Disco Metagov
Speaker 1: We've learned along the way from our association with a variety of different organizations and friends and colleagues along the way, researchers, practitioners, theorists, and cooperatives, etcetera. So we draw from different realms, including the commons, p two p governance, open source, care work. I love that hanging k. Value flows, labor, feminist economics.
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Transcript
We've learned along the way from our association with a variety of different organizations and friends and colleagues along the way, researchers, practitioners, theorists, and cooperatives, etcetera. So we draw from different realms, including the commons, p two p governance, open source, care work. I love that hanging k. Value flows, labor, feminist economics.
Oops. Oh, so on the DISCO, just some bullet points for this would be the DISCO TLDR. Because we will have plenty of time for conversation, we can dig into to any of this. As we have said, it's a cute name, but it does stand for distributed cooperative organization. More than a pound on the decentralized autonomous customs, and there are reasons why which distributed and why we use imperative. We think that semantics are a form of code, and they're a form of relationality, and we do try to be careful and caring with them. This goes on.
Yep. A way for people to work together in ways that are cooperative, commons oriented, and tied to feminist economic principles with values nourished in small federated communities, harnessing the utility of tech without being completely tech centric, with mutual trust at the heart, reliable, enjoyable, collaborative relationships. And finally, this is the tech part that we're we're getting into more and more, That distributed ledger and blockchain technologies are only put to use when they're when these values and their resulting human relationships are formed. You wanna say anything more about that now or move into that later?
Yeah. It's I mean, working together with our cooperative, commerce oriented, and feminist economic is doing and doing with others, they were doing together. It's not just throwing a bunch of code together that will channel people like the who was the sheep person, hardly grading.
Oh, I know. Oh, I know what you mean by the
term of the name. You know, without resorting to cheap cheap metaphors, code is very good, but it usually translates the value of the culture creators or of the investors of the code. So in programming, as we come from economics, one of the foundational texts is Marilyn Waring's What if Women Counted? So over here is What if women designed the economic protocols for the new economy? And by women we basically mean the others, and people that have been invisibilized, others, disempowered, etc. Why cannot they have their value on their life experience be reflected on code and all the algorithms that may govern our our economic life? Move on. Move on. So this code's DNA is combined with forming elements. We don't know if it's a good thing, so we can present in this with slightly different worlds on pictures.
We're gonna assume that some people know some of this, but not everyone knows all of this and certainly doesn't know DISCO. So the idea of the comments in p two p comes from time we've spent working for with and for a variety of different organizations. So comments, for anyone who may not be familiar, are self organized systems, stewarding to meet human needs while leveraging the power of networks. There's a lot to say about about a a commons or how the commons works. But basically, commons has people, rules, and a resource. The rules around it can often be some kind of a governance model. The resource can be all sorts of things. We see a lot of them online, things like Wikipedia, obviously. But there's many many other types. And the people. So in in our case, it's a cooperative. More to say about that later, but open co ops.
Open co ops, we'll talk about in a minute. It's something that emerged in parallel with a very well known platform co ops, but actually came from this meeting between the worlds of open source, the commons, and the corporative and social economy. Of course, there's there's a lot of overlap with platform calls. I'll I'll see in a minute. Open value accounting.
Open value accounting kind of does what it says on the tin, enables value sovereignty by rewarding mean of meaningful contributions to projects rather than wage labor. We'll probably get into this a little bit later, but we, we have three streams of work that's done in a cooperative, called a disco, which would be livelihood work, love work, or pro bono work, which is has many purposes, but supports the community, and care work, which is the often invisible work, behind the scenes work that people don't necessarily name and don't necessarily acknowledge. We we blend these and we make them visible. It helps open conversations about accountability, responsibility, participation, but also about what it is people want to do with their time, what's important, what what they value.
This kind of measuring, this accounting or and care work especially ties into feminist economics. And apart from the gendered, aspects of of economics and the privileges and biases that we that we see filtered down from mainstream economics into crypto economics, DLT, fintech, to me, fintech is kind of like the little cousin of economics. You know, it's it's it's it's a bit more limited. It tells us again what is the others counted. And the technology, the open value accounting is a way for us to implement these feminist and commerce oriented oriented principles into governance models, which are highly adaptable for and above. Cooperatives, social solidarity economy, community land trusts, nonprofits, philanthropy, blah blah blah. We just keep forking these models for different situations where cooperation takes place, whether it's in the marketplace, academia, overlanding, etcetera.
