communities work like that. Some guy with more knowledge tries to mentorship someone that is his friend or something like this, but as a program to foster the collaboration of different people like women or trans people or something like this, I've never seen such efforts of the communities itself with grads. I'm not understanding, sorry. Global Voices actually has done something that's like what you're talking about, well, developing more of a program. It's not just this sort of casual, like, hey, come on, young friend, but actually something a little bit more structured. We've done, I think, several different approaches to trying to usually make just pairs of people or small groups around an issue or an interest that cuts across regions. And it has worked to varying degrees, but I think that the structure was really important because, like, you know, social skills and I hate to put it this way, but popularity are factors in these, you know, when you have a loose structure where there isn't a boss that says, okay, you're gonna do this and you're gonna do this, it does, these organic relationships form and that is really beautiful. There are also people who are shy and to have somebody come along and say, here, you two are gonna be partners can be incredibly helpful. And I think we actually ended up finding that with having a specific output or a specific project that people were gonna do together as buddies, is the term that we're using right now, that that was really helpful too. So people were kind of interviewing each other about some common thing that they had and then putting together a story or a video for the community blog and it became, we do it, we do stuff like this, approaching our summit which is when everybody actually comes together to meet and it's really helped keep people from silwing off into their regions or into their linguistic groups. But be happy to talk more about it at a later time. Thank you. I want to know what happened with the people who doesn't use like social, technology, the older people, how did you include them in this project? So we were aware of that very early in the project that we have several case study communities and we would very quickly realize that it's impossible to bring everybody to use the app. Okay, it's fine, then we design it, giving for granted that not everybody will be there and not all the tasks will be there and not all the reputation will be there and it's perfectly fine, we just design around it. And it still can contribute a lot even if part of the community is using it. The same way as if you are in a collective that is using a mailing list and you don't use the mailing list, you just, people tell you, you will know what's going on in the mailing list even if you are not using it or a group, a chatting group, a WhatsApp group or whatever, right? So yeah, it's not trying to push a community that is working in the online of line to be purely online or something like that, not at all. We are very aware of this controversial relationship between the online and the offline, not only because of elderly, people that are more reluctant to technology or that are clumsier or that are just not interested, right? How do you keep meannesses from the possibility of mean, people being mean, bullying the 1% to the 90% or to 9% and how might you prevent that? Or does that mean it's got to happen online particularly but is there a way that the platform works with that? This is very challenging, online harassment or offline harassment happens a lot. We are not dealing with it right now. It's not that the community has, it's not that we have so many users that we are having this problem, right? So it's, we are still not working there. There is very interesting research there. I would, if you are interested, I would check what Nathan Matias is doing from the, it's another Berkman Plain Fellow and I would refer to him because he has researched a fantastic job in this arena. So you basically use this research to identify the needs of a community and build a tool that fits again the needs of this group that has different roles and such, which I think it's great. The question is, is the tool creating some kind of output in an ongoing basis from which maybe that same group can learn? And if you have some examples of that, I think, you know, sometimes, you know, a tool doesn't fit the needs of everyone but if it's producing some kind of output from which we can learn, then it becomes also very, very interesting. Sorry. So, sorry. The groups in the community, they have kind of an etherpad or Google Docs-ish document. It's not Google, of course, where they can generate content and it's, by default, it's public, although the idea is that you can do private groups also, but by default, it's public, so anyone can go and see what the communities are generating, what are the groups are generating, and you can even check what others are generating in order for you to do something similar. So even if you're not using the tool, it's generating content that, by default, is open-licensed and that others can use and reuse. So we hope that this, peer-produced small-scale content, let's say. I don't know if you refer to that or you refer to some kind of external outcome. Outside of the tool? I think it's mainly data that can be used by that 1%. They want to learn from how the community is using this, how can the community be organizing a different kind of way and kind of improve. So, I mean, yeah, if you're producing that kind of output, I think it's going to impact the overall community, but mainly the user would be that 1% that is devoted enough to kind of organize