Zine Release Change Is In The Cards Governance Transitions In Open Source Commun
Speaker 1: Especially if it's your first time joining, feel free to post a little introduction in the chat so we can get a sense for who's here. Just name, maybe pronouns, and how you got here or some about the work that you do. Yeah. Welcome to Medigob seminar. I'm still admitting people, so we have a full house today, which is so fun.
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Transcript
Especially if it's your first time joining, feel free to post a little introduction in the chat so we can get a sense for who's here. Just name, maybe pronouns, and how you got here or some about the work that you do. Yeah. Welcome to Medigob seminar. I'm still admitting people, so we have a full house today, which is so fun.
Alright. Thank you, Val. Welcome everyone. I'm Nathan Schneider, professor of media studies at CU Boulder, also on the board of MediGov and a long time participant. And at CU I direct a lab called MedLab and we've been part of this collaboration with friends from MediGov like Amy Jong and Seth Frey who's who's been leading this effort where we we managed to get an NSF grant, National Science Foundation in The United States, to study governance in open source communities. And this research has involved a lot of different things that you'll hear about including assembling large datasets, doing doing data analysis, collaborating with leaders in open source projects, exploring just the nature of governance in these very online communities. And part of this project has been producing a public shareable artifact that we've used that that we've we've taken and and built in the form of a of a zine, a kind of community product created by the people who have been in in conversation around this around this project and some other friends that we've brought in. And it it it is anchored in the recognition that governance is not just a set of tools or mechanisms and rules, but it's also a mystery. And it's the mysterious side of governance that we really focused on here. And in order to highlight that, we turned once again to a longtime MedLab collaborator, Drew Hornbeam, who is an artist and an open source developer and also a tarot deck creator and a tarot reader. And so Drew has brought that tradition and that practice into, into this process and into this publication. So today we're going to learn a bit about, what is involved in this, in this beautiful, beautiful zine, Changes in the Cards, and we'll have a chance to hear from some of the contributors and also participate in a bit of a tarot reading ourselves. So to first of all, if you haven't yet, please take a moment to order a copy for yourself. We have free copies available. Starting this week, we're going to send that list of addresses to the to the printer and say go print these things off and and start mailing them. So please today if you could get your address in that form, we'll put it in the chat and order a free copy. If we'll also have now the links to the publication on the MedLab website and I'll make sure to to share that as well so you can print your own copies or just read it online, whatever is most comfortable to you. There are lots of ways to experience this this project. And and so this is this is a chance to to bring this zine out into the world. To to to further introduce what we're up to, I'm gonna turn it over first to Adina Glickstein, who's been anchoring the development of this scene, who has been a really, really central creative wizard in making this this process happen. And then we'll hear from some presenters, some of the participants who contributed to it, and then Drew will lead the tarot reading at the end. I think that's all for me. Thank you so much for being here, and I'll turn it over to Adena.
