Posts on mixmix

Grublins

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Children are kinda messy, a bit grimey, and a little mischevious… like goblins. As our kids grew we had nick-names for them and some of these evolved into a developmental progression of goblin-ness.

Here are the phases I have mapped so far :

1. 🥔 Potato

When humans are born… they’re kinda par-baked compared to other animals, as in they’re not ambulatory, and only just aware of their environment. Some people talk about this as the “fourth trimester”. Somewhat uncharitably I call this phase the Potato.

2. 👶 Chublin

Your goblin is somewhat active and has started looking a little rolley. They’ve got creases part way down their limbs, big cheeks, and very little neck to speak of.

Chubby goblin → Chublin.

3. 💩 Grublin

Your goblin has moved on to solids. They make a significantly larger mess consuming food, and their output is a new level of nasty.

Grubby goblin → Grublin

4. 👹 Grumplin

Your grublin is growing a lot (which hurts) and they’ve also developed enough theory of mind to realise they can say “No!”, and just straight up defy your requests.

Grumpy goblin → Grumplin

5. 👺 Squablin

Higher cognitive functions are online, your goblin can now make reasoned attacks on your authority.

Squabling goblin → Squablin

(click to expand)

Personal Safety in a p2p Social Network

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I believe in a free and open web. Over the past 3 years, friends and I have been growing and shaping an ecosystem for that purpose — for many, it’s now our primary way of communicating. It’s built with cryptography and is p2p. The result is a system with fundamentally different behaviours than the old web. This is part of a series exploring the sociological and technological ramifications. I call it “The Medium is the Message: Cypherspace Edition”.

Speaking at a recent re:publica conference, my friend Rich Bartlett voiced his lack of faith in blockchain as a solution for all that ails us. Specifically, he threw this challenge:

“If you’re going to claim that your project is decentralising power, please explain it in terms of justice, rather than just efficiency and disintermediation.”

This got me wondering how our project Scuttlebutt, a decentralised social network, is any different from other hype. Most pressing was the question, “Can we guarantee that people will be safe from bullying and abuse?” If we can’t build a community which is free and open for everyone to participate in — if it’s a space where some people are sexually harassed, or receive threats of violence — then we’re wasting our time.

Our decentralised architecture certainly makes global spamming attacks hard, and data only flows along lines of trust. But it’s still technically possible for people to abuse others within our community, particularly if they have a lot of friends in common. In our history to date, we’ve only had a few incidents of behaviour and communication that run strongly against the community culture I want to support.

So how have we dealt with abuse?

Just kick them out

On corporate platforms like Twitter, Youtube, or Facebook, there’s a single central organisation with (essentially) a single data storage system. In that context, it’s easy for the owners of the system to delete content or users — in fact it’s their prerogative and, some would say, responsibility to do so. Most platforms have a “report” or “flag” feature which marks content or users for review/exclusion. This can be good, but also results in endless arguments about these rulings, since policing and judging fairly is expensive and difficult.

Companies like Reddit get around some of this overhead by being a platform for community-moderated ‘subreddits’ (channels for specific topics). Sometimes Reddit admins will still step in and ‘moderate’ user content, like when their CEO messed with Trump posts , which was simultaneously funny and pretty troubling.

As a federated network, Mastodon takes this a step further — communities self-host their own ‘instances’ of the platform, meaning there are many self-governing fiefdoms. Each sets their own rules and can kick content and people off their instance. It’s great because there’s no corporation shaping your experience, and you don’t need one policy to cover all the people in the world. The challenge is you have to be fairly organised as a group to set up and pay for the infrastructure, and to actively govern your space.

Scuttlebutt goes even further: it’s fully decentralised, with no single central organisation or federation of fiefs. There are only fully autonomous peers, each running the software on their local computer and making their own choices about how they want to interact.

There is no owner of any shared physical space or hardware from which you can kick a person.

This is the double edged sword of p2p social networks — it’s a space safe from authoritarian interference and it’s harder to assert boundaries.

Have a strong culture

As described above, this decentralisation might sound like total anarchy. It is, but maybe preconceptions have coloured your expectation of how this might pan out. In practice, what emerges is not that different to other networks — people migrate toward and away from conversations and people they want to interact with. We see ‘islands’ or ‘domains’ of community, which might be distinct, overlapping, or totally disconnected. It’s similar to the dynamics of Twitter, but while Twitter’s global space leaves it open for witch hunts and hashtag storms, Scuttlebutt is more localised and stable.

What is culture in such a fragmented space?

I can only talk about the parts of the Scuttleverse I interact with. It’s filled with open-source programmers, communists, vegans, feminists, sailors, and mycologists — and not capitalism or trolls.

The community space around me has something like emergent governance. When someone presents rough behaviour, it’s common for one or more people to intercede and apply some combination of:

polite inquiry and clarifying questions
assertion of what sort of interaction they’d prefer

This costs time and energy, and it’s totally worth it.

As individuals and as a group, we get the opportunity to:

check our assumptions, and (maybe) build connections with new cultures
clarify our beliefs and who we are
role model what respectful conversation and good boundary setting looks like

Our conflicts have advanced us individually, and as group we have built stronger relationships and are more skilled and articulate. I absolutely believe this is the fundamental and unavoidable work of community, and that community is integral to any