Ten minutes in, I think you can just start, or do you need some heads up of what you should talk about? No. No. Then just start.

like, we

Alright. Thanks, Philip, for this introduction. So I will take over now and talk a bit more about the actual governance features we have in Carrot, which are maybe not so usual. So food sharing, as Philip already mentioned, is more like, yeah, it's a big project. It's it's really grown all over Germany. There's, like, hundreds of thousands of users. And when they started, it was really all about saving food and not about, hey, let's build progressive governance structures. So it's it has admins. It has these roads with very hierarchical structures inside. And when we got started with Kerat, it was very clear from the beginning that we would not want to reproduce that. So we were thinking like, okay. What are these the moments where normally right now things are solved with admin roles? And that's mostly when permissions have changed. Right? So when you when you get new users into the group, somebody needs to say, okay. You can come in. If you wanna get rid of somebody, somebody needs to have the rights to kick them out again. And if any rights change, like, for example, you get rights to edit something, then also somebody needs to have the power to be able to do that. Right? No. We've tried to solve this differently and came

up with

some mechanisms where we requirements are met. Or like, that is the the one thing, and the other thing is to, basically give the admin right to everyone. And then it's just, like, if somebody presses the button, then things happen. So I have made a couple of screenshots, which I would show you

Nice. To just highlight three features we came up with in this context. So this is a screenshot from a caret group. It's not an actual caret group, as you can see, with a a beautiful title of zero four test group. This is what you would see when you go on to this def caret. Word instance, which has, like, not real users. We have also real users, but for data privacy reasons, I chose to use this group for presentation. And so I'm interested. I clicked here, and I was like, oh, yeah. This group, I wanna I wanna join it. So I cannot just join it. I need to apply. So I have this green button there at which I can click, and then it leads me here where the group can define some text. Like, makes sense to put some questions there. For example, like, this text which you can read there is the default text, which every group just has, but they can, for example, translate it to another language, or they could add a a a URL to to some roots they agreed on or whatever they want. And then the applicant can answer. So I just, yeah, wrote some blurb and then submit it. And then, yeah, the application is pending, and you have two weeks, basically. So from the other side, when you're inside the group so this is another user account from a user that's already inside the the zero four test group. And this is, like, yeah, the main wall, basically, where people can just talk. And in the sidebar, you can see there's this the small blue one. It's a bit hidden because applications are not necessarily interesting for everybody, but when you click the show more button, then this applications thing appears, and then you can click on that. And then you get to the application overview, and this Katrina Bell is the account that I did the application with. And then I'm, like, just any user of the group, and I can just click on there, and then I can either open it to get, like, more information and see the questions and the answers of the person, or I can immediately accept or decline. So here, we chose this approach of just giving everybody the possibility to accept or decline, but it will be locked in, like, in the past applications, which I will show you later. There's always written down who accepted or declined someone so that it's not super random. Yeah. But here, I just click open first, and then, yeah, I see the initial questions and answers, and I can also write another message. Like, for example, invite them to a meeting in person or ask further questions or what or whatever. And whenever somebody in the group feels satisfied with the answers or with the degree of of of, yeah, getting to know the person, they can just accept them. And then oh, yeah. That's it. So much for the application feature. It yeah. There are more thoughts about that, but maybe I just continue with the overview. Yeah. I think that makes more sense. So the next thing would be editing rights. So here's the member list. It's a test group, so it has not a lot of members. And as you can see with Bruno, for example, it already says he was added by Thurman ten months ago so that we know what happened there. And then on the side, you see these funny carrot buttons, which look different. Two are brown with a green chip on them, and one is white with a red chip on them. And those are trust carrots. So for the editing rights, in the beginning, everything was free for everyone, and we just thought, yeah, well, people can just talk and then they can figure it out. But, some actual users said this is so unusual that people just don't expect to be able to do stuff, so they break stuff accidentally. So, yeah, especially older people who are not so used to using technology at all or yeah. Just you don't you don't think you can delete important information when you just join the group. So it's basically a security feature that we then, when we made the applications, also added a very small trust system. So here, you can see that Janina, me, and the playground user who have brown carrot logos, we already have editing rights. And Bruno, he has a white one with a red chip, he doesn't. Even though I also have zero carrots, but that's just because I joined this group very, very early. So before the feature came, I already had the rights, and we thought it would not be so as not to strip everybody of the rights when a new feature comes because that could cause a lot of confusion. So, yeah, Bruno doesn't have any carrots, but the playground user has carrots. So this is what I see when I just click on the carrot because there is a carrot, and maybe I wanna know who who trusted this person already. And here I can see it was me. I gave out this carrot. Nice of me. So but Bruno doesn't have anyone yet. So here, this is what I see when I click this carrot button for Bruno. And here, the the the pop up immediately says that just one more person needs to express the trust to grant Bruno editing permissions. This is also interesting because it dynamically changes. Like, when somebody starts a new group and is the only user of a group, they immediately have editing rights because otherwise it would be quite impractical. They wouldn't be able to to create places or create pickups inside, change any descriptions. Yeah. Basically, they would not be able to use the group. So they have editing rights. And then as the group grows, the the threshold changes. And I think it's, like, half the size of the group. So, for