and structure the organization. So right now, the tool is focused on attracting newcomers, so the main output would be that the 1% would see how people are participating, more people are joining the group. So it's a, we call it a visual way to engage new participants, to engage newcomers, right? This would be the main output, the main outcome for the 1%. We are not generating stats or a dashboard to see that we are not right now. We have experimented with some of that and right now we have frozen that branch to try to explore this one. Hi, I wanted to go back maybe to something that we were touching on a little bit earlier with some of the questions about the internal power dynamics. And I was really active in the Independence Media Center movement for a while, right? And so I ended up writing about it a little bit. And we talked a lot about that concept of the tyranny of structuralistness, right? And the focus was on consensus and how do you kind of decentralize these decision-making processes. But it was always a really difficult, difficult struggle and sometimes I think maybe overly emphasized in some way, even though I think that it was a huge part of the process and was really important. And the reason I was asking it, because I wanted to find out how much of that has come up with what you've been working with and the groups you've been working with and studying it also, kind of this question about how the 1% say, or the core, the most active have a disproportionate amount of power and a stronger voice in these collectives. And that has a good and a bad side. On one hand, they're the most invested and maybe vested in putting the time in but how that affects the other kind of dynamics. So I guess a long way of asking, if you could say a little bit more about your sense around the internal power dynamics. So, okay, the tyranny of structuralistness, it's about how the power dynamics, if you are not challenging them, channeling them in a moment that there are no structural and very low rules, then gender dynamics or issues with race or with people just having more authority speaking or whatever, you would have a lot of inequality and power dynamics going there that you wouldn't have in a formal context where everything is regulated, there is a lot of structure, but whatever. So, we were taking that into account when in our tests, for example, we, in a moment that we were exploring the rewards like the thanks app that we developed, we tried first with medals and we saw that there was a deep gender bias there so we immediately discarded medals and started working with thanks because they didn't have this gender bias. So, we are taking into account these issues of being inclusive with multiple groups in the design of the app. I forgot the second part of the question. Can you? Yeah, with all this kind of general question around the power dynamics. Carry on. Ah, yeah, yeah. The power of the one percent. That was the second part, exactly. So, it's true that the one percent holds more power naturally in the community and we are, without telling them, we are smoothing it a bit because anyone can push new initiatives. So, if one nine creates an initiative and brings traction like others joined there without the one percent collaborating, they are pushing forward the community in another direction which that the one might be agreeing or not but as long as the community is agreeing this is moving forward, right? So, it's not asking for the authority of anyone to be able to lead new initiatives, new groups within the frame of the community. I don't know if it's... Yeah, no, I was just saying, it's kind of like the structure, the power of the structure like that and it's having a structure that doesn't get static. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And that creates, that shifts, inherently shifts the power dynamic. That's the thing. So, it's constantly evolving and dynamic. Do you mind if I ask a question that kind of relates to that? There's sort of, seems like there's a layer of this that kind of asks us to distinguish or to think about people versus systems or not versus not in this way but just like something that we experience a lot is that type of activity will be very built and oriented and run around a specific person or a pair of people who came up with the idea and who really inspired it and everybody's like, this is really us. We really feel like this is us carrying forth our vision. And then that person has a baby or leaves or something happens and suddenly we feel lost. And the reason, I think, is that it was kind of about that person and we never built a system or we never documented what they were doing. And sometimes that's okay or we can fix it or try to put it together but interestingly, we often have resistance to building systems. There's this like, no, just let it happen. Which is beautiful. But I guess I wonder, I don't know, I just wonder if you could just comment on that that kind of tension between structure and this organic growth that is beautiful but maybe fleeting. Yeah, I mean, what I would say is that collective intelligence works and at the same time it has to be guided a bit or facilitated in some way. So we have to take care of the processors in which it is happening and we design them in a way that is resilient to problems that may come in the future. That's what we are trying to do with when designing apps, like trying to build things that, for example, self-document because no one documents, it's boring, right? Or trying to do things that the knowledge is there if you want to come back later because the person that was pushing is not anymore