Thank you so much, Nathan, and thank you everyone for being here. It's really exciting to get to share this zine with a community of engaged thinkers around some of these questions of governance. I was trying to remember this morning where the idea to make this an explicitly tarot themed project came about. I think it originated in our desire to collaborate with Drew, who's been kind of a long time MetLab coconspirator, and who happens to make tarot decks in addition to designing previous publications that our lab has put out. But I couldn't remember exactly where the idea came from. And in retrospect, I think it's really sweet and funny because I'm a lifelong die hard cybernetic culture research unit fangirl, and the fact that we made this zine about the esoteric feels somehow fitting. But I should back up and, like, actually introduce myself also because I don't know everyone in here. I'm Adina Glickstein. I'm a master's student at the University of Colorado Boulder and a research assistant to Nathan at MedLab. And my professional background is mostly in arts editorial work, so the opportunity to work on a publication really made me tingle. And, yeah, our task in putting this together was sort of together both, like, ground level and more human data, about what people have learned from governance transitions specifically within free and open source software contexts, but also how those lessons could then kind of be extrapolated or generalized to wisdom for moments of transition in broad general. So in approaching this question, we look towards the tarot, which dates back to fifteenth century Italy. I didn't know that until we started working on this project, and thought about how this deck of cards has, for centuries, served as a sort of starting point for reflection or introspection. So we decided to consult the tarot deck for each contributor to this zine. We invited people who participate in open source communities in various capacities to to reflect, first, altogether in person in a sort of book sprint or a zine sprint, where the opportunity to contribute was time bound and they were asked to just create something really quickly, and then also asynchronously to some people all over the world who worked on their contributions over a longer period of time. And, yeah, we we pulled two tarot cards for each person, and regardless of their existing knowledge of the tarot, said, here, free associate. What does this imagery raise for you and how can you run with it to conjure some kind of wisdom or lesson, or even structure a case study about community governance in sort of transitional or pivotal times, in your software project, but also beyond it. So our hope is that the zine will be an open ended starting point, a forkable resource, as we've been joking, that can help people navigate different kinds of organizational growth or transitional moments, in open source communities, and beyond. So one of the things that we've sort of been thinking about throughout is this idea that making open source software is a way of collectively speaking new And both programming and community building are sort of forms of practical magic, or they're like speaking or writing new things into being. They're implementations of codes. They're sort of ways of casting spells in that sense, or writing magic words that do things in the world. So the analogy between writing software and divination or making magic is making magic is maybe actually not that far off. And if that's the case, then governance is sort of the stewardship or oversight of these processes, and we were interested in kind of demystifying certain aspects of that comparison while potentially also demystifying others because one of the lessons that you learn from studying governance is that people still don't actually really know how to organize themselves or that the more information you get, the more confusing things become. But in, I think, a kind of beautiful way that we were nevertheless able to encourage our contributors to glean some really thoughtful lessons and takeaways from, all in the spirit of helping people operate more effectively and group settings. So that's my intro spiel to what I think we did here. Nathan, I'll kick it back to you.
Okay. Great. We have a group of of contributors here who participated in in the process of of making this and sharing their experience and their and their wisdom. I'd love to start with Seth, who is really the instigator of this broader project. And, and then we'll turn to some of the others. Seth, do you wanna share a bit about where this this, this zine fits in, the broader work that you've done, and and what you contributed to, to this particular artifact? Absolutely.
First off, it's a wonderful thing. Thank you all for for for doing that. I had a role, in, basically kinda writing some of the grants, convening a meeting. In a way, I you know, it it it it's funny to feel any sense of ownership for a thing just because you were involved in starting to, like, kick it, like, down the hill even though the actual, like, snowballing wasn't done by by other people. But I do feel a little bit of that sense of ownership, and I'm really proud of this thing. I'm a professor at UC Davis, the Department of Communication. My training is in the science of the commons, which is a science of of sharing. It's a science of community. It's a science of people coming together to to do stuff together. We have, you know, millennia of thought about how to do this well. We have millennia of, examples of people doing it. One thing that's hard to do, just, you know every science where we study things, we study lots of it, I think, but it's hard to study lots of societies, lots of self governing systems, lots of communities. They're really apples and oranges when you try to compare them. But the online community gives us, the Internet gives us online communities as model systems for governance experimentation. And that's all my research is asking questions posed by people like Elin Ostrom, or Vincent Ostrom about democracy and testing them quantitatively using large datasets. Now open source software projects have turned out to be just this kind of model system. So I'll collect big datasets of GitHub repos or governance docs written by open source projects. And so to quantify their policy text, quantify their success, or or or, even, by by their own measures, to just test theories of successful self governance. Now, I do that with academic hat, but there's also my practitioner hat. I have a long history in organizing housing cooperatives and and the cooperative sector. And I always struggle that the questions I need answers to as a practitioner are really different than the questions I can answer as a scientist. And one of the one one one part of the spirit of of this project that led to the zine is bridging that gap. So getting our practitioners really in the room, really listening to what their problems are. It's it's been a awkward experience for someone who identifies as both practitioner or researcher to realize with a lot of these communities, the questions I could answer, the questions I wanted answered are just so different from the ones our our people wanted answering. And so I think part of what the the zine accomplishes is bridging that gap, which is really valuable to me, getting people I get to be collaborators with so many practitioners who who contributed, so that's a substantive and equalizing kind of relationship. And then the one that's been really profound is, you know, not all of my friends are nerds. So, they all have interest in all kinds of things, and very few people of my friends would raise their hands and say, yeah. I think open source governance is fascinating. As soon as I show them the scene, their eyes drop, their mouth start watering, and they start to think I'm fascinated by open source governance, which is something no paper I write could have accomplished. I'm really sad to say. And so to be a part of an artifact that can accomplish that magical feat is is, yeah, is really special.
