Who are the groups of people to whom we are connected in systems of governance? To whom do we owe allegiance?
Suggest readings for this topic here! The topic's facilitators will then curate final reading selections & distribute at least one month before the discussion.
- Grounding (volunteerism and polities in technology):
- Microstructures and Design Elements of Liberating Structures
- 🎬 Democracy --> Sociocracy (un)learning individual and group patterns [whole video encouraged!]
- The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative, focus on 1. Introduction, 3. CIC in a nutshell, 9. Summing up...
Other material:
DAWN: We talked a little bit about anti-productive spaces and meeting spaces when we were preparing for this call, but that has come up in a lot of other groups I'm a part of too is, how do we be together, but rescale the amount of work we're doing, or have the act of meeting be part of the work? Which resonates with me. I also do have a lot of work I'm supposed to be doing. So I can't do no work, I have to figure out how to do only the right amount of work. But I'm not there yet.
KELSEY: Yeah, and I'm wondering if we can slow this down. I know that some people don't show up at these Data Together sessions because they're like, Well, I didn't have time to do the readings and I don't want to show up every time having not done the readings, and I get it.
It's legit, and having done this a bunch, curating the readings is amazingly hard and time consuming. EDGI did a pretty good session, we did an antiracism training, we got a good dozen people through it with an outside consultancy this summer. It was really cool. And we even have this follow-on, part of every other all-EDGI meeting now is devoted to an in-meeting antiracism workshop for everybody. And one of the specific elements of it is that there's no pre work. If we're reading something, it's something we're going to read during that time. And I'm wondering if we could pick that up here.
STEFAN: So when you were saying, what to do, I was gonna suggest, my partner and I, we used to run this thing called the Wayward School ages ago. And it was skill and knowledge sharing events distributed around the city of Victoria in spaces that were underutilized, closed down businesses and warehouse spaces and backyards and all of this. But one of the one of the formats that we experimented—because we were running seasons of programming around a theme. The first one was home economics. And it would just be anything that we could find within our community. So if there's anybody who wanted to teach something, we created the platform for them to come in and do it. And one of the things that we did was, we had this thing called the out-loud reading group, which was very open, you don't have to read anything to come to this reading group, because we're gonna read it out loud here.
We would pick just one text that was really juicy, foundational in some way, you know, just there's a lot to it. And we would literally just pass that text around the table. And we would get like 20 people from the community at these things, just passing around this printout of this essay or whatever it is. And we would make our way through like four paragraphs, because every time somebody would start reading, it was like, what this makes me think about is da-da-da-da-da. And that would lead to a bit of a conversation and then kind of turn to the next person, they'd read a couple of lines, and then stop and go, yeah, and then this and this and this. It was a really interesting way, and it required no advanced reading. You could if you wanted to, you could read it in advance. The option was always there if you wanted to digest the whole thing before you came, but you didn't have to.
DAWN: Yeah, that reminds me of a couple of things. There was a standing event here called choir choir choir, where you would go and learn a song to sing aloud as a group choral activity, and so you'd show up, I don't think they always announce the song in advance, sometimes you won't know. But all the prep and getting ready to sing together would happen there. You'd pick up a sheet with the lyrics, walk through it as an exercise together, and by the end have accomplished something. But that didn't require that work in advance. But also, the other thing that reminds me of, which actually works, and I really love it, is in a few organizations I'm a part of, but probably the largest one that does, this is one of the union I'm a member of as a grad students, GP3902. And they read their anti-oppression positionality statement, as a group, by passing off paragraph to paragraph around the room before every meeting, I think it is a lovely gesture.
KELSEY: I don't want to let Data Together drop, I want to have another semester of it next year. I'm wondering if maybe that's a good way to do it, have people volunteer to bring a piece that feels appropriate that we all kind of read in the space. And then, and I really liked, Stefan, what you were talking about with people just feeling comfortable pausing and saying, I want to discuss this.
I love the variety of people that come to Data Together and the backgrounds they come from. The readings are great, but parsing it with other people is what really unlocks them.
STEFAN: Yeah, there's so many fun formats to do with it as well, too. There's another exercise that I really quite like, called narrative reauthoring, which is a little more out there. I know all of these different formats and tools and everything, because this is what I teach all the time. So I'm more than happy to help share ideas around format. And I thought, coming back to what Dawn was saying, in terms of, what do we do for this call right now? I think this conversation is a good part of that. And then maybe we experiment or have a feel for one of the structures that we can actually do, the three of us, right now, if we want to. And then from that, get a sense of, at least some measure of differentiation.