So from platform to open co ops to discos. Not much more to say about that. Discos arose from a community of practice, the Guerrilla Media Collective, best known for the commons oriented translation collective Guerrilla translation. The tiniest bit of backstory there in around 2014, the two of us started Guerrilla translation. And we didn't only start a translation collective among the two of us. We always envisioned it as a as a larger group, and it took time to build the group. We wanted to do things, in a very particular way that also included the authors, included the the readership, networked in a different way than just a traditional translation agency, and also provided more opportunities for translators to work if they were activists on subjects that they cared about and to also build an open knowledge commons in the form of pro bono translations for two language specific blogs. The purpose there was to give everyone a chance to to promote their work also, but also promote causes that we all felt aligned with. This grew and we began to also do work that was not translation anymore, but we found ourselves doing some more media related work of other types including design. So out of that came more and more of a focus on how we operated, not just what we did. And that's when we began to refine the model away from simply the the translation and the media collective into disco itself.
So, ask when I'm already being the MC, I'm the DJ on some big channels. So from co ops, platform co ops to disco, there's a history to corporativism before it was codified not only by the rock tail pioneers, and you could talk about the iric white federation. They have their own recording style of what we would argue as cooperativism. So without getting into primitive communism, etcetera, but, obviously, there are many ways to skin a cat Ouch. Just don't do that. Layer your cake. Yeah. The seven core principles which you may be familiar with are What?
Open and voluntary membership.
Democratic member control.
Members economic participation.
Autonomy and independence.
Education, training, and information.
Cooperation amongst cooperatives. And concern for community. So here, you may notice that there's a lot of love and care towards the members, but, of course, economic activity affects more than the membership of a cooperative. In economics, you're talking about value flows, you're talking about partnerships, etcetera. And autonomy and independence, we like to talk about interdependence, but not only as a philosophical concept, but as a software design principle. The sixth principle, cooperation among cooperatives, is one of the things that we work on the most and are working on more actively. And consent for community. And here you see a change in the language. It went from the members of the community and cooperatives, you know, and federated to community. So the members of the legal members for cooperative and community. So we're going to explore some of those
Just to be just to be clear for anyone who may not be aware of this, these were preexisting anything to do with us. You may have made mention of that, but these are the already existing seven cooperative principles that stand as pillars for cooperatives.
This is the LG server. Yeah? Yeah. So we got classic co ops.
Work around and worker control.
Fast forward a hundred and fifty years later hundred and seventy years later, sorry, on the platform co ops. Platform co ops?
We've got the digital platform, and this has its own economy.
Concurrently, around 02/2014, we have open co ops.
Probably deserves a little bit more explanation, but they would have a commons goal, social goals, and using open source principles.
And with that, we are left to the seven disco principles. They do not come to the knowledge in any way the cooperative principles, but to footnote them. We we like writing together. I like footnoting. I like that. And so these seven principles add to the already existing legal structures and constraints that cooperatives and cooperative law changes a lot from legislation to the legislation, but the intent can be reflected on the original principles. But are they being followed through? That's something that we can we can get into. So the seven DISCO principles are additional constraints and guidelines to make sure that you're kind of like walking the talk of what we perceive is the intent and comparatives, which is the commons. Receiving the legal formation of comparatives, we have the act of commoning, which is often legally vernacular. It takes place informally, etcetera. And by commoning, I want to distinguish between commons as envisioned by Ostrom or Analise, and here's our dog, and commons based peer production. In a traditional commons, as per Ostrom's principles, you have clearly defined boundaries. Do you have clearly defined boundaries in Wikipedia apart from linguistics? And what is the Wikimedia Foundation doing about, you know, in requests to data access compared to some of our don't be evil friends like Google, etcetera. So all of these conversations are important, but, again, we think that there is this big confusion between a common space peer production, which is common space, but it's not a common. It's a in fact, it could be a federation of common as we see. So the certain principles.
Oh, okay. Yeah. Sure. Oriented towards social and environmental ends.
So we we can we'll get the principle and then we'll do kind of like the streetwise translation. Walk the talk. Be ecological in your statutes, not just in making your b corp, etcetera, but actually measure. Most economic activity is directed by Graven measure. So Mescher, those social and environmental ends, but also be concordant with those, you know, the stuff that's unmeasurable, which is values. And from values, we go to value. How do we distribute those values so it's not just the members of the cooperatives or the cooperative movement?
Multi constituent in nature. You continue. I got distracted with the dog.
Oh, yes. Anyway, the dog is a member of the call, obviously. I'm I'm sorry to cut. So this is based on the model found in Quebec, etcetera, where you have four kinds of stakeholders, also first shares. So for example, instead of privatizing health care to a for profit entity or Blackstone or something just as ridiculous, you would give it to a call. Part of the vote will go to maybe the government if they're putting the funds or maybe the city if it's an institution as in the evergreen model and the Preston model. It can also be the doctors, it can be the patients, and it can be the family members. So this is when we say that economic activity is still so wrong beyond the economic entities which are having direct transactions.
