Oh, my bestest of friends (and biggest co-designer by far for the co-opernation concept) is pretty entrenched in the nonprofit and charitable communities here and is very much on the ‘hippie’ side of things. She made sure I was VERY aware of those difficulties and concerns and spoke well as a champion of other perspectives (though she wasn’t alone). I just didn’t want to speak as much from that perspective because most of mine is second-hand. Similarly, I’ve had some RBE types and commune folks who made sure they were heard early on. We’ve had some awesome convos!
MOST of the issues you see in non-profits (and beyond to collectives and communes) actually are exactly the same as what you see when you’ve got a project team of any sort. You’ve got a ‘customer’, you’ve got people who have the pieces of the puzzle or access to those pieces, and generally there’s no ‘motivated by money’ stuff going around. In fact, in a lot of cases there is no customer at all, just a bunch of people trying to do something useful with no resources supporting their efforts, right?
The only thing that you’ll see that’s heavily skewed is that I’m strongly of the opinion that ‘doing good’ shouldn’t be something that people have to choose the path of poverty for. It’s a need just like anything else and just because there’s not some tangible financial benefit doesn’t mean that it’s not something people want and deserve.
That’s why there’s the three-way split between Worldminers, Peoplespheres, and Servants of Humanity in the design!
Nope, I haven’t seen it before. It seems really cool from an educational standpoint though, I think it properly defines the world as ‘a game of Monopoly where you’re stuck joining after all the properties have been bought’, except with much more context.
I do think it’s something to also incorporate between teams trying to accomplish goals, because sometimes starting at a disadvantage can inspire people to come up with really clever asymmetric solutions, right?
I think it also illustrates what we want to avoid. Dunbar’s Number is a nasty, nasty beast and it’s an unfair amount of work for people to have to overcome it, that’s why I’m such a fan of ‘start small and network’ rather than ‘be one big cohesive thing’. The big part is only to protect all the small parts IMHO.
We need to design our governments for who we really are, not who we pretend to be or want to be.
Agreed though this sort of game may play as most interesting and challenging when the disadvantaged groups organize in smaller, Dunbar-acceptable numbers.
Maybe @albill say whether the small group strategy is part of Dog Eat Dog?
It isn’t hard. You lose. Period. This is because the colonizing player, after each round, decided how well the colonized adhered to his or her conditions of colonization as determined by him or her. The colonized then abstract a rule for behavior from these decisions based on what is decided.
Oh yeah, I actually think that could be a really powerful approach!
Even if I have my druthers and nobody is ‘disadvantaged’, there’s still a big benefit to people essentially living/playing with ‘cheat codes’ to up their challenge and find new ways to do things, to prioritize differently and so on. I could see organizing competitions between people for exactly that sort of purpose.
Just so nobody’s stuck living in fear/doubt or trapped by a bad decision. Then we still get all the advantages but nobody has to be a ‘second class citizen’. I really want that concept to cease to exist.
For illustrative purposes and education, then that’s an excellent approach because it shows us how much it sucks to be at somebody else’s mercy, right? And it also could be situationally fun and useful in games that train communication/negotiation
But for real-world humans with real consequences, it’s a crappy way to be and nobody deserves that.
I served on the board for probably 3.5 of those years and was president for 1.5 (president as effective dictator). Let’s just say it was exhausting. Everyone either wants to abdicate decision making to perceived leaders or gets annoyed at dictatorial decisions by leaders (who are often working in a vacuum). Basically, it comes down to personality and the willingness to do work or motivate others to work.
Luckily, I’ve been off the board for a year and a half now (once I got the lease out of my name) and haven’t been president for two. I was pretty burned out by the end.
Another friend described the bulk of our socioeconomic systems as a really big, really awful LARP that gives all the advantages to the rules lawyers and the drama queens.
I have a hard time disagreeing, I think he nailed it.
Well, the viable and well-tested middle ground is ‘don’t treat leadership like it’s something that adds any more value than any other skill in your group, and let the groups self assemble’
That way you’re not denying the reality of humans organizing to perform tasks but you’re also not creating a scenario where leadership = power.
Valve’s been doing this for years, but we got exactly the same sort of instructions in my first Skunkworks project back in the 90s.
