Notes: International Networking Session
Facilitator: Madeleine Martiniere (Zebras Unite, community organizer). https://zebrasunite.coop/ 20,000 people in 23 countries are sharing knowledge. Co-op is 200 people across 23 countries. Navigating membranes, how do people move between and across – how to decide which decisions people can and should be involved in. Finding common themes and patterns in building networks from the local to the global, grounding in regional and local contexts.
Intros: What communities are you building and holding, where are you structured in your evolution?
Victor/Brasil: communication and agroecology and systems for land defense, monitoring native seed networks, extractivism in the amazon. In Brasil, are connecting land, technology, and community movements. Helping them set up their own local networks, but once funding expires, project ends as there is low digital literacy. Instead, need to support communities to develop their own technology using a holistic approach. They will only have time to develop this tech if they are surviving. Next year, they are supporting tech residencies in the Paraiba valley. (1 year, living in the community).
NAME?: Global community of practice – OPEN Impact. https://openimpact.io/ Enterprise resource planning. Supporting network connections. Connecting farmers, volunteers, food systems, built environment, community wellness, landscape restoration, displacement. Went from 5 organizations to 30 to 300. Have a regional resilience fellowship program – 20 orgs, 16 countries, half are Indigenous led. Convening how to mobilize good practices and knowledge shared in the network. How to advance peer to peer learning, and versioning (peer reviewed process). Focus and interest on data sovereignty and reciprocity are key themes of importance to actors in their network.
Divya/LiteFarm: www.litefarm.org FMIS tool, recordkeeping, task management, enable data collection for certification or locally designed needs for storytelling/MEV etc. Focusing on how communities develop their own value propositions, with specific needs and specific challenges in specific geographies.
Michael/OpenFoodNetwork Australia: https://openfoodnetwork.org/ online platform to sell produce/food – trying to shorten food supply chain and support local – make it easier for farmers to sell directly, or through foodhubs/CSAs. Open Source Project, now a global network.
Serenity/OpenFoodNetwork: https://openfoodnetwork.org/ 13 years ago, co-founder. Different countries have individual non-profit organizations that are networked in a global “pledge” – values and expectations as an agreement to use the brand and use the OFN service. Coordination as a community guided by Sociocracy. User circles, product circle, governance and finance… operate horizontally to decide what is being built, managing and delivering the produce. Communication and documentation is really important. (e.g. slack). Really important to connect as humans, and it’s a quite small number of people who are actually involved in the central decision-making and building community outwards. Resourcing comes in through individual countries, but there is some sharing across instances.
Richard, IndigiDAO: MIT Solve | IndigiDAO - Overview democratically governed cooperative for Indigenous entrepreneurs. Technologists, entrepreneurs, artists, farmers. Fiscally sponsored. Supporting Kinship economy, linking to ancestral trading routes mainly in SW USA, Hawaii, Washington. Focus on Traditional Ecological Knowledge (use Tech to engage TEK). Support regenerative businesses that regenerate cultural practices. Farming community is a big part of the ecosystem. Goal for GOAT is to learn more about community governance. Looking at a RAP DAO… or maybe a new structure that might emerge.
Steve Francis, Tech Matters: https://techmatters.org/ worked in 1000 landscapes for 1B people, collaboration/network between well-established entities, Conservation International, UNEP, Rainforest Alliance, looking for common solutions across broad and diverse network. Finding common ground/shared values was challenging. Groups discussed “setting aside their brand” as they were often normally competing, e.g. for funding. Common needs included curriculum programs, share financial instruments that blend public/private finance, share money to the field, and shared tech tools. Move away from SOP, project, grant, build tool, project end, tool dies. Expanding networks in OPEN Team, GOAT, community. Community is a community of users, the people they are trying to serve (Farmers, planners, govt extension agents) – blending networks and communities that helps and challenges them to make decision. 1000 landscapes for 1B people… noting that often have to pick 1 organization to receive $. Rainforest Alliance handles the funds for that project. But they aspire to having $ be governed by community, to dictate priorities. But noting lack of time and sometimes interest, for farmers to be involved in extensive participatory governance processes. Need to reflect on this.
Madeline: How do you define the ‘membranes’ in your organization and how to make them accessible to the most amount of people.
• OpenImpact – important to discuss the prolonging of relationship/belonging. Both formal and informal membranes. Acknowledge the temptation to be less clear in agreements to invite flexibility, but they decided to be more clear, specific, in agreements to align action. Different layers of membranes, each one has signed workplans and partnership. But there is a wider desire for belonging beyond the specific workplans. There are fellows, ambassadors, etc…
• Michael/OFN – use the term “community” to refer to 1 country. “Network of communities” is a OFN network. “Global community” is all the users? Each of these communities is a very local context. In Australia, they wanted to involve farmers, but they didn’t want it to be involved, they just wanted to use it. In France, a farmer came to the meeting and served as an ambassador to other farmers.