And that's important when you start to talk about the active creators of commons, but also commons in general. Because when you talk about the impact on a community, you also I also remember the word extraction or or or what's the other word I'm
thinking of? When when something is not
taken into account, but it's not taken into account, but it's exploited.
Commodification, enclosure.
Enclosure. This idea that, that that something can be written off as just a cost of doing business, but it may have great impact on the social or environmental mental community. Active creators of comments, part of what happens here is that you create a resource, but you also protect it and you also have a community around that resource, whatever it is. So this is a bit more of a flow with the community surrounding the the entity, the economic enterprise. Transnational in nature, this is something where there may be did you wanna continue anything further about the comments?
Oh, no. No. I was just not sure in nature. Sure. Go ahead. We're we're international, Amari and I.
Yeah. We're transnational.
We're transnational. No. This this gets back to, we're older than we look, in the mid to late nineties, manifestos written by former Grateful Dead lyricists, etcetera. Were inspirational to us, and I think that all of us of that age have suffered a different disappointment. And Halberian, chief economist of Google, as our colleague Dimitry Glena reminded us and told Google that what we need is lockdown. And what we have is web two point zero and the commodification by capital of web models. And that's attention. And, you know, we think that there's good intentions, but to us, the topology and the ideology of the web is best reflected by cooperative and or nonprofit legal structures. So Wikipedia would be one of the former. It's one of the latter, so we are incorporated as the former, which incidentally, we'll talk about our legal structure later. We're a nonprofit, socially oriented co op, and we're simultaneously setting up a foundation with folks from Mondragon, Tazebay, and other discos and co ops to activate this. So, you know, in the declaration of independence of cyber space, you know, we reroute our own problems. Well, governments have become problems, surveillance has become a problem, the big five, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook have become big problems. How do we reroute? We create new highways and byways with our own technology, which is transactional. And we look at the legislation. This is not a call to, like, let's just go crypto without economic transactions. We think that is a lot more nuanced and complicated than that. But we can create solidarity networks. Talking about the big boys in Silicon Valley, three years ago, the market cap of of the big five was similar to the annual turnover of cooperatives worldwide. Now with COVID and other things, our friends, Jeff, Bill, and I was running off a bit now, actually have the edge on cooperatives, but we've almost been there. And during economic downturns, normally, cooperatives thrives. During COVID, Silicon Valley has thrived. And, you know, cooperatives haven't done too badly, but we can see those changing tendencies. The next one?
Well, we'll send it out send it on care work. The idea here is, care for the members, care for the community, care for the collective, the entity itself, but having a a broader look at impact and recognition and and validating and visualizing, making visible a lot of the invisible work that goes into almost anything that has an economic nature.
So that's a new flow of value that Marie has spoken about.
This is yeah. The the idea of having different different streams of work, and we'll talk later. I think that we must talk later about how that's remunerated.
We can go into it. This is a bit more geeky economic design part of Tesco. But, again, it reflects common principles and, feminist economics. Finally
They're designed to be federated.
That's six comparative principle, cooperation among co ops, some would say social solidarity economy, and those people who are, you know, trying to conceive of a better world in this cyberpunk post apocalyptic juncture. They decide to be federated not just because you frame the comparative principles and you look at them with wistful aberration from time to time, but we actually have the structure, not just the culture to ensure that we cooperatives worldwide can be an economic counterpart. Well, that not just an economic alternative, not just, more ethical consumption alternative. We believe strongly that production plays a key part in this. And now we may have the ways for that value neutralization to reach critical mass. But again, we want to talk about care work. In cryptoeconomics, feminist and ecological economics have a very large absence in movements that talk about distribution and liberation and distribution of power, etcetera. So that's the the federation stuff. For more on this, we will show you some of our publications in a minute. But this does not take place in just our research petri dish isolated from the world, but through actual disco
labs. So there are people who have approached us and also people we have approached to, to make first attempt at implementing this model in their own groups, whether that means taking an existing cooperative and discofying it, or from the ground up, simply learning how to be a cooperative and how to apply disco principles at the same time. What's listed here are a few of the groups, including the original Guerrilla Media Collective, but every day there are more and more people who are contacting us all over the world, basically, saying that they want to become a disco or they're operating as a disco, and we're in the position now of needing to reach out and, cooperate, more deeply with a lot of these folks to, to get a handle on how they're making the adaptations, to see how they understand the governance behind it. And, yeah, I think we'll be updating our list of labs, pretty regularly.