example, when you have two people in the group, you need one trust to get editing rights, and it only goes up to a maximum of three. So when you have six people in the group, you need three trust to be given to you to get editing rights. But when you have 50 people in the group, it's still three. So these numbers are also like, we came up with them. It's not said that these are the perfect numbers, but so far, it works quite well. And the idea was that, potentially, a lot of people have editing rights because the idea is not to have these exclusive admin roles. Right? But rather to have, like, when people are part of the group, meaning they meet up physic in the physical world, and they actually do pickups, and they, yeah, they are trusted to not just break everything because, I don't know, weird moments, then they also should be granted these rights rights on the digital space of the group as well. So, yeah, I can be the first one now to trust Bruno in the test group, and I do it, of course. And now you can see it changed, and Bruno also has this brown carrot with a with a green chip, and has editing rights. Yeah. So easy. Yeah. And what are the editing rights? I just briefly mentioned it before. This is the main page of a place. It's a test group, so you see a lot of testing things there. For example, the description is a fun script test. Anyhow. And here you would have pickups because, you know, the use case is saving food from cooperating businesses. So maybe you have this agreement of, yeah, we go every Monday at 03:00 or, like, here at 10AM, and then people can just sign up in the slots. And when I have editing rights, I can manage these pickups. If I don't have the rights, I don't even see the options to not make people break stuff by accident. But with these rights, I can I can see this, and I can change it? Like, I can change the time. I can change the number of slots. I can give additional information. I can delete everything. Same goes for the place itself, like the the the description, the name, status, location, and this all can be changed only with editing rights. Yeah. And then I can go to Bruno's profile. You can see on the bottom, there's also a history of what he actually did in this group. It's all specific to groups. And there's also this small button. Like, you have the bubble. You have the carrot again. And in the middle, there's this frowning smiley, and that's the button for the conflict resolution. That's the feature we implemented when people said, like, okay. We have these really problematic people in our group, and nobody likes them, and they destroy everything. We have to kick them out. So we thought, okay. We don't wanna just, like, make admin roles now. Like, we came so far. Come on. This would be would be a shame. We also don't wanna use our our database privileges and just, like, remove them manually. Like, no. No. We're not gonna go into that role. So we thought, okay. How can we how can we make this possible? And we came up with a voting mechanism to basically give the decision back to the group to let them discuss and vote on the different options. So far, it's still very minimal. It's really just, yeah, kick the person out. No, keep the person in, or let's still just continue the discussion. It's still not clear. So when you want to start this conflict resolution, you also need editing rights. And then when you click this frowning face, you go into a step up, which first basically tells you what it is about. So here, you're gonna start this conflict resolution. Like, the whole group is gonna be involved. And then also, thank you. We we thought it's very important to to not get into this culture of it's it's just blaming people. You know? I'm just this mean person who points the finger at this person who does something wrong. But no. It's more like or we thought it should be more like in the spirit of, yeah, I care. You know? I could also just look somewhere else and say, I ignore this person. It's an annoying person. I don't wanna deal with it. But, no, I take my time and type down what what happened and why I think this is a very toxic person or whatever. And so we thought, like, yeah, it makes sense to to frame it in this very, like, positive thing of there's a conflict. We should address it, and it's a good thing you started it. And then, yeah, here to give some transparency, also that whatever you type, like, everyone in the group will see it, including the person it is directed against. So that might also maybe surprise some people. Like, it's not anonymous at all. You will stand there with your name and with your blame, basically, that you pointed somebody else. That's, again, like, why we pointed it out that it's very nice of you that you that you make yourself so exposed in this moment and start this. Yeah. And the voting itself is anonymous. It goes on for seven days. And, yeah, then there's just a statement that the person can still make, like, yeah, why why is this happening now? What what's the problem? Let's discuss it all and then submit. Yeah. This is, for example, a very, very bad initial statement. It would be better to really explain the situation. Anyhow yeah. And then you created this conflict resolution, and there's you have, like, these two different parts of it. One for one, there's a chat where everybody from the group can type and read, of course, as well. And then there's also the vote. And it's a score voting because score voting is just better. And you vote on every single option. And, yeah, since I started this and I'm very against Bruno, who I just gave trust, well, I have high discussion high resistance against him staying. I have also resistance to just discuss this forever, and I just want to remove him from the group. So I vote this, and I save my vote, and, yeah, that's it. Like, in the time where the voting goes on, which is seven days, I can, like, change my mind how many times I want. And then after seven days, you can get a results screen, which for example, would be like this. Since I just started the Bruno thing today, I couldn't wait. And I went to the past issues, which are of course locked here. You yeah. For transparency reasons, we thought it's very important that you can still access everything. Like you can access chat that was that took place, and also the the voting results. And this country resolution against Nick a year ago, he got removed, and you can see, like, just the the total numbers of votes. Yeah. Another example would be I know that is the the chat as well. And another example would be here, this one against me a year ago, where three time the group voted to just keep the process running because, like, the yeah. The I mean, that was testing, but the use case would be that new information comes up, for example, or the people still don't know really what was happening, and there's just, like, yeah, the need for further discussion. And then at some point, in this example, just, yeah, nobody voted on the issue. Well, then it can't be solved. What can we do about it? Yeah. But with the with the Nick