Okay. Thank you, Seth. I'd like to turn it over next to Tara Merck, who was one of the participants in the in a workshop that Seth led at Princeton that was the genesis of this of a lot of the content from from the scene. Tara, do you wanna take it away?
Yep. Sure. Thanks, Nathan. So I wanna start out just like because I knew the seminar was coming up, and just now I got a little distracted in scrolling through the zine, which is amazing. I'm super excited. But, yeah, I wanted to start out is that actually you guys introduced the zine in the workshop with a zine. And I'm usually not somebody who will keep conference programs at home, but I actually like just just reflecting and also acknowledging, I did think the approach, regardless of the outcome, just the approach in itself was, super cool and something that really stood out, to me and that I wanted to give a shout out to. So, yeah, my name is Tara. I'm a PhD student, hopefully finishing up her thesis in the not too distant future around the idea of exit to community. So the idea of, you know, founder investor led sort of startups usually in the in the digital economy transitioning into something that is community owned and governed. So, obviously, I'm sort of interested in this whole governance transition aspect and got to work on a project together with Seth and Josh Tan, who I'm not sure is here, and now also Nathan Hewitt, who I see on the call, around, exit to community calculators. So under the same grant, which, you know, allowed me, to come to the to the workshop. I think maybe one thing that I wanna say that is interesting around the zine and also the approach of the tarot and how that fits into my work is with these exit to community calculators or governance transition calculators where which are obviously which are also online and done with Medigov, and I will post a link just now. The idea is really, can we create some sort of tooling that helps to anchor a conversation within a community that needs to make this decision of, like, hey. Do we wanna change anything about our our current governance structure? And focusing particularly on open source. And the idea really that sometimes maybe because this is hard, and right now as the zine also shows, it's there's a mystery around it. It's not always clear, so there's a lot of intuitive, implicit knowledge happening. Maybe these tools can help us make that explicit and make that a little bit more structured. And what I wanna say is that, you know, reflecting before today is, like, wow. The tarot cards or the tooling, right, that that did that at least for myself. And I think I did a little poem together with Liz Berry for the actual zine, you know, very much anchored that conversation of, like, what are we talking about when it comes to governance and open source project? This is very broad and wide topic as we just heard. And what specifically, maybe mostly also from Liz's perspective, do I wanna pass on in terms of my experiential experiential knowledge, of being within those communities. So, yeah, I wanna or I'm here to say that this approach, was really cool, the combination of the zine, and having the zine to introduce the zine, something I loved and something that, regardless of the content, I think is a is a cool thing to carry on forward and also now a nice output. This sort of idea of tools that help to structure conversations between people within the workshop and contributors, but also to elicit sort of some of the knowledge and experience that is usually maybe more implicit, the mysterious aspects of these governance transitions, and doing that through things like, the tarot was was a really cool thing. So, yeah, it was a big pleasure for me to be part of this whole thing and excited to have the physical copy, sometime soon.
Thank you. Next, I wanna turn to another contributor, Mallory Nodle, who is somebody who I've just been admiring for many years and whose work in open source and in tech activism has just been an ongoing inspiration and I was so glad that Mallory was was up for contributing to this, to this project as well. Mallory, can you share a bit about about what you, what you contributed and and where it comes from in your experience?