On the DISCO mothership, which is the organization, you know, we hold the domain. We put the staff together. We're deeply dogfooding. I guess you're all familiar with the expression, but it's eating your own dog food, testing software in yourself. This is not just software, but cultural practices, etcetera. We have a good problem, which is we do not have the cognitive capacity and resources to attend to all of the labs, yet at the same time, we like to grow slow. When we try to expand too fast, we miss that care work dimension. And we get back to our relationality, which is based on codes and protocols and algorithms and maybe smart contracts that self execute without human involvement. We don't want that. And what we do want is time, and time has been the greatest thing that has been commodified and accelerated since the industrial revolution and now going into almost singularity like proportions without the luxury automated communism nowadays. So these are the most active labs and, from Gorilla Media Collective to the disco core that we'll talk more about. Corporation of Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi, Laneras who are in our village, multi talented makerspace from Zimbabwe, and from the Basque Country and the OG disco and Jameson. So the seven principles, we'll just go through them. Oops. You know, we'll try and research. No. We won't resize these pictures because it's. But through the magic of highlighting, we will have, like, Superman X-ray eyes. There's no lead in the screen. Maybe there is in the materials, but value based accountability.
So in Discos, production is explicitly guided by a need, including social and environmental priorities. This orientation towards positive outcomes is at the heart of DISCO's values.
So here you see La Meras, where they produce, Marino
Woah. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, based on the merino tradition of Western Spain and practices artisanal practices that have been lost, you know, during the twentieth century. They rebuild and they open source machinery using traditional methods. There are neighbors, which is no small thing. Second
So building whole community governance rather than risk rather than restricting democratic principles to one organization, DISCOs extend rights of ownership and decision making powers to all those affected by a DISCO, neighboring communities, backers, suppliers, clients, and those who perform affective and reproductive labor. And this this this just maybe deserves a bit of an asterisk because it might get into a little bit about how we how we relate to or seek to relate to funders and other benefactors and talking about the the power relation, between those who can provide and those who can benefit, in that kind of way.
And, again, all of this comes from consent, if not consensus. And we do have a problem with with consensus because we do think that it's normative. I mean, just people talking to each other and communicating. If you boil it down to algorithms with preset decisions, you are playing, you know, choose your own adventure. And so let's have a role playing game. Let's have a lab. Let's do this for real. Whole community governance doesn't, you know, means that it's not twenty five percent one stakeholder, 25% another stakeholder. It's dynamic. It's dynamic. It has to be. COVID has changed our world or maybe, you know, like, the apocalypse reveals what is really there. It has shown it has flashed the the height of clarity on some of the shadows that we're already done.
That's our time going with the presentation.
I think that we're about to wrap up. Just go through the presentation. Sure. Sure. Sure. Okay. Again, we're not sure how familiar you are with this code. It is complex, so we just want to touch on the on the main points.
So we're active we've mentioned this a few times, active creators of comments. Diskos actively generate decommodified open access resources like infrastructure, knowledge, design, code, you name it.
We're thinking global local economics against both transnational means. Physical production is kept local while knowledge, resources, and values are shared globally with other discos. So, for example, fab labs and makerspaces, they share globally, but they produce locally. And they can produce even more locally, and they can we can have open source designs that also thrive from the specificity or where they're being manufactured or additively manufactured. And these are things that we're looking at, but also has to do with the artisanal tradition and cultural traditions, which are non explosive folk tradition, like, walking with the land, etcetera, and maybe even permaculture. The real translation had a comparing different look. The south thing global print local where we released an open source book online that we translated.
Long story. But we we we translated it in Europe, and it was simultaneously printed in a number of Latin American countries.
I recently did the same with David Olia and Sophie Helvetis and Free Fire and Alive. Mhmm.
Move on.
Let's go. Yeah. What is up the commo?
Yeah. So DISCOs are living entities reflecting the values of its members, which need care and attention to maintain their health and the well-being of the persons working there. Beyond individual members, DISCOs extend the notion of care work towards the collective as an entity represented by the upkeep of its goals and values. This boils down to we care for each other. It's an intimate type of relationship beyond the typical workplace. And we care for one another as individuals, but collectively, we also care for the organization and do our best to be able to witness, observe, and discuss the health, whether that's economic or or otherwise vibe of the whole the whole disco.
This was something that's here. We are first French speakers of that. One of
our one of our members is
So here's a mix of open source and proprietary tools and how we relate with them, etcetera. And we go to principle number six, which is
We've mentioned this about reimagining the origins and flows of value, that it isn't just one productive, stream of work. We've got reproductive work, but also this love work component, which often takes the same form as the livelihood, but simply produces a commons. And as a side, it also, helps, promote what what kind of work the disco may be doing.
This can change from disco to disco, but in something like a video translation, livelihood work and love work is the same thing. It's translation. And it's an asymmetric because you measure it by work. This is productive work. Care work is reproductive work. It's like, hey. How are you? And, also, it's care work for the collectors.
And it's also, hey. Can you pay that bill?