if the voting results and the user gets removed from the group, that's also something that is immediately executed. Like, nobody needs to click any button. The person's just kicked out. That's that's it. So that's one of the cases where the software itself just takes action, basically. Yeah. I don't have any more. Could be there. Oh, yeah. Just to save Bruno's reputation, this is a screenshot of his actual food savvy group. As you can see, there's many more people with a lot of trust, and he has 17 people who trust him in his actual food savvy group. And, yeah, I think this is my last screenshot. What let me look at my cheat sheet, what I still wanted to say. Yeah. For for the future, of course, there could be much more additions, especially for the conflict resolution. Also, a lot of groups requested that that just kicking people out is maybe a bit, like, binary. So it could be cool to to just offer things like maybe freezing them for for a month or excluding them from this particular store where they misbehaved or, yeah, just, like, softer things than just kicking them out. But, yeah, that was the first implementation, and it still works quite well, I think. So yeah. Ah, right. And another idea that we had with the voting system, that's also why we called it issues in the sidebar and not conflict resolution, is to just solve other issues with it. For example, to integrate include more user roles, which also exist in the physical world anyways, like store coordinators, people who are, like, really feel responsible for this one corporation, have the contact to the store owner, for example, that they then have, like, a special I don't know if they really need other rights, but they would have, like they would be visible in the platform, and then you could also have, like, votings to decide who should have this role or people who take care of applications more. That it's just like yeah. That you basically have a good reflection of what's actually happening offline in the online world as well. And that this should, like, change dynamically and based on what the users do. This is what what the dream is and the question is how we can make this as, yeah, as easily, flowily happen as possible. Okay. I think that's it for me now. And then I hand over to Bruno.