Everybody here has done facilitated things with people. So that's fairly common, but we can do one, we could do the spiral journal if we wanted to right now. We could do narrative reordering, if you guys wanted to. But they're more reflective, they're more slowing down. If we had a bigger group, we could do some of these other breakout ones, and then get a get a different feeling from each, because the thing that I find with with gatherings of people, whether they're coming together for a very tight purpose, they all understand, we all work together. We're all fairly interdependent in our work, versus a group of people more like Data Together, where we're loosely held together by an interest in the topic and an interest in the conversations in the community that gets created around that conversation.
In both of those instances, there's ways to leverage purpose in different ways.
One thing that I'm kind of curious about, Kelsey, is, for Data Together—and maybe this is just me being unfamiliar with the space—for Data Together and EDGI, is there an overlap? Or are they two completely different things? In terms of folks who come to Data Together? Are they also part of EDGI? How does how does that mixture work?
KELSEY: Yeah, well, I think Dawn, is this your brainchild originally? I feel like I took it over from you. I assume you originated it.
DAWN: Um, yeah, but I would say I don't actually totally know the answer anymore. So when it started, it grew out of mostly EDGI facilitator energy. And at the time, I was doing most of that. That would have been like three years ago. And an active engagement that also involves software development, and a lot of time and energy with Qri and Protocol Labs. So it was imagined as a tri-partnership. We had imagined always splitting that coordinating work and tried to set up a very loose governance approach around that, and then planned to have an annual meeting once a year to check in on the various things that were going on. The first year was around multiple different channels, and then by the second year, that really focused in on what I would say were EDGI strengths, which are creating this as a space for a certain type of conversation that wasn't happening, I think, totally within EDGI otherwise, but it drew a lot from conversations that EDGI has facilitated. And then also, that maybe weren't happening around Protocol Labs and Qri at the time. But yeah, I don't actually know if I have a strong handle on how things are now or how much this feels like it overlaps with EDGI. I would sort of turn that to Kelsey.
KELSEY: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's really interesting, because it has this history, right, like Dawn was saying, of intending to be a technical challenge that people take on together. And even through last year, we were having an in-person annual meeting, and we had representatives from Protocol Labs and Qri. And we would generally have somebody from Protocol Labs and Qri and EDGI at every session, although I took over the coordinating, which Dawn had been basically handling, I think Kevin had a stint in there where he was doing a lot of coordinating too. And now it's sort of odd, because over the same time period, EDGI originally started as a big data saving archiving operation. And it hasn't been that for multiple years, basically two, since I was hired to coordinate it, and hired to coordinate the archiving, specifically, which we don't do.
We're in this really interesting space where a big part of the original intention was to have a more ethical and more citizen-controlled way to be saving data than we had. And it spun into this much more theoretical discussion, because Brendan actually made Qri, my understanding is, kind of based on the Data Together conversations. Qri is a decentralized dataset software company that he started. And then, IPFS, they're very engaged with us sometimes, and other times, not. When they just did their Filecoin big launch in September, they reached out to me and they're like, Hey, we're ready for your data. All that data you have, we want to put it on the dweb. And I unfortunately had to respond to that with, I'm so sorry, I'm very busy and I don't know where the data is. I actually got to reach out to them this week and say, hey, we're ready now.
That's the dream we had originally, so that'd be cool if we could say yes to it.
But it's sort of strange because Rob, who been in a lot of these recent meetings, I'm not sure if you've had any crossover with him, Stefan, but he still very much cares about these principles and he's very active at EDGI still, he's one of few folks who's had this very consistent through line since Trump's election at EDGI where he does this exact type of data work. I've felt like this is a space where EDGI comes in with this very strong environmental data justice angle and holds space for other people to come in and bring their perspectives. So we have folks like you, Stefan, and Dawn, working on understanding collectivist spaces in, having these really strong experiences in community organizing. We have people coming in from citizen science backgrounds, we have people coming in, who maybe have no real background in justice issues or community organizing at all, who are building protocols. And they've maybe never had a time or space to think about, if I make this technical decision, how does that play out in terms of who's able to use it and how they're able to use it? And it's this really cool intersection, when it works, which I feel like it honestly often does. But to directly answer your question, I can't say that there's a lot of overlap with EDGI, because we don't do that anymore. It's just me, but I work for EDGI, and I'm still sort of holding that space at EDGI, too, when we have data conversations. I'm the technical one in the room, usually saying, hey, well, we should consider doing it this way. We should be present in these spaces. And I feel like a representative in a lot of the technical conferences outside of the EDGI sphere and say, Hey, I have a real use case for data decentralization, which isn't often the case in data decentralization nerd meetups.