Yeah. Because what's normally called admin, a lot of the times, is invisibilized. You know, you may have, like, a management layer that is privileged or underprivileged. Privileged. Yep. Okay.
Final. I
would like when when you hit me, it's
like Yeah.
Yeah. I'm giving
them the tap on the knee because I'm worried about the time.
So, yeah, this is supposed to be
Prime for federation. DISCOs replicate through a standard federation protocol that allows critical mass without regimenting all parts examples.
Corporation Jackson, they have I really encourage them to look them up based on Jackson, Mississippi. They have several projects going on, and Cisco can be the way to to tie them together. The next big thing will be a lot of small things, or as David Lean would say, you know, large scale problems do not require large scale solutions. They're requiring a lot of small scale solutions within a large scale context. So the small scale solutions to us are commons with specificities or discos, which are limited to 15 or 20 people within a large scale framework, which can be commons based peer production to go back to this distinction between commons, you know, the things going on with the people that recognize each other, whether digitally or not. Cognitively, you can talk about dumper numbers, but I think that we are too spread out on the Internet. And if you're going to work with a crew, that should be around fifteen and twenty. We're fine. It depends. After that, you lose their relationality and you get more into protocols and commerce based preproduction, which is fine. That's federation. It's knowing where where
to stop. Knowing where to stop is really important because when a group gets too big, the the the relationships break down.
So And another word famously absent from the blockchain space would be sufficiency. Enough. And they're nice words to to have around, especially with the ecological crisis that happened.
Well, here we are advertising our own second publication, the second out of three that that are planned. So the disco elements helps anyone understand the more practical ways that we've taken, as approaches to building and maintaining any disco. Although we started with the disco manifesto, which we also recommend. And that's it.
Disco Corp are organization, prototypes, interoperable forms of ownership, governance, entrepreneurship, and value accounting. And entrepreneurship, getting back maybe to the Greek origins of the world, not to the enter enterprecariat situation that we see nowadays. But, you know, to that that driving spirit, but doing it with others and doing it with the conversations that make it happen. To
Yeah. The the one of the main aims is to build radically fair workplaces.
So what is the future of work? This cliche question to us instead of the cliche answer, which is automation or basic income governed by our friends in Alphabet or someone else we don't know, it's restoration. Meaning restoration of our relationships to each other, our economic relations, our relationship to the planet. We are of the planet and we are with the planet, not, you know, this species so smart that they have to name it twice that just explodes the planet according to the wrong criteria. So who's dancing at the disco? Most of
this is most of our present groups in part. So this is a few of us from one group, a few from another, but, yeah, these are people
who contributed
to disco.
Yeah. Disco.co took us out. Disco manifesto. Here's the website. Do we sign to our newsletter? I would think that's I think that it's one of the best newsletters in the web, and I can't say that because I don't write it. I don't write it. The disco cap does.
I can't say it because I do it in part.
Social media. Twitter or Slack platforms. You've got the disco co op, Telegram, disco wire. Masterdom is where we'd love to hang out with you most. So at this call coop and underscore at social coop. If you're familiar with Nathan's work, etcetera, I'm sure that you're in social coop. And just write to us with good old email at hello@disco.coop. Every month or so, we do an AMA. Those are community calls where people get to ask the staff and we get to hang up. We don't have the capacity to do so many individual calls. So if you write to hello@disco.com, we would ask for permission to add you to another list, which is the one for the for the community calls. And that's the lonely disco ball after COVID. I know that we can I mean, we live together as you may have worked out? Yes.
I only wanted to end by saying that we we may have gone through this very fast. I'm sorry if if it was kind of a a a high speed train on a slow track, but we've also just finished our very first in person meeting with one other cofounder team member of, disco coop. And, we've been talking through a lot of this for the last five days. So, a lot of this is kind of coming out very quick, but, yeah, we'd love to to hear some feedback or the the question that I had in mind. Let's go back to the video.
Yeah. Let's let's see the faces again.
The question that I had in mind is if anyone has, had experience of of some of the things that we're doing in terms of, helping others adapt governance models that that are central to, to a cooperative or anything related. Anyway, thanks for your time and for listening to the presentation.
Thank you so much. That was so much great information, super inspiring. I wanna give folks a chance to kind of respond to the question you ended with. But otherwise, we have tons of questions in the chat so we can we can get started on those, as as people think about that provocation. I think one of the first kind of pieces that came out in a bunch of these questions was around distinguishing different types of work. So John asked how you distinguish care work from pro bono. Sargon mentioned that, you know, distribution of privilege across management or admin care work might be sort of artificial. So how do you sort of think about those, boundaries of different types of work?
