2005-10-07

Collective Action workshop


much more could be done with the screen and code to help groups work
effectively together.

premise: the net has been very good at creating markets, but not so good at
letting people come together and act as a persistent group (hold people
accountable, collectively own assets, make decisions together about how to
distribute net proceeds of activity).

help design online systems (maybe avatar based, maybe not) to more effectively
act together (this is action based).

clay's framing: - let's say there's movie discussion group. you would go and
see a film you didn't want to see, if everyone else wanted to see it. the
group membership trumps the personal preference. [communitarianism: sacrifice
personal will to group will.] - very few ways online for the group to take
external action - there are some things we need: membership and roles; some
way to come to a decision (enumerating decisions, closing them down,
announcing the final decisions) - groups exist in a tension between the monkey
mind (which is good at being social) and the forebrain free will stuff - the
net has increased the ability for individual choice, and the ability for
groups to form when there is nothing at stake

question: - what happens when the communities are so fine-grained that you and
your local people are always of one mind. there is a unamind, the echo
chamber. [good point: "community" didn't exist until people could leave their
villages and choose between communities by moving.]

[it seems that, in real life, people can move between two states: you can
speak for the group, make assertions for it; you can speak as an individual.]

clay: people are grouping by affinity rather than geography.

different kinds of groups: working on a collective artefact (open source);
founded to exert their collective will, on something external

[i'm now thinking about what people risk by acting in their groups. in RL
companies, people get paid in advance from the anticipated value to the group
of their action. the payment is what's risked by not acting in the right
direction. in collection action groups, are people risking anything, other
than reputation?]

discussion now about how discussions get archived. liz goodman is talking
about what it means to have a completely instrumented office, home, whatever.
in one instrumented workspace, one rule they made was that if anyone ever
appeals to the authoritative record, the entire system is dissolved. in many
years, people have not appealed to the archive.

danah boyd: xerox parc experiment called "cobot." way of collecting and
data-mining communication patterns; the ability to query it destroyed the
game, quickly.

[the risk of not coming to a decision in a group is that the collective action
doesn't get achieved... but we're very bad at thinking of things that happen
in the future, because of the future discount rate. we have mechanisms in
place to make us feel the consequences of the long-term in the short-term, and
we submit to them willingly, like odysseus tying himself to the mast to get
past the sirens.]

[i'm concerned that roles, companies, etc online are cargo cult copying the
solutions we've hit on in real life.]

ben hammersley: how self-conscious of being a group are groups? corporations
are individuals.

[i'd like to think about risk in groups. people come together to do something,
and people - like tom said - will give away some of their personal will to the
group. you have to do that. the thing is, what do you risk by not doing that?
i'm not sure reputation is enough. coming together for a raid, okay, that's
fine. you risk not getting the payoff. but for bigger problem: what do you
risk by not quickly coming to a decision? we do risk the longer term goal, but
we tend to discount that because we're bad at thinking about the long term.]

[i'm not sure excluding people from groups is enough as a mechanism to enforce
people to toe the line. i suggest that we let people, ahead of time, bind
themselves to the group by putting up a ante: "i will pay 50% extra on my
monthly subscription if the majority votes i should." [hm, although this is
just a constitutional 'this is what the allowed punishments' are.]]

danah contextualised and throws out group definitions: - institutional
[school] - politics [everyone who likes knitting] - network [social, ad hoc]

[the mission for this group could be to design new ways to use the net to
enable groups. this feels like a total problem solving exercise: i'd prefer to
make a thing which displays some better characteristics.]

now discussing what the goal of *this* group is. to help a group advance
goals? to represent a group mind/state? to make X easier for groups?

[i'd like to have a templated group constitution, that can be instantiated and
applied like a creative commons license, by a group. so this would need a way
of acquiring it, voting records, punishment systems, ways of preventing
regular problems (like, it takes a billion years to write down the group goal,
and that's a problem), ways to switch constitutions. think of usenet as the
first place to evolve constitutions, as group constitutions, but they didn't
work, as we can see (because usenet didn't work). constitutions need to be
run, see if they work, change them. this is a legal nomic, for groups.]

[some ideas for where our group could go: what are the things we can only do
online? how about a group demon that can be anonymously possessed and chased
out? taking on a skin/avatar really changes the personality of the writing:
take advantage of that. it's possible to bring back shamanistic culture, the
group avatar possessing the individual.]

[i brought up my idea of the *telepresence ouija board* again. it's a perfect
example of a system where there are anonymous inputs but an answer has to be
reached. also like poker in that you have a mix between the optimal solution,
and the solution that helps the group persist (ie, the person who cares most
will inflect the solution towards themselves).]

[ideas to finish with: i suggested one tool to implement, in code, something
that is part of the constitution that is chosen. observing that, in star trek,
they always threaten to self-destruct the ship, and the problem always gets
resolved before the ship blows up, this mailing list would have a
self-destruct button. when you press it, the mailing list will be disbanded
and the subscriber list destroyed unless the decision has been made within 36
hours.]

clay, in his roundup, said that we need a way to raise the stakes of what's at
risk. social and financial escrow, a way of popping someone in the now. [over
lunch, i mooted that i would stop replying to email and using email unless the
other person had a functional stab-you-in-the-face-over-the-internet machine
installed.]