Alright. Hello, everybody. Can you hear me and see me well? Because I haven't tested before. Yeah. It looks like it's okay. Thank you, Gina, for saving my reputation there. So I've seen there's some questions. I can probably actually answer one of them now because we will start giving, like, practical examples. And then maybe we can answer the others later, like, implementation, more technical details because I don't have a very technical profile. I I'm based in Gothenburg, Sweden, and I started here, like, the equivalent of food sharing in the city. Also inspired by food sharing as I was in Berlin just 2015 and and thought it was really nice and seeing all the problematic with the food waste here and also being attuned to dumpster diving and have having practiced myself. So okay. That sounds cool. So just a little background to explain how I ended up on and at least as a as a part of a group, as a user, and to give the the examples of how how it how it works around here. So what we do in our group is to save food. It's the base basically, the same concept as food sharing, and then we have we have these sharing points. So the project is actually called solidarity fridge, but in Swedish, of course. And we save food from stores, bakeries, restaurants, etcetera, and then we transport them to these sharing points to these so called solidarity fridges. When we started 02/2016, there was they I don't think there was a carrot. Correct me if I'm wrong or it was just the very beginning. I was very much focused into, like, okay, food sharing. I can maybe just take their platform. Let's check if it's open source, if something that we can use here. And for a number of reasons, it wasn't practical, it was in German, and so on. But then I got to know, okay. They're working on something similar for international groups. So we were one of the first groups that joined, and that's when I first got in touch with Yanina, I think through social media. I don't remember exactly. Or maybe I just sent an email to food sharing. And then she introduced me to Carrot, which by then, it was just the main feature of organizing the pickups, which I'm not sure if Yanina has shown in one of the screenshots. But Philip has mentioned that. It's, like, the main crucial feature for this kind of use case, which is saving food. So that's how we started. And then the it was gradually developed, all of the other features, which is chat and communication and so on. And then I can probably bring some examples of how we've been using these particular governance features, which is applications, how to accept someone to the group, how we give trust, or or how we solve conflicts. So here, from the beginning, it has on the application point, it has been very loose. We just wanted people to join. They started small scale, which refer refers back to another question, the question of scale of the groups, how to organize. Our group now is about, I don't know, a 130, give or take, members. It started with very few people. And, of course, we noticed the change in scale brings about very a very big number of challenges. Many of them include governance. So we are actually currently discussing the governance issue within a group and and and how to make decisions, and we are always striving to a more flex organization as possible, and trying to sort of decentralize and make people participate a lot in decision making, which is a big challenge. But back to the application, first, we just accepted people. Of course. They they wanna help. They show the interest. Great. We need hands on. Then, of course, we started the question with, like yeah. But we should be careful also not to get a new one. I mean, people should learn how to do the pickups, for example. So we wrote a text, you know, came up with a few basic rules, and we said, read this text. These are the basic rules. Do you agree with them? Fine. Come into the group.