The first question mentioned that I'm just starting to focus my peripheral vision on the chat here is about distinguishing care work from pro bono. That's actually pretty well distinguished in the, instances that that we've had of running two DISCOs now is that that care work really doesn't have anything in a sense to do with the the the the central focus of the disco. It isn't the productive work at all. So it's it's care work is a lot of the behind the scenes work between the people work, admin work, but also interpersonal relationship management, decision making, maintenance of, of a vibe in a sense of of a common common view. All of the work that goes into making sure we're on the same page where pro bono is we're producing perfect example. We're producing this translation of an author who has not been shared in this language before, and the author doesn't pay for it. We're doing it pro bono to build an audience for the author and an audience for our blog and to to open the conversation on what we think is valuable information that may turn into paid work because we may get a book deal from it. That's what has happened in the past, for example. So pro bono is is is really much more related to the central productive work. Anything to add on that?
Yeah. Sure. The boundaries are not clear, and that's key because how do you set the boundaries? And this is a question that each group has to ask itself, which this call has to have a conversation. We can help you I mean, this is, again, a cliche sentence. There are no answers. There are better questions. We can challenge you with a lot of questions, and we can show you our answers. And they're not the same answers as two years ago or three years ago, even though they have a similar thrust. And that's part of the thing. Again, I wouldn't be qualified as a Marxist, but, you know, when they ask Mars, you know, what does upper class communism look like? It's like, I don't know. As the working class, they have to figure it out. And as operators, we have to figure it out. This code gives you patterns or templates, not blueprints. It has to do with documentation of practices. So, again, to use Haifa as an example, they have a handbook. I think we're all inspired by inspired by Inspiral, which is better than Inspiral. But, yeah, by documenting these practices, one of the projects that we have is, federated disco weeklies, which are not are not federated weekly and the Lord Cunningham thing which is really is really exciting, but actually semantic wikis would signal each other. So say that I'm in one disco, and we have Artem and Ofer and Benedictine and Ofer. We do know Benedictus, and Artem might be the researcher. So imagine that we're writing about, I don't know, let's say, how to cut physical resources and how to put limits on the exploitation of intellectual resources, which may be culturally inappropriate to do so. So we're going to work together on non cultural appropriation license, which is actually like one of the one of the projects we have. We get into a conversation and we devise governance systems together. But if we want to talk, for example, a topic that fascinates me, the tensions between free remix and open culture and cultural appropriation. And we we throw out that it's usually around capitalism and exploitation and enclosure and also much about usage. So we get together on that and then we devise ways of governance and then with that's where the boundaries are established both within your own disco and in the way you you federate. Becoming a disco, we can talk about what it entails, but it's also about modularity and having plug and play economic and also conversant mechanisms to be able to to relate.
I see a question here, and I'm just going to quickly ask you to just drop the the GT URLs in the chat. Estelle had asked about examples of what we've translated. I'll just we'll just put the the links to Guerrilla Translations blog so you can see for yourself on a whole mountain of work.
There's website freelance going on, like, gorilla and our discos. So what you have in gorilla right now are two blogs. These are the gorilla translation newspapers, and they have been active since 02/2013. We've dumped them to to different domains. We like being around with domains. We think both domain speculation and domain usage is quite fascinating. So not assuming that all of you are exclusively English speakers. I'm also talking about a translation called ES for the Spanish translations. Another great newsletter. Another new newsletter. The commoner, not the not the journal, but very much related. Click
the chat? Yeah. Hold on. Here we go. Yeah.
Your DJ's a bit sleepy today. It
would be
coming from that meeting room.
I don't have to have any
If you wanted to join, I'm realizing we have way more questions in the chat than we're gonna be able to get through. So if you wanted to join our Slack group, I can send you an invite after. We can try to continue the conversation there.
Thank you.
Just a a note because I know everyone has great questions and and we only have ten minutes. I am going to shamelessly skip to a question I asked, which I think is okay because Zargav and Nick plus one bit. Around, you know, if there have been trade offs in implementation, whether technical implementation or otherwise, between any of the principles if that's sort of been a struggle.
No.
And Nick Nick added is specifically interested in trade offs between these principles and financial sustainability.
Can you can you repeat the second?
Trade offs between the principles and financial sustainability. Yeah. I interpret that as how have we had to compromise Yeah. In in any way. Oh, yeah. It's hard to start.
You keep that real. I mean, life life is trade offs. We do not have limitless freedom to operate, I mean, both from an ideological, but also from a social standpoint. So you have to trade off. And again, it's about
Let let me jump in. Let me jump in because I know you'll riff on the first one just about the general principles where we've had to go. But I I need to say this. We have been aiming for a long time to have fully functional, ready to go software. We don't have that yet. So everything we do is still a tension and a trade off because we're still working with some very diligent people within our collectives on spreadsheets, and we still have to have conversations month to month about what's happening. Everything is still very much in a an open conversation about how do we how do we get this done? So, that's where we're that's where it's at. So those conversations are kept alive and kept safe and sane through trust and having some rules around them.