here, right? So things that would do the things that people don't do for maintenance, you know? So do them, facilitate things that work in an automatic way or semi-automatic way so the sustainability of the group is guaranteed beyond these 1% lives, right? So I may be asking a question that was asked before but in different terms, so I'll just do it anyway. So have you tried to implement this method in an organization that has really been around for a long time and where you actually have generational issues? You know, it's like the statement about the acceptance of new scientific paradigms one funeral after the other and in the organization that I'm thinking of that I'm involved in, it's really coming down to that. You know, these people are going to be there until they die and I had somebody say in a meeting on climate last night I want to be able to work with people where we don't have to discuss because all I have to do is look into your eyes and both know what the other wants. Well, that takes, that's almost a marriage of 20 years or 40 years, you know, so I mean I don't think we will ever get there. So I just wondered what your thoughts were on that matter. In general, such mature communities have very, I mean, their processors have gone a lot of work already. They are very smooth and they don't want to change it. So to introduce a tool there, it's very, very difficult. I mean, at least in our experience typically we work with younger communities because they are much more open to change. You know, I would agree that the governance structure is very smooth because they've been at it for a very long time. But it's not particularly effective and the organization is losing members and they're troubled by that. And they definitely want those of us who are sort of skirting the 9% now or maybe into the 9% to take on more responsibility but they want us to do more. But when it comes to a question that I would like to handle it this way, there's a lot of resistance. So I was thinking all the time you were speaking how could we implement this approach in this sort of quasi-religious organization that I'm participating in. Yeah, it's just that they have, let's say, 20 years of experience that this works. But maybe it has been working for them in a previous generation and now when you are trying to bring new commerce to the same frame of mind, it doesn't work. And it should adapt, but it's very difficult to adapt. It's really very difficult, especially if we are talking about generational change, right? It's like a whole set of new issues. I'm curious whether there is a certain personality type that makes up the 1% and when you talked about the 1% being tired of having to explain the same thing over and over again. Sorry about that. We'll stop before I get around to turning it off. So do the 1% have the patience to sit down and document these things in detail? Or are they just tired of re-explaining them? But maybe they're extrovert and they don't like to sit down and write documentation. It's very difficult to generalize. Also because I wouldn't catalog it as there are people that are 1%, there are people that are 90s. Typically, as I was saying before, I myself am 1% in some communities, 90 in others, 90s in most of them actually. So the fact that I'm a 90 in Internet Movie Database doesn't mean that I am a passive person, that I don't take the initiative and that I am oblivious to any all the work that they are doing and I don't want to get involved. Or the fact that I am 1% in another place doesn't mean that I'm a person that I'm pushing forward, extremely passionate and whatever other. So I wouldn't put up a personality type. Definitely there are people that are more willing to push forward and to take the initiative. There are others that are more comfortable not pushing the initiative and not taking initiative from following along. But with appropriate empowerment and education or training or whatever, anyone can push forward initiative. That's right. I wouldn't say, oh no, the 1%, I'm talking about roles, not so much about people. When you are filling the role of the 1% in this community, then you are filling the need of the community to be sustainable. But you also are overwhelmed with work so you want to delegate. So it's much more about roles than about types of people. In that way, I mean, in some communities the 1% would be very willing to document in others. They would not, right? Yeah, my question was just if you could say a little bit more a little bit about how newcomers to a system like this come to understand the values of the community. If the hypothesis is just like by seeing an overview of projects and by seeing small ways that they can get involved that somehow that leads to them understanding the values or if you have like more thoughts about how that happens exactly. We have experimented several ways of doing that. Right now it's basically seeing what's going on you would extract it from what's going on. Previous versions of the tool were for example crowdsourcing the support that different projects are receiving. So on the top you would see the ones that are receiving more support in the bottom you would see the ones that are receiving least support. So the vision is crowdsourced because you would see which are the projects that are driving forward the community. So a newcomer would see and even a person can start a project see that people are not following that it's okay this doesn't fall within the frame of this community which is perfectly fine and it's better that I know it early because maybe this is not my community and it should be totally fine. Wonderful conversation.