Sure. Yeah. No. Thanks so much for those kind words, Nathan. And like Tara, it was really my privilege and my pleasure to participate in this. It came at a really great time because I had just participated in a really hard to parse Internet governance meeting that was sort of put together last minute and happened in the Global South around a g twenty meeting. And I felt like the tarot was an exercise in interpreting what I had just gone through. And I I have to say that, like, you know, the two cards pulled didn't feel like they spoke to me and my reality. I actually kind of anthropomorphized or, like, personified the Internet governance community when I reinterpreted them. And just like a gut reaction was like, oh, this is talking about the larger landscape, which in the year 2024 and to some degree 2025 is actually reckoning with itself as if it were, you know, a 25 year old person. It, you know, twenty five years, it, you know, essentially if we think about when, you know, the UN first started to look at the internet, that was, in, you know, 02/2003, 02/2005. It feels like not that long ago. The internet was rolling for quite a while when that happened. It's sort of in the UN system. The Internet gets a review every ten years. And not the Internet, but, you know, the way that it's governed, the way that, you know, all these different groups work together, if it's network operators, if it's activists, if it's states. And so the tarot to me was talking about, like, where are we at collectively? What is the, psychology of Internet governance right now? How is it self reflective and how is it iterating upon itself? And so the meeting that I was at was something called NetMundial, and it was the second one. So it was a reflection on, the first meeting that happened ten years ago. And the reason why the first meeting of the NETMUNDIAL was important is that it existed outside of the UN system as a way to talk about internet governance, with all of the stakeholders involved and engaged and based in the global South. So that first meeting was really important, and it was very obvious from that first meeting, you know, where the Internet was going. They it was post Snowden, like, by a year. Everyone was aligned. The technical community, the activists, everybody was aligned against states, basically being poor stewards of the Internet. And so the statement that came out of that meeting, it was very much like a kind of unorganized unconference. Like everybody gets in their little groups and figures out what they wanna say. And then at the end, we try to put it all together. It was super cohesive. It was very strong. And the ten years post was not as clear, but I think the takeaway and kind of what I write about in my piece is like why it's still important to keep reflecting and why it's important to keep, demonstrating and exercising that muscle that yes, we can work together on a global scale outside Anyway, that was it. Thanks.
Thank you so much, Mallory. And finally, before we turn to our our participatory tarot reading, I'm gonna invite one last contributor to share a bit about the experience of of this, of sharing in the scene and also just, the the kind of experience that that she draws from Coraline Ada Emke, who is the creator of the contributor covenant and much else, leads the organization for Ethical Source. Coraline, take it away.
Hey, everybody. Glad to be here. The zine project was so much fun to participate in. I'm I'm already involved in a zine futurist future, futures project, so, zines are already on my mind. And, I have a long history with tarot, going back to my first dabbling in the occult at age, age 12 in rural Virginia. So, the tarot is very familiar to me, and I and, I love open source. So I'm like, yeah, I'm in. So, the piece that I wrote, the cards that were drawn for me were the two of discs and the 10 of wands. So, their two of discs is referring to hard work and hard work sort of as a burden. And the 10 of rods or the 10 of ones similarly is about overwork, having taken on too much responsibility and being burdened by it. So that made me mindful in the open source world of the majority of open source projects, which don't have any governance, provenance at all. They don't have, they don't, they, they have a handful of contributors and they have a single maintainer. That's, that's the majority of the open source world. And we can find that success in a world like that can be a double edged sword. In terms of the the extra burden that you have to take on. If you if you're wildly successful and your stuff gets adopted by a FAANG company, there's an additional set of burdens and responsibilities that fall on you. And as we've seen in the wild, adopters aren't too keen on supporting upstream maintainers, especially on smaller projects. So yeah, I wrote a piece that was kind of a second person narrative describing the ongoing woes of a successful single maintainer open source developer. So So it was a blast. I hope people enjoy the story. It's a little bit bleak, but my card my card draw was bleak too. So
Thank you so much for bringing your your your many lives and experience into this into this work. And and and thank you all who who spoke who shared just now and all who contributed to this this process. Now I want to turn it over to, to Drew. Drew Hornbein is an artist and activist and software developer, community weaver, and all those skills came together in this, in this process. So I'm gonna turn it over to Drew to lead us in in a reading. Drew, are you ready?