Also, I know our generation of footnotes of where we come from. We come from punk rock. We come from doing things as we come from being impatient and angry and not waiting and just doing things in a in a scrappy way. And again, what if women count it? What if the others count it? Can we just pick up economic design that has not been made by feminists or by people who have similar values to us? We're not that interested. Nothing about us without us. So even if it takes long, we really do want to have some solutions which are more specific to DISCOs and which are tweakable enough for the specificities for the DISCO. Because being a DISCO is the seven principles. Those are seven challenges. How do you answer them? Sure. You can check out how we answer them, how corporation Jackson or multi talented makerspace answers them, but the onus is on you to provide the answers according to your social, economic, environmental, and values based context. And then you tell us about it, and we put it in a, you know, in a place where other people can see it not just as a database or not just as kind of like the fractal components of a of an algorithm, but also as a story. And there's a storytelling component. And really, if we want to break I want to start breaking into the mainstream, if I break the mainstream and create new value systems, relatability is key, and storytelling is key. And some people, hey, this is open source. Great. I cannot understand the code. This is gibberish to me. This happens to many people. Maybe you want a comic book, and that's fine. And we can have fun. And different people learn different things. This does not mean that they're any less, intelligent or able to to contribute to the conversation. So it's a lot about figuring out things together. Again, this is nothing new. This is the de facto, so, mode of social organization of pipettes since the last hundred or fifty thousand years depends on your own archaeologists. Sorry, anthropologists.
Finally finally, I'll also say to that point that we're also kind of interrogating that the seven principles among ourselves again to, to to simplify or to make them somehow more legible for new groups, but also to determine what what constitutes a new disco. At what point, do we say something is a disco because it's it's attained a certain kind of, solidity in implementing some of the principles? Are all of them necessary for all groups? How might some change? All of this is in play all the time. So, yeah, there's a lot of tensions and and, things to be learned and documented.
So as we have this fascinating questions, but I think that we're gonna refer to you, Divya. Okay. Yeah. You're more you're more familiar with the group on your dynamic.
I wanted to give folks a chance to respond to the question you posed at the end of your presentation in terms of whether people here have had experience with this. So Josh and and Zargam, if you were going to speak on that at all, I wanna give that priority.
Thank you.
Yeah. I mean, I was gonna point out a specific thing that you said that's been really relevant in my experiences, and that was around sufficiency. And for particular, I think I said this in the chat about separating constraints from objectives. So, like, in the organizations that I've worked in, really destroying the assumption that sort of a financial production function is an objective and treating it as a constraint really is necessary for interpreting it as a, as a sufficiency because you always have to stay away from that constraint in the sense that your organization breaks down if it doesn't meet its sort of financial sustainability objectives. But, like, if you envision it as a constraint, then sufficiency just comes out naturally. As you get away from the risk of hitting that constraint, the the primary purpose becomes the dominant kind of collective objective function. And I was just kind of curious. On one hand, that's how I deal with this in my organizations, and I've had a lot of success with it, but only at the level of small groups where there's actually a lot of a lot of technical expertise around which we can have this conversation in a very formal way and then agree and then proceed with that. How do you deal with it in a case where maybe the audience doesn't have maybe a formal mathematical optimization background that they can use to anchor the difference between an objective and a constraint?
Objection. Yeah. This is probably many of the disco interactions. I mean, in in our groups, again, we we insist in smallness and in relatability, but we have no audience. We consider that as other groups. So to us, it's like more of a mutual bidirectional learning process. And so we can talk to indigenous peoples and maybe they don't have the scientific knowledge, but they may have knowledge that we can go into, like, a scientific understanding of how to do protocols, which actually replicates some of the relationship dynamics, which frankly have been much better for the earth, than what we are what we're currently doing. And it's a process of, like, mutual mutual I mean, we talk about the commons from the point of Western academia. I think that's bullshit because those people who are closer to the commons are usually not in don't usually look like me, and we're not listening to them. So, you know, it's and again, like we say, like this call, it's science, it's magic, it's feminist economics. We like both things. We think that groups have to have to be balanced. How they relate? Again, if it's not an audience, if it's distributed cooperatives, which is of course what we would promote, we have the translation tools to relate. And you can also, like, consider most conflict as, like, ever since translation. We think about that because we're we're translators. So we're kind of, like, giving you, like, don't trust our translation. Here are the tools for you to make your own semantics together. And then those I mean, from ideals and values to language to semantics to code. Call this a language. And it's not a language that everyone can understand. So if you complement with storytelling and if you receive storytelling, you know, things get messy. That's also part of the beauty. Things will get messy anyway, so you might as well work on it.
There will be blood.
There will be blood.