• Richard/IndigiDAO – the larger community is huge (we are all relatives). But to be part of the DAO this is a more specific ceremonial process to be included in the DAO community. To be part of community governance, they have to be part of that ceremony. There are very clear tokens of who are members and who the community, and who is governing the DAO. Even though there are lots of activities that happen offline. Want governance to follow bioregional processes attached to the land.
• Divya/LiteFarm – we are very straightforward – Our community includes users, open source contributors, partners, because we all work for the same cause close to our hearts (transitions and support for agroecology/diversified ag/sustainable small scale agriculture). We have partners – organizations that work with farmers in specific geographies. They are the ones that navigate the relationship between the users and the product design decisions.
Madeline: there is a broad spectrum in how ‘community governance decisions’ can be made, a lot of diversity in this group. How can we apply the learnings/challenges, opportunities to GOAT….How specifically (brass tacks) are community members involved in higher order decision making? How does onboarding occur?
• Belonging/How community members participate in decision makings
• Serenity: for sociocracy, those who are applying energy have a bigger say.
- “Do-ocracy” – when they started, they were almost purely volunteer, but then as transition to paid roles, that is a tension that has to be managed.
• Michael: the personal connection is really important – we come together as people, not just to discuss the tech. Process for engagement is all documented online, to make onboarding easier. We have points of contact for guidance. People have to sign pledge if they want to set up an instance and have aligned values. One potential conflict point: to share finances, the pledge is to share back a percentage as a country group, and the community pays for that, but some instances don’t (or can’t) bring funds in. Aspects of solidarity too to support instances in Global South.
• Victor/Brasil – how to get traction, when using tech as a broader approach – technology is anything we use to make something in the work. We don’t want to ‘lure’ the people to use tech. We hope it is a more natural process. We navigate coordinating different organizations coming together towards the same goal. We also want to balance not being bureaucratic with not being too individual-oriented/personalistic. Navigating across different cultures and community dynamics. How do we avoid “calling all my friends to work with me because I got a grant”.
• OpenImpact – inheriting hierarchical bureaucracies, and how do we deconstruct that to go to more open governance processes. How can we belong to one another. This is evident in our user interface, they are a wide-label as their own platform. That helped them behave as a part of community of practice. A lot of partners are also networks. They beave with and as a member of their own community of practice. They have some specific membranes (e.g. fellowship program), then resource partners, then members of a community…
• Richard/IndigeDAO – how to engage and co-create autonomous organizations that protect Indigenous sovereignty. Can’t lead with blockchain, that’s a conversation blocker. How do we lead with values and human connection? Now collating different kinds of community governance and sharing Toolkit for community governance (including BigGreenDAO team), learning about what it takes to build a community that leads on values, but builds economic principles (e.g. they have 6 economic criteria, and votes need to be based on that) to build a community practice.
• Morgan: Proposed a question re: low level protocols for emergent community governance – DAO, Sociocracy, wholocracy, propagating networks. How do these vary, level of conciseness, etc.
- Madeleine – used and ‘broke’ sociocracy – can get challenged by conflating operations, structure, and governance. Sociocracy can be used as an operations structure but not as good as a governance structure. Zebras has a co-op and a non-profit. They tried to do operations across the two entities and it got confusing, so they had to create concentric circles (Dazzlecore) to do the operational/finance functions.
• Question: (Vermont NRCS) – for Richard – curious to see what kind of structure they are looking for – Richard is looking to see what models are out there (e.g. watersheds) and bring into their own structure, learning into each other. Their DAO isn’t really working like a blockchain DAO, it’s working more like a cooperative. DAO by name only. The toolkit will be helpful for this.
- Steve Francis: there is the legal structure, which can be fundamentally different form the decision structure.
- Serenity – sometimes you want to be legible to the external system and sometimes not!
• Ryan: Q re; principles / building blocks of community, for communities that don’t have self-determination. Governance is difficult for communities that are constrained/aiming to reestablish self-determination. How do you establish the foundation for that level of trust. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
- Richard: the principles were for economic transactions/feedback looks, based on sovereignty, economic justice, wealth generation feedback loops. So far, none of these have led to decisions with adverse effects but curious to hear more about this.
- OpenImpact – things get into trouble with more ‘purist’ principles – self-determination can be supporting with more pragmatic and dynamic/flexible work …. Working on shared libraries and feedback loops so that learning makes it way back into the toolkit.
Madeleine: what is the value you are providing, to whom. Be careful about feeling you have to serve everyone, equally. A lot of the value/service provision here is very clear about who is being served and why. How do you do your values in practice. Time matters, building in time for micro-decisions and building engagement before going to macro-decisions….