Doesn’t matter if you like it. You’re human (one assumes) and your behaviors and instincts are wired for group interaction and primate dominance behavior.
And then you find no one doing the work and no one directing anyone or a cult of charisma developing around one person.
Well, except in the long run, it always does. We might be equal but leaders always wind up being “more equal” in practice. I’ve never seen a working exception more than five years old.
Ever talk to anyone who has worked there? I have. It isn’t all roses. Aspiration is not reality.
Look into all the business writing around “holocracy” in the last two years. My work, at Mozilla, has debated this but decided not to even try something like that. It is problematic.
I personally don’t think trying to keep a group of people coherent for more than a couple of years is a terribly good idea, I’m more a fan of giving people options and letting them move about, and think that’s kind of mandatory for making any egalitarian society working.
There are real-world exceptions that manage to overcome that though, or at least ones that keep it from being the sort of problem that causes people to suffer (the Buid, the Semai, etc.)
Yup, I know a few, I haven’t heard ‘our org structure’ or ‘our management’ as a complaint though.
Nothing’s all it’s cracked up to be, but we’re talking in the context of the current list of options we have (which includes top-down hierarchical structures). Each has it’s advantages and disadvantages.
I’m not saying that imposing one or the other is what should be done though, in fact I’m saying exactly the opposite of that.
I’m saying that people should choose their entire context and that context should include their organizational structure and they should be able to change their mind periodically (semi-annually at least) We all work better in different systems and we all change over time. It’s part of the human condition.
Then you can’t build institutions or groups that do things on a decades (or centuries) long timetable. Short term work only.
Are you speaking of paid work here, social clubs, NGOs?
I don’t get to change my work organization periodically since I have limited venues for who will pay me for what I want to do. I have to conform to their structure (or leave) unless I rise internally to such a position where I can change the organization, which runs the risk of just being co-opted on the way anyway. This is assuming that I want to get paid.
Sure you can, that’s a design consideration, but that’s more for below.
I’m talking about the creation of something new that has those capacities, that’s the bulk of the convo that @hello_friends and I have been having here.
So, that in mind, imagine that as an option. A corporation designed to be an effective civilization with the scientific method on top (so we’re defining by results rather than by a set of rules).
Inside that corporation, people still have jobs to do, but instead of being just sent home after they’re done to Detroit or Somalia or whatever they have a degree of ownership over their campus, to as extreme a degree as is possible.
By design, the intent is to stop pretending Dunbar’s Number doesn’t exist and isn’t an issue, and instead to embrace it and when possible take advantage of it.
And no, not my idea, but I’m good at shredding other people’s ideas and while I’ve found some areas that needed fleshing out as a framework it’s vastly superior to what we have as a ‘democracy of choice’ and would work very well for a large number of us. It wouldn’t be optimal for everyone (more refugees than a lot of typical Americans actually) but that’s kind of the point.
Here’s a VERY rough draft and incomplete version of a hopefully NOT TL;DR take here. It’s obviously got lots of components and I haven’t been bothering to try to post all the details of something that has barely been read (butI have been responsible in my thinking design-wise, I’m not big on ego and like finding out I screwed something up) and was just going to do it myself. I’ve taken stabs at it elsewhere like here … but to be honest while complex systems has always been my thing and I’ve got several years of design and research on this, I’m crap at explaining and I was focusing my efforts on just doing it instead (I already have one small business starting point staging up)
At the very least, I do think this deserves a chance in the realm of ideas, especially considering what the competition is.
So what happens when you decide you don’t like the corporation’s mission or direction anymore?
By conjoining all social interaction and where you live with a single entity and its goals, you put people in the place where if they decide they don’t like the mission or goals anymore they have to leave their homes and sever all social ties, right?
The positive side of our non-communal way of living right now is that if I change jobs tomorrow, I don’t have to sell my house, move, and get all new friends.
I’ll go read your Medium piece. I’ve had it buried in a tab.
She made sure I was VERY aware of those difficulties and concerns and spoke well as a champion of other perspectives (though she wasn’t alone). I just didn’t want to speak as much from that perspective because most of mine is second-hand. Similarly, I’ve had some RBE types and commune folks who made sure they were heard early on. We’ve had some awesome convos!