Benedict, you've been putting a lot of great content in the chat in terms of experience with Haifa and other co ops. Wondering if you wanted to add anything before we switch over to Josh.
Yeah. Sure. I think I've been involved in several organizations that's going through this, like, tension in the startup phase where it there's there's also, like, quite a difference between, like, consult consultancy and product companies. With product companies, it's like so front loaded. One is like Meet dot coop. We're building like a cooperative SaaS. So this is also interesting because to operate a service, a digital service rather than building an open source product is quite different. You you need people who are, like, constantly answering emails, supporting. And so it's it's not something that a small group can do. You need a technical team. You need, like, a a a product team and marketing team. And the way that we are trying to address this is to have a lot of small cooperatives contributing labor to support this thing. So so even though we keep the local group small, we can organize, like, bigger scale global projects. But in the beginning, obviously, there's, like, a lot of culture differences that we have to sort through. So, like, that is some of the comments I put here. Early on, the most important thing is really just like let everyone speak evenly and figure out what people want. Then have a have a like, don't talk about anything else. Just talk about how to make decisions. And once something is decided, we stick with it and stop and stop, like, going in all sorts of directions and wasting time having too many, conversations that lead lead to nowhere. So so that's, like, some of the learning for this. Yeah.
That's great. Thank you. And I know the Medigap team is also, you know, thinking about these questions and so hopefully we can continue that in the chat. Josh wanted to give you a shot before we apply.
Sure. Last super quick question. So Mary and I were just discussing actually, we're actually here together in one place. Hi. I know. It's crazy. Right? It was a pandemic. But oh, by the way, yeah, we're in New York City. If anybody wants to drop in and hang out.
Oh, yes. I want to. Okay. Go on.
Well, please come. We're up in Harlem. But any case oh, yeah. I'll message you afterwards. But the so the question was how can we represent, like, some of the principles of DISCO in a kind of lower level technical framework that, like, for example, that we're building with Medigov and PolicyKit. And we thought, okay. So DISCO itself, like, these seven principles seem relatively abstract. They're kinda like, more, like, constitutional values. Whereas, of course, like, once we get down to the examples, you know, people do have to implement specific policies in ways they represent them. And we're thinking, like, you know, what kind like, maybe there's a way of designing a policy that kind of, like, is it like the variation between all the different discos you've seen and whether there's a way of maybe using software or finding some sort of, like, parameter, that these all these different sort of, like, examples share in common. But just in general, I just wanna put that out there because I would love to sort of, like, study or interact or just figure out some sort of pattern that all these all these discos share.
I think we we should talk to you and actually harvest some of those questions and get on with that because that's something that would be really interesting for us too. I don't think we've gotten anywhere near that kind of a level yet, especially as our software is one step forward, half a step back, one step forward, half a step back for the last few years. So actually, some of those questions are a bit advanced for for work for where we really are, but could be useful.
You have to figure out minimum viable governance and minimum viable tech first. And and keep asking yourself. I don't wanna call it Elon because, like, I think he's a super villain. I don't know, the component that you can take away is the best component. So how can we have like elegance? We talk about punk elegance and do both things. And you may have like, again, you take those seven principles and they are challenges. Our job is to make them as clearly articulated as possible in the language that you can understand. And when you feel obstruction, that to us is an invitation for creativity and for your own specificity. And that obstruction has been placed there very carefully. So because we're interested in your voice and your expertise your expertise is not our expertise. And again, to quote Bakunin, I trust the authority, you know, as an anarchist of the bookmaker because the bookmaker, she or he, is an authority in bookmaking. I do not trust and justify authority of the bookmaker to tell me to, you know, wear or not wear this clothes or use this language or send me to the Carlos because I've said something naughty.
But how did you get there?
You know, the history of people being here.
Anyway, I wish I wish I wish we were in New York City right now. It's my hometown, and I miss it. So I wish we could come and hang out in Harlem and have a coffee or a tea or a wine. But, yeah, thanks everyone.
This is also like a Gen X signal. You just, I mean, phone, you know, with me. Music.
Thank you so much. I know we're over time. I will send you the invite to the Slack right away so that we can keep this conversation going. This has been incredible. I wanna invite everyone to unmute and do our little applause. And then thanks everyone for joining. One, two oh, okay. Let's do it.
Counting is hard.
Thank you everyone.
I assumed consensus because we've been talking about it so much, but I
didn't You
hear the sound? Yeah. We'll we'll share, like, the last slide with the directions and links. If you can send us a copy of the chat, and, yeah, sure. Include us. We're we're Maramos in this way, but we can we'll go to Slack
to check.
Sure. Sure. That is
Yeah. Yeah.
Anyway, thanks everyone.
Thank you so much.
Bye. Bye.
Take care, everyone.