DAWN: Which I still find so intensely interesting, a few years in, that this still is a maybe a really strong use case. So I think something like say the Starling project, I don't know if you spoken to Jonathan Dotan, he'd be a good person to invite to some sort of Data Together event. They are similarly thinking about needing to archive important witness testimony related to things that were recorded with the intent of being publicly available from now and into the future, thinking about these questions of trust and holding this sort of data, but it also has this resonance in so many important communities at very strong orientation towards justice, it's not the environmental justice angle, in the same way, it's more a human rights and witnessing emphasis, but it was very resonant, and they have a really strong use case. And they've done some testing and working with IPFS folks. And actually, Ben from Hypha, the worker's cooperative I'm a member of, also has worked with them. And they did a launch this year, so there are some of these use cases, but there aren't a huge amount of them. There's a lot of interesting apps that are being built, but there isn't totally these fully thickened, rich contexts where this is a space to think about the implications of this and how it's used and understand how we should think about building this out, individually. For what it's worth, I think there could be another season or another term, or maybe a reimagined version of it.
STEFAN: I'm gonna suggest a mild intervention in this moment here. If you'll allow me, I'd like to interrogate the two of you using Nine Whys, which is another helpful liberating structure. And maybe we can get to some bedrock material for why Data Together. I heard a lot of context there that was super helpful in understanding the overlap of these different spaces and also early intentions that were held by Dawn and then passed on to Kelsey. And I feel like getting at your guys's shared why would be really helpful for whoever watches this recording. And then we could also leap off of that, and into spiral journal to have a reflective closeout. Any objections to that proposal for the remainder of our meeting?
DAWN: Sounds great.
KELSEY: Always good to have a facilitator in the room.
STEFAN: So let's start. Why Data Together? Why the purpose around Data Together?
KELSEY: A very basic thing for me is that I really like it. I feel the most intellectually stimulated in this space that I get to be, because I'm talking to all these people who are working on really real things and have all this theoretical background. And it's perspectives that I haven't heard, and I can watch them hear perspectives that they've never heard. It's kind of amazing. It unlocks and shifts concept in my head, and I can feel it happening during these conversations.
DAWN: I think it's actually not too dissimilar of a reason why Data Together to me, was that it felt like there was a gap between, at the time, the way we were trying to use these technologies, decentralizing and peer technologies. The promise, we could see in these technologies, and the rich and careful and nuanced, ways that we that and from an EDGI side were thinking about justice around data. It was a way for me to have conversations that helped demystify the technology, or remove some of that allure of the technology from folks who maybe don't build it as much. And then also have the people who build it have that connection into understanding some of these very important framings or approaches or critical understandings that inform action. So it's a way to have disparate expertises meet and commingle.
STEFAN: Okay, I hear similarity, but also interesting difference there. Or at least, additional concepts, like this notion that there's a gap that's been filled, that Dawn mentioned. And then Kelsey, I think a lot of what you said, around just this diverse group of folk coming together to think together about these questions. There's a lot in line there with what Dawn was just saying, I think. So, why is that important?
KELSEY: I think this technology is interesting enough that it's going to get built, and I'm afraid that it's going to be built without all of the perspectives that it needs. One of the things that makes the space cool is that a lot of the people in it, a lot of the base technologists even, are dreaming the same dreams that I am in terms of what our society can be if we treat each other differently, if we if we hold things differently, and there's this deep interest that's held in having this other world made possible by technology, but there's also, Dawn had this exactly right, and this has been in my head too, there is this big gap, where they want the right things, but they don't have all the people who need to be in the room to make those things happen. We don't have all the people in our room either, but we try to bring it in at least through text.