we have been trying to develop this process of accepting new people. We're still doing that, and we are sort of the threshold is becoming higher and higher, actually. So now we're actually organizing for people to go on introduction pickups before they accept it and all of that because, again, we noticed that many people would join the group, and they probably didn't have a they probably didn't have a proper introduction, and that led to a different different problems, misunderstandings, and so on. So in that sense, it's quite flexible, the application, but the offline decisions, so to speak, is still crucial. Like, they are very, very much important. The same goes for conflict resolution process. We have very few, two or three. One of them was very straightforward. It was really one guy who behaved quite oddly, didn't connect with other people, started bossing around. And then another person with a lot of social capital, let's call it like that, within the group started this and had a very detailed explanation of what the guy has done and how it's completely messed up everything. So it was an easy decision. Everybody voted strongly kick off this person. Yeah. Does not fit the group. We had another more convoluted, complicated situation between two active members, two active people in our group, another conflict conflict resolution process, and and that required more energy and more also a process offline, as I said, to have a meeting with these people, with different people who were sort of involved and also some more neutral parts, try to figure out. But we ended up actually relying on the feature because we had this before the seven days went by. And it was quite interesting because people who were accusing this one person was they were very, very much very outspoken, had very strong opinions, and it seemed really serious. And, you know, usually, on on these deliberating processes when you have, like, assemblies, like, real meeting if you don't have a a very good moderation or something like that. It ends up that, you know, people who speak the loudest or people who take more time. Yeah. So sort of we tried to moderate moderate as good as we could in the real meeting, physical meeting, but I was surprised at the end of the process how many people the outcome was not as they expected. So many people ended up voting in a different way, so they sort of expressed actually, they used this opportunity to express a little bit more anonymously, but also participating in the discussion as well. But it didn't have been just that, like, the one who speaks the longest wins. So that was quite interesting, but it required us to actually adopt this formally that this is the thing that we are doing. Right? Because before, when there was no feature, we we actually had, like, an association and a board, and then we would decide on the board, like, if there was many complaints about one person, we would ex ask the person to take a pause and so on. That was our basic modus of around it. So so we changed to actually rely on this conflict resolution with carrots because according to to me, what I think personally is I think it's a bit more open to say that a board would sign a numb different numb number of people who can also be the subject of a conflict resolution. So, anyone could start that. And if it's really, like, baseless, it will show. So that was another example, practical example of a guy who just to mess around after the first conflict resolution that we had, which was this very simple and straightforward. There was this guy with sort of a joker in the group. Joker in the Batman kind of sense. The guy who just want to make jokes. And so he started one with the the same guy who was very much trusted in the group, had a very big reputation, and everybody just yeah. Right. Dismissed. Yeah. Yeah. Funny. Funny. So, of course, he had the trust carrots to do that because there's always this sort of danger. And then I want to talk a little about about trust carrots in the sense that we don't have we don't have anything in our group in particular very much decided, like, when should we give one give a trust carrot? This might happen even like, okay. This guy's nice or friendship token of friendship or whatever, you know, or just, like, giving likes on social media. That might happen as well. So there's really a lot of people who have trust Carrots. So, really, a lot of people who might mess up, but we noticed that people are not very comfortable with just changing and clicking around either because they don't know so much how to do it. It's maybe a question of usability, but also, yeah, because they're not very comfortable because it's transparent in a way your actions, they're recorded. There's a history there on the menu, which you can see. Or even in the personal profile, you can see, as Janina showed, the actions, every action of a person who has the person has added something. So I think that's also actually another governance feature in itself, the transparency. You know? It's something that, obviously, is not something that came up with. You know? It's sort of a Wiki type of thing. You know? But it gives accountability in a way. People see who's doing stuff. So you can you should be able to answer, you know, why you changed that, this, and that. So well, how do we go forward now in this governance with Carrot. We don't have answers, so that is partly why we we are here in the seminar and hopefully creating these nice connections with you so we can have future some future collaboration. But we have thought of, for instance, more graduated sanctions. They are needed. We identified this in our group. I'm actually using the words of Eleanor Armstrong or Eleanor Ostrom in their principle of governance for the commons. Because for many people, it seems very radical that we just kick someone out, but people do sort of fuck ups. And we identify that it would be nice to have some more graduated sanctions for people who do these mistakes and errors. And and so we need actually to design this new features. And this is just one example. It could be just simple plain voting on, you know, with no actual implement implementation. I mean, with no actual consequences on the software level, how it is now with the conflict resolution. It could be just voting on whatever issue there is. The group think it's it's important how to they they should organize themselves and then come up with, yeah, an outcome and something out of that. So we don't know exactly how to go what exactly to design, but we have a plan on how to go forward. So Nick and I have been recently trying to adapt the Google Design Sprint to this sort of community projects, which is a very different reality. It's not like a start up. Yeah. We're not people who are working with this full time or part time. So to get the users, the community engaged in designing, any feature requires more preparation or you know? Because for those who know the Google's design sprint, it's like the whole week, and everybody should be there, like, sort of full time, many hours, five five weekdays. So we don't we cannot do it that way, and it's a different context of a startup. But there are some good insights, good methods, and techniques that we thought that we can apply in designing these these features of these governance features. Not only, of course, major features on Carrot in general. We have been trying to to work in that direction of community involvement and participation to design them. And that's also how I ended up joining the Carrot team. So some very brief final words now before we run out of time for the future vision. Carrot now is developing we brought up this example of say food saving, but there's also a bike kitchen here in Gothenburg that is using carrots to organize themselves a bike kitchen. So open free workshop to fix bikes and also save them. And I'm wanting to work with other different groups organizing on saving resources and sharing them, which is based completely on volunteer work and self organized so that they can maybe see if Carrot is a fit for them and try to develop Carrot. We have been working on that recently to develop Carrot in more more of a general direction in the sense that it's not only for saving food, but, you know, what are the kind of target target groups or main groups that would be interested or be useful for? And then we think that it is grassroots projects that interesting self organizing, that need to organize maybe go from a small scale to a bigger scale. The bike kitchen, for instance, is using the pickups feature as, you know, to organize who's keeping the workshop open, and they use the communication as well on the different places, the chats. So it's about that different groups to use carrots that might be useful for them and use this to self govern more easily and also to operate in a sense more efficiently, maybe at a bigger scale. Right. I'm done with my part.