I think so. I hope so. I've been struggling with technology, so things might be weird. And that's exactly right.
Let them be weird.
Let them be weird. Alright. Let's see if I can do this. Hey. So I just wanted to I got inspired to pull out the old zine. This was the first one that we made, and there's some I don't know if you can see very clearly, but there's lots of different kinds of tarot decks. They go back many hundreds of years. Here's the the proof of the zine to get you a little excited about getting your copy in the mail. And here's the deck that we used to prompt people to to to make that to to make their to to tell their stories about transition. And so I wanna lead us all in a little mini version of that. But before I get started, what's if you have connection with the tarot, if you've used the tarot in the past, maybe you have a card that you remember or that you really love, or maybe you've seen the tarot once and and you and you and you still remember that one card. I want you to just put that in the chat. I'm curious. The I was very surprised at the tower. Yeah. I was very surprised with how easy it was to to take this, like, weird esoteric tool into a group of people that I would maybe I I projected a sense of, oh, these are material rationalists. You know? The people are gonna find this very weird and uncomfortable, but everyone really took to it. And I think like Nathan said in the beginning, there is a and has been repeated. There's a strong connection with sort of the magical ways that computers are. And I think I've always I've always considered computers to be or the Internet to be such a a magical thing that we don't, you know, we don't lay people don't get a sense of that. So while we get started, I I wanna invite everyone to just to take a nice deep breath, settle in a little bit, shake shake out your body if moving feels like the right thing. And don't think about a specific story, but just start to think about, like, transition, how you've experienced transition in yeah. Just the the maybe the vibe, the feeling of transition. And I'm gonna lay out for us a couple of cards. And one of the things that I I I think tarot's really well suited for is taking the unconscious and bringing it up into the conscious. I always say that tarot is sort of like a a mirror that reflects you. You're you're the mirror. It's the mirror, and you're reflecting on each other in this sort of infinite Indra's web kind of kind of way. And now as you're let me try and get these a little more centered. Hopefully, you can see you got me you've got my video big. Made big. Let's see. Yeah. There we go. Cool. Gosh. And I don't know if the if if the the lighting might be blowing this out, and that's all okay. So what I want what I want to invite you to do is, we have a card in the center, and it's fine if you have no idea what any of these cards mean. I'll I'll tell I'll I'll say them maybe I'll say them now. This one we have in the center is the three of wands. The way that the tarot works is there's four suits and then another deck of trump cards of of the major arcana cards. So here's the tower, which a bunch of people a few people mentioned. And
this is
a major arcana, and then the rest of these are minor arcana or the the kind of the little mysteries. They talk about the little mysteries. In the middle, we have the three of wands. Over here to the east, we have the six of wands. In the South, or I guess it's the North for you, is the ace of cups. On the West is the tower, and in the South is the ace of pentacles or coins. So it's totally fine if you don't know what any of that stuff means. But I want you to start in the middle and go in one direction. Look at look at the shape and the imagery of these of these cards, what you can make out over the video. And starting from the center, pick a direction, and those are your two cards. And just let's all take a moment to examine the the shape, what what you think about, what what comes up for you when you see this. Does it remind you of something? Do you does it conjure a memory? Does the process of choosing two cards, middle to one of the outside, does it seem challenging? Does it seem silly? Kind of weird? Just be with that and see and, like, notice what's coming up for you. And, oh, east west is reversed. Thank you. Yeah. I'm it's I'm totally I'm also very reversed right now. So so notice notice what's coming up, and then see if that can concede can be the seed of a a memory that that is on this topic of transition. See if you can you can notice these two cards and say, like, oh, yeah. This one reminds me of this one thing, and this one reminds me of another thing. And those two things put together remind me of this time that this happened. Take take a moment to maybe jot down some notes. Just consider consider what what surfaces as you look at these cards. And what we'll do is invite you to maybe put in the in the in the chat, even if it's just a a word. What what is what is invoked? And remember, you're choosing two cards out of this set, so we're all gonna have different seeds from the story. Just take a moment to think through that. Yeah. Thanks, Val. That's that's so perfect. Oh, wow. Adina, I I don't even understand any of those words. Centrifugal force, decatris, and torpedo. Let's see. Nathan, is it can can we invite some people to share?