DAWN: Yeah, I would say probably it feels very similar to me. I think it's important because if these technologies are to meet the potential that I think the creators desire for them, and the users and those who are in this decentralized and political space want, I worry that they won't do it, if it happens through tech as usual, being built, which either through, say, Silicon Valley style, or even the existing norms and paradigms in open source and open culture, I think are insufficient. And there are a rich array of other ways of imagining otherwise, and alternatives that have existed for a long time, but also are being actively enacted in grassroots movements, activist spaces, and that tie into areas in academia that are not often in conversation with the technical. So for me, it's about trying to attach those conversations. And I think you see, certain ones get attached in are in vogue, say something like Digital Commons, I think Commons now occupies that as an imaginary, is present enough that I think it is engaged with, but to me, it's like, what about things like abolition and abolitionist tools, or data sovereignty, drawing from Indigenous sovereignty, and that as an understanding, or anticolonial and decolonial ways of thinking, or just transition, or transfer, more of a transformation approach, which I can draw from sustainability, and just sustainability spaces. There's just so many of those that I think offer something really rewarding. And I would like to see those ideas circulate.
STEFAN: Why is this important?
KELSEY: There's a lot of historical reasons why these perspectives aren't in the room. And I think that there's a lot of varied history to the internet that we have. But the people building our new internet are not fundamentally that different from the people who built the other one. I think this is the difference between not racist and antiracist. You have to do a lot of conscious work, if you're looking to actually address and not have inequity in a system that starts not equitable. So I think that's the the concern with letting that gap exist, or letting letting the people who are building it, decide what to do.
There's even really small things about open source; there's the what gets measured gets managed, but then there's also, I've been an engineer in a roomful of engineers who are certain that nothing matters but the engineering. That company failed because we never hired a marketing person. There's a lot of that sentiment in open source, and there's this beautiful feeling that anyone could contribute, but that has to be anyone who's able to make a GitHub commit in the source code, and that is really a small "anyone". You can't even have a designer say, hey, this should look like this, and then do it. You're still reliant on the people who write the code. And the people who write the code, we already know, is a pretty small demographic that has a lot of skew in it. And if that's who builds it, especially if they build it open source, they're going to build it around what they want, what they need, what their passions are, unless they have a really good reason not to.
DAWN: Yeah, I mean, so I think it again feels very similar. My answer about why these things are important is, I think we're at a moment, we're at multiple moments of pressing need. This sort of work feels like, there's no going back to normal in those domains is very apparent. And so I think about how, to take that seriously, we have to rethink the modes, the ways that we produce knowledge, or the ways that we produce these systems, the ways that we produce these technologies. And I think a lot about how to build these technologies, which I think are maybe a parallel attempt to others to actually think about a pluralistic future we could live in, we have to build in ways that escape that technodeterminist way that mystifies them as technology. And I don't think we can do that with the existing tools. So we have to do that horrible, messy process of, work with the tools we've got, which kind of suck, and build new tools at the same time that we're trying to make this new world that we want. But we have to try. Or, what's the alternative, not trying? I'm not prepared to do that.
STEFAN: I'm gonna ask you why, Dawn: why all of what you said, we have to rethink the ways we reproduce knowledges and technologies to build a pluralistic future away from techno-determinism. Why is that important?
DAWN: I think we have, at this point, heartbreaking and overly documented evidence of the damage that these systems have caused. And that harm, I don't know if the the way out is to abandon everything, I don't think we can just critique our way out of this situation. I think what we've developed is an extremely robust set of ways to critique these systems, or at least certain areas of academia have that I draw from, and I am super indebted to those as ways of ways of seeing, but I am committed to also thinking about how to make it so those critiques don't have to be used, because we aren't in that world anymore. And I think my why would be that rethinking is the way I think we get out of it.
KELSEY: I have a sort of personal dichotomy that I've probably mentioned in this group before: this idea of work to change the world, I use the dichotomy of frontliners and utopians. And you really do need both. You need people fighting, actively engaged with the world as it is and seeking change, saying, hey, something else is better, and we should work for it. And then there's also this other set of people, utopians are in the space of saying, Hey, I think that we can try it. Let's start with the world we want. Let's make an assumption that it is possible. How do we how do we live it right now? And how do we iterate on those systems so that there is something specific that is proven that we're aiming for. And I'm much more of a utopian. And I think that what Dawn was saying about rethinking the technologies that are imperfect, and having to use them while we rebuild, that's exactly that. That's saying, okay, if this were perfect, what would it be? And how do we get to that as soon as we possibly can? How can we actually live our values?