Yeah. Sure. I think Nick, already answered one of them in the chat. So I'll ask the other one, which was, so I think early on, Yanina described, Carrot as a progressive and kind of community centric alternative to foodsharing. De. I was looking through, the little bit of foodsharing. De that I could understand since I don't actually read German. But I did notice that you guys were admins there. And I guess, so the question is, do you have any evidence yet, about how outcomes differ between if you use the kind of hierarchical food sharing, approach and the kind of the carrot approach? Or any kind of comparison, I suppose.

I think it's really hard to say because the numbers are just so different. Like, compared to carrots, food sharing is huge. It has been going on for, like, much longer. Also, I wouldn't really say that we're admins on there. Like, we have been in involved on higher levels than just doing food pickups, but the whole organization structure of food sharing is just so yeah. I don't wanna sound bitchy, but intra intransparent and and big and and hard to deal with, actually. So there is a lot of problems in food sharing, actually, which I would say is very much due to the hierarchical structure. But then again, I also have an agenda, you know? Like, I'm already convinced that having grassroots initiatives with people who are on equal footing is just the better way. So I don't know if I can really be, like, neutral on this. And if you ask about evidence or data even, I I would I wouldn't say that we ever really went in into an actual, like, yeah, empiric comparison of stuff. Yeah. It's just way too different.

Makes sense.

Nick, you wanna?

No. Can't talk.

I think I would need to read the question again. I'm not sure if I quite understood this. Okay. The ideological component.

And maybe if someone else would like to get their interpretation in their own words.

Oh, yeah. Oh, actually, in my group in specific, I haven't seen any problem like that with people being very much strictly against this conflict resolution. Like, actually, I forgot to say, this is not at all about excluding how we put it so far in our group has never been about excluding people completely from the group. Like, you're

or

something. Should On that, before the the feature, in a smaller group of people who actually came to meetings. So we post all the people who misbehaved and then ask them to come to a meeting actually and try to resolve this. But now as we use the the current feature, it has also been in this direction. Of course, the person will be kicked out of the group immediately if that's the outcome, but the person can always reapply to the group. But, actually, we need more practical experience with that because we just had one clear cut case of a person who who should not be part of the group. And the the other example, the person was accepted. And the the third one was a a joke. So, yeah, there's not much experience there.

No. Hope I answered the question.

Oh, yeah. Definitely. So for one thing that is very yeah. That that's perceived as a very big threat right now in food sharing is people leaving and building parallel organizations. So people who actually do wanna do food saving, but who don't wanna be part of food sharing. And I so I've never been really myself part of these struggles, so I only heard stories. It's only based on rumors. But from what I gathered, it's always about somebody makes a decision. Say, no. Don't build a corporation with this bakery. We already have too many bakeries already, and you cannot just go out and contact them now. And then this other person being like, what? We wanna save food. Why can't I go out? Who are you anyways to make this decision? You know? So you have really these power struggles, basically, inside the groups. And then people saying, like, okay, fuck it. I will just go and do my own thing, and maybe I can even, like, take these cooperating stores with me. And then there's really, sometimes these these people hate each other in a in a way that is completely exaggerated if you ask me. But I think it's also maybe because it's all voluntary. So people who do this really, like, they have a passion for it. They they they they think it's a great thing, and they they wanna do it right, and they don't get any other benefit out of it than appreciation of others and appreciation for the from themselves because they're doing the right thing. So I think a lot of people get very emotional about this. And then when you're basically blocked by structures and you feel it's just not right, then, yeah, I think it's it's it's very hard. And in food sharing, you basically have no no methods to to demote people. Like, if you have an ambassador, like, the ambassadors are the highest people in the city, and they have really a lot of rights on the platform, they can see so many things and change, like, names of people's profiles or whatever, like, just an example. And if they just if they turn mad, for example, there's no way to to to demote them. It's they have to leave themselves, or you have to back for with the with the with the people you perceive as even higher ups. Like, it's always going up the the the ladder. And then hopefully somebody will hear you and and and and save everything, or you can just leave. So this is just really yeah. It's really sad because, like, when food sharing started, as I said before, nobody thought about these things. It was just a small thing and it grew so rapidly. And now it's yeah. I wouldn't say it's too late, but now it's it just grew like it. And it's very hard not to change these things afterwards.

the food