Absolutely. Yeah. Great. Hope should be able to unmute.
So, yeah, keep putting putting things into the chat. Even if it's even I I wanna really normalize an invite. If this is if if you think this is, like, weird or uncomfortable, like, that is also true information. And it's, like, nothing's coming up for you. Also very valid and true. Yeah. Does anyone want to to take, you know, maybe, like, a minute or two to to share anything that's that's bubbling up for them? Nothing says open source software governance like a rickety tower. Yeah.
I can say, like, say slightly more about my what I put in the chat.
Thank you. Yeah.
Which is that one of the things that I'm I was thinking back to a transitional moment where we had a really great motivated aligned set of people all working towards a particular purpose. And we delivered on that purpose really well. And then we said, okay. Now we're gonna do something else together. And we just could not agree at all on what that thing would be as a specific set of people because we all arrived at that purpose, by going in but we were actually headed in different directions. And so the transition was yeah. There the the transition was kind of that realization. And what I I saw the what's it's the card for the left the card on the left for me. No. The the other left.
The other left.
Yeah. Where there's all those I actually you know, I can't tell really if it's, like, swords or wands or what have you, but the but those I'll just say sticks all intersecting there and then going off in other directions, and they're supporting one another maybe depending on how you look at it. But, yeah, that was my reflection.
That's awesome. And that fits a lot with the the this is the six of wands, and it's it's traditionally the the champion card. And it talks about, you know, the the group supports the champion or this group supports, you know, the the idea. And but the and, you know, and the idea is sitting aloft, but also it's the people supporting it that are that are also important. Anyone else wanna share?
I
mean, there's no one? How about how will we go into maybe a general reflection of we can we can start with how how was that process? I know some of you got it. You know, something it it it it something something connected in the in the we see it in the chat. Does anyone wanna reflect on this just in general? Yeah. This and this is this is the the deck that I created, and it does have a very Rorschach ink blot. But the thing is that these and I think what's interesting, you know, this is what's interesting about the tarot is this is my sort of ink blot, black and white interpretation of the cards, but there's but it's based off of someone else's interpretation in in other decks that I referenced. And then there those decks are based off of other people. So there's this iterative forking, very open source, the the the iconography and the archetypes that go along with these cards, yeah, are are are are are had been iterated over, and I'm just one step in that that iteration. Yeah. Maybe I'll hold all these cards up. Yeah. My whole setup today has been, kind of a mess. Is this upside down for everyone? Is this right side up? There you go. There's the tower. This is I had to go hard on on on the tower. And, yeah, ace of ace of ace of cups. And so you you can you'll you see these in the in the the zine. Alright. Maybe we can open it up to more general discussion. Is that is that what's next, Nathan?
Yeah. Absolutely. I'd love to, you know folks, feel free to put, put questions or or comments that you'd like to bring into the discussion in the chat. But, Drew, I'd love I'd love to hear just to get us started here a bit more about the the zines you're building around this deck and the the question of interpretation. You know, often decks come with a little booklet about how to interpret these cards. How are you thinking about guiding people in the interpretation of the deck that that you've created?