STEFAN: I think we're getting deeper into some layers here. There's a lot going on around avoiding the damages and harm caused by the previous system, but also being trapped in this funny dichotomy, where we have to use those same tools from the previous system to rebuild the new one. And then this interesting notion of the frontlines and the utopians. And I like that, I think there's a lot of fruitful play space in these ideas here. We can stop here and build out a future present scenario, but I want to go a little deeper. So why Data Together? In the context of all of these things, why Data Together?
DAWN: Data Together started as a place where there was a confluence of those things. We were building the bridge two steps in front of us. We were doing like eight other things, and we were trying to grapple with what it all meant. That's how it started. We were building this tech, and we needed a place to understand how we built it. And there's these dusty GitHub repos kicking around, and then there was the realizing that even how we think about what could at face value appear to be pretty innocuous concepts, like data, is not innocuous at all. There's so much to unpack there. That is a rich and fruitful conversation. So we need to have those conversations too. And then also, it was a way to think, to be in that shared space together and think and do together.
STEFAN: Now my frame zoomed out a bit back to why Data Together. But why all of these things that have been discussed so far in relationship to this entity, Kelsey? I think, Dawn, you're getting at it, you brought it down, but why is this important? Why does this matter? Why?
KELSEY: I mean, that confluence, where it is, it's at the crux of it right there. There are all these amazing concepts. There's nothing new in philosophy.
I read the biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote the Rights of Woman and decided to go be a war journalist at the French Revolution. She was deeply antimarriage and all this other shit that you just really aren't allowed to be at that time. And you're still not really, and nothing is new, right? But somebody was already living this crazy, radical future way back then. And I love to think about her in that context. So I don't think we're going to be inventing something here. But I think that in our modern context, we have to find the ideas that we need in the moment. And I think that that's not available, especially in technology spaces.
People who do a lot of tech spend a lot of time learning how to do it. I've personally spent all day trying to figure out how to fix one line of code, or even just trying to understand the documentation on one function within one line of code. It's very hard and you are seldom invited to zoom out and say, what is the context of my work? What is the purpose of this? And am I building something in a world that I want?
The concept of work, we've discussed that here, too, but the concept of work is challenging because most people spend all of their work in busyness, without ever saying, this thing that I'm spending the majority of my energy on, do I care what it does? It makes me money, is that what I'm looking for?
This Data Together space, it's that invitation that says, hey, whatever it is you're doing, have you thought about it? Have you thought about it on a grand scale? Have you looked at what it's for, in a long time? It's an invitation to see ideas that maybe nobody ever showed to you, because you were a code monkey. Or maybe it's you actually getting to talk to technologists about the thing you've been fighting for on the streets for years, maybe you've protested Google or Facebook with a picket sign, but you probably never talked to the engineer and said, Hey, why didn't you do this thing better?
This is the kind of space, I want it to be the kind of space where that can happen, where you can say, hey, you really can't make that decision, because it'll impact my life, and I need you to know that.
I think that in general, intersectionality of backgrounds, when they can be focused productively on a topic, can be really, really fruitful for for everyone involved, just because it's often new for each person in some way.
DAWN: I think there's two things in there which really resonated. The first one is this idea of meeting ideas for the moment. I think sometimes we've under-resourced certain certain forms of production with all of the ideas that could give them the space for things to be better. So it's a lot of work for folks who are in those spaces to search out and then engage with those ideas.
I think people do that with technology, I think people do that whether they identify as a technologist or an artist or a researcher, but it's tough work, that gets taken up by an individual in some cases, or they have to build that community around them to do that work. My dream would be that there is a way that those ideas are more ready to hand. And if not, there is a way that we can hand off ideas to each other at the right moment, when it's a good time.
But also, the other part of it, which I think is super important too, is that it's not really one sided. I'm nervous that maybe I frame things in such a way where I'm like, oh, only the technologists have to learn from people who are really theoretical or people who are activists, I think that concretely having to grapple with why how things are built is so important to thinking about how to build them better. And so there's that putting into practice moment, which I think is a question for Data Together. If we're not doing the putting into practice in Data Together now, how do we support people as they take things back to their own place where they're putting it into practice.
I feel like EDGI maybe has a good conduit because of the way that we've facilitated that group, but if the rest of the people coming into this space are maybe a little more distributed, for lack of a better term, like for me, for example, I'm not active in EDGI, I'm a happy alum, but I'm not actually doing that day to day project work. Thinking about how to connect it back into the stuff I do is maybe a question. Because I think that actually is a way to keep this feeling resonant, and/or having that important scheme realized more broadly.