Hello CoSocial Readers! Looking forward to our session this week. See below for agenda, including some questions for reflection and possible discussion.
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Introductions (10 minutes)
Discussion (60 minutes)
Initial thoughts or impressions of these chapters?
4. Governable Stacks, Organizing against Digital Colonialism
Schneider defines Governable stacks as the continuous design of layered and interconnected infrastructure and practices that enable self-governance, central to resistance against digital colonialism.
What do you think of this strategy? How can pursuing this strategy be expected to benefit individuals/groups/organizations?
Modular politics is a governance design model for online spaces, described as the basis of an emerging governance layer for the internet.
Are there organizational barriers to experimenting with governance design? How can these be addressed?
Governance archaeology is the work of filling governable stacks with lessons from ancestors across diverse times and places. It draws inspiration from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s “The Dawn of Everything”. Decolonial theorist Catherine Walsh puts it as “a past capable of renovating the future."
What can we do to inform ourselves and collaborate in this process?
5. Governable Spaces, Democracy as a Policy Strategy
Schnieder writes on p. 107 "Governable spaces arise when social and technical infrastructures enable participants to deliberate, make decisions, and enact those decisions through accessible, transparent, and just processes. To the extent that systems of rules organize our societies, governable spaces are difficult to achieve without policies that are well suited for supporting them.
What government support would you see as helpful to this end?
And on p. 112 “Under policy that expects governable spaces, social networks would have incentives to design for healthy self-governance. They would have to provide for users something on the order of modular politics—tools that support a variety of participatory mechanisms for rule-making and administration, such as elections, petitions, boards, and juries.”
How could such a policy change the social media landscape?
Epilogue, Metagovernance
On p. 128 “Governable spaces are steps into possible futures, starting with the connective networks that are already now among us.” and leaves us with “Governable spaces are a starting point for becoming, together, more fully ourselves.”
Invite to enable video. No recording and no transcription in use.
Share notes file with read/write permissions for everyone. Plan to post notes publicly after this session on CoSocial Discourse General Discussions
Invite to add name and/or handle to notes file
Goal is for notes capture the discussion, excluding who says what
Need a volunteer to take notes
Introductions (10 minutes)
Discussion (60 minutes)
Initial thoughts?
The examples were apt but seem seldom discussed. Perhaps there is more of a barrier to entry than the author appreciates… Is the work proposed really plausible? Is the book offering practicable solutions?
There are some projects embodying what the author describes, so it will be good to work more on those particular projects, for example in the free software movement/community.
The governance archeology brings together various approaches to governance from history. Schneider offers more of a menu of possibilities than a map.
4. Governable Stacks, Organizing against Digital Colonialism
Schneider defines Governable stacks as the continuous design of layered and interconnected infrastructure and practices that enable self-governance, central to resistance against digital colonialism.
What do you think of this strategy? How can pursuing this strategy be expected to benefit individuals/groups/organizations?
The “stack” metaphor fails in some respects but similarly, dependencies constrain new attempts at self-governable spaces…
Makes us think of Lori’s work:
Joe Dumit has this approach called “implosion” as a way to write/think about it:
Macroscopically Sustainable Networking:
On Internet Quines
Modular politics is a governance design model for online spaces, described as the basis of an emerging governance layer for the internet.
Are there organizational barriers to experimenting with governance design? How can these be addressed?
Communication
Distinct digital comms, IA, information wayfinding
Lack of knowing there are alternatives
Skills
Risk of losing people if you change core tools, when should you take the risk
Resistance to change (power structures, adversarial)
Governance experiments -
gets some of us thinking about international monetary policy! and how the lack of equality makes it really hard for self-governance to scale up in the way we are looking at here
important to make the overarching structure hospitable to experiments
there was a wave in the 20th century when many countries in Africa were fighting for and getting sovereignity. ^ the declaration linked above is related.
Trying to find an article about the Arusha Declaration and found this, little crypto connection:
It’s an interview from Daniel Denvir at the Dig
Governance archaeology is the work of filling governable stacks with lessons from ancestors across diverse times and places. It draws inspiration from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. Decolonial theorist Catherine Walsh puts it as “a past capable of renovating the future."
What can we do to inform ourselves and collaborate in this process?
5. Governable Spaces, Democracy as a Policy Strategy
Schnieder writes on p. 107 "Governable spaces arise when social and technical infrastructures enable participants to deliberate, make decisions, and enact those decisions through accessible, transparent, and just processes. To the extent that systems of rules organize our societies, governable spaces are difficult to achieve without policies that are well suited for supporting them.
What government support would you see as helpful to this end?
have to give power to the citizen groups if we want them to be influential
lots of good stuff about feminist self-governance - especially around things that appear to be neutral but instead shadow the established power structures
Technology design is policy design.
a) not our current centralized policies - trending the opposite at a high/federal level
b) maybe that makes this the best time to try different things, forces us to be more specific and clear about what we’re trying to accomplish
c) community research alliance - was an early internet era, govt sponsored digital literacy in partnership with community. Here is a book that came out of that: Connecting Canadians - Athabasca University Press | Athabasca University Press Community Wireless Infrastructure Research Project was another one
d) some Canadian specific stuff about funding colleges to be innovation centers in their region
e) citizen panels/juries - but they need to be given power to actually accomplish much
- many examples were shown but none with effective results
f) awareness of these tools and processes and wanting them to be available makes a big difference
impressed with a lot of the technology mentioned - but all of them are notably complicated, which makes it very difficult to have the adoption of these technologies
somehow we have to get to a point where we can harness the available time (2 hours a week! ish) to get to self-governance, but
maybe another structure: Lifehouses
I actually feel there are lots of ways to be incrementally more in community or just around other people, I like this summary:
“The IMF and World Bank transform into the International Currency Union originally proposed by Keynes in 1944. It is probably going to require a massive, global petition backed by labor leveraging strikes and consumer boycotts, but I think it’s the most important policy change to demand, because it will mean debt “forgiveness”/amnesty and redistribution of wealth on a global scale, and that is what is needed for real democracies to even begin to form.”
Citizens assemblies, sortition, and liquid democracy
aside: brought up the meshtastic outside the internet encrypted space - maybe a fun way to play with these concepts
And on p. 112 “Under policy that expects governable spaces, social networks would have incentives to design for healthy self-governance. They would have to provide for users something on the order of modular politics—tools that support a variety of participatory mechanisms for rule-making and administration, such as elections, petitions, boards, and juries.”
How could such a policy change the social media landscape?
Epilogue, Metagovernance
On p. 128 “Governable spaces are steps into possible futures, starting with the connective networks that are already now among us.” and leaves us with “Governable spaces are a starting point for becoming, together, more fully ourselves.”
Final thoughts?
Book recco: THE GLOBAL MINOTAUR
Something about ways treat each other equally as difficult.
Do we want to figure out how to share from this more widely? Maybe toot series, maybe
Here is an example of a summary:
from this reading group:
Feedback (10 minutes)
Governable stacks working group?
Next book recommendations?
What works and what can be improved with our group
John – will pull out book reccomendations
Steve – will take future notes