Oh, I so as a as a a project of trying to never finish this and and and avoiding any kind of success or completion, I'm making the most complicated booklet I could I could fathom. So this is one segment for the swords, and I've been I'm in the middle of illustrating it. And so booklets often are the the artist's or someone else's interpretation of the artist. You know, the Ryder Waite Smith deck is a good example. That's sort of your classic tarot. And, you know, Smith was the artist, and then Ryder and Waite, I think, wrote most of the interpretation. And I actually have Waite's booklet, and it's just incomprehensible nonsense. So in that in that, you know, to honor that incomprehensible nonsense, I've been making this these very complicated word cloud, word art pieces that I have been putting into zines, and I am just now I actually have a big stack of them right here on my desk where I'm folding them together and gonna turn them into this booklet. And I'm glad the swords was the one on top because it is pretty pretty well finished. You know? Obviously, I have some blank pages, but that's the continuation of this this deck is these, like, really dense yeah. This really dense booklet of of how I you know, this taking these very abstract cards and then putting my my interpretation of them down. And I'm about halfway halfway done with that, and it's in kind of yeah. Like I said, a totally insane process that I've I'm taking on. Let's see. Yeah. Was that so so yeah. And I and I've been I've been getting obsessed with zines, and we actually I actually brought the other zines that I worked with Nathan and and the med lab team on Sacred Stacks being one of my favorite if y'all have ever seen this. And there's a little like, here's here's a a tower in there. So the tarot has always we've been we've been leading up to this point. And, yeah, I I I find zines to be, you know, in this world where we have such everything's digital. It's really interesting to try and build tactile tactile things that exist and reference the real world. So, yeah, zines are cool. Thanks.
Yeah. I I think it's also really important to consider the way in which Taro has been a kind of governance technology. And, you know, there in in the course of working on this project, I, you know, in our chat, like, I've been putting all these references to things I've been reading about tarot, like, in our in our kind of collaborator chat, because I've just it's been so fascinating learning this history. This article, I thought, it's called the sociology of tarot by Mike Sosteric. And I I found this really interesting because it it it discussed tarot as a as a tool for a transition in governance regimes in in the context of of early modern Europe and the turn toward, the emergence of a new elite, and a new new forms of decision making. And so seeing Taro as a as a a tool for a a kind of emerging bourgeoisie as a as a means for people to to reorient how they make decisions together. You know, I think, again, the the it's not new to see Taro as a as a guide for governance. This is perhaps, you know, where where its origins lie in the context of a governance transition. Val also asked, you know, I know you just took us away from that camera, but Val also asked how you felt from the poll. Did anything come up for for you, Drew?
Oh, gosh. Well, what yeah. I didn't participate. I love the invitation to participate. I think this these two cards are the ones that are that are calling to me. You know, I have this artistic and and background and also but also a technical background. Like, I I am a a front end engineer and a recovering material rationalist. And and in in my activist days where I met Nathan, that was in Occupy Wall Street, and I was leading the the technical operations working group there. And the the transition that's been very present for me, the three of wands here yeah. Sorry. It's a little blown out. I you know? Gosh. I wish I had all this stuff a little better suited for you. So the three of wands is a card that describes finishing or or or kind of the completion, the return of a process. It's like you've gone out and you've returned, and you have all this this this knowledge. And and then the ace the ace of pentacles or the ace of of coins. I think coins should just make a lot more sense. This is a card that describes the base energy of of, like, groundedness of of material material stuff, you know, oftentimes money, hence coins. And the the thing that I've learned, the transition that I've been in is that I I learned all this all this in open source and and and following following the the the technology. I gave so much of myself away and and, like, learned a lot. And one of the things that I learned is that it is completely unsustainable unless you can take care of yourself. And I see that as one of the the biggest lessons in my activism and in my work in open source technology is that if we can't find ways of taking care of each other and the project itself like, we can't if we're not taking care of our our our own project, we can't take care of ourselves. So if we aren't taking care of ourselves, we can't take care of the project. So, yeah, that's that's my interpretation. Thanks for asking.
Are there any last, questions or thoughts before we wrap up?
Charles here. Yeah. I'll I'll I'll just come in and and underscore what I just put in the chat. I was kind of curious because I'm I'm I'm not very familiar with with Taro myself, but in inquiry and I Ching in particular is something that that I do have experience in. And just the the idea of stating some kind of of, either question or or or statement that's, guiding the the reflection as opposed to just sort of pulling the trigger, jumping in the pool. But maybe I'll leave it there. If there's anything quick on that, I'd love to pick up on it with anyone. Yeah.
I I just cutting out
the opposite. I guess as as someone on the material side, say, treating tarot as a pool of associations, it's almost like it's for me, it's almost the question There's something useful in the fact that let's say let's say I randomly generated ontologies for the world. The question is, can I still learn about the world? And the truth is just the act of hanging you know, facts and experiences on a structure, regardless of the specifics of that structure, reveals the things' relationships to each other, reveals parts of it. And so, pero as a pool of associations, as fodder, and, as, yeah, an impetus to to to start inquiring and is sufficiently, like, wide representation of human experience to make us draw pretty widely for our inspirations to contribute ends up being a a a a really, really nice device regardless of your deeper metaphysical commitments.
But could couldn't it be a yes and? I mean, they they're not mutually exclusive necessarily. Like I think to kind of focus and try
to exclusive. But, functionally, they're super they're super aligned. Yeah. I I I I think it's okay, you know, and and even good, that we have, like, processes, and we'll call this one of them that, that that take people who are different and help them come to something that's the same. And and so I think with different mechanisms for what's going on or where it's coming from, as long as, like, the the sort of effect is the same, which is that I drew pretty deeply on my own experience through the associations provided by the cards regardless of their tie to a deeper fate or destiny, just more associationally. And and, Drew, I really like the kind of openness you provide, to people of all epistemologies. You know, it's not too self deprecating to just invite these as mere associations for the materialist inclined rather than kind of more, necessarily having the kind of depth that that adherence have. See.
Rick, do
you wanna add something?
Yeah. I just wanna say how much I like the the the tarot from the point of view of unraveling the the mystery of the unconsciousness as a way as a mechanism for exploring that. And I just posed a question which we don't have time to address with while people are talking, I did a perplexity AI search on the question. I have no idea how good the answer is, but at least I I put something out there about how might the sociology of Taro inform the implementation of equity meta governance if people are interested in that for another conversation.
But I I think that's apropos. I mean, one thing I've been exploring with my students some some of this semester is the relationship between these these earlier tools of divination often used in centers of power, like, for instance, Chinese divination practices like Yiching and tarot, which, you know, emerged in relationship with with structures of power. And we're seeing that now with with AI. Right? Some critics, for instance, like Timnit Gebru have talked about AI as a stochastic parrot. You know, it's using randomness as part of a technique for producing what appears to be a kind of knowledge. And so the idea of turning to AI to talk about tarot, I think is actually very fitting. I think these these technologies have something to do with each other. And and so actually in a moment where we're trying to figure out what governance means in relationship to a technology like, you know, that falls under the bucket of what people call AI sometimes that turning back to things like Taro and I Ching are are really valuable. Thank you all so much. We're at the end of our time, so we should wrap up. Thank you to everybody who participated in this process. Thank you to Drew in particular for guiding us through that experience for all that you've put into into making the scene so beautiful and so so deep and and Athena for grounding us in your reflections and and then the the guidance and vision that you brought to this project throughout. Please spread the word about this, share the links that we've shared here with your communities, we'll send it off the addresses off to the printer probably tomorrow or later this week. So please, if you don't mind, share that for more Medigov seminars. Keep an eye on medigov.org/seminar and you're very welcome to join us in the Medigov Slack as well. Thank you all so much for being part of this and and we hope, you know, you you love this this this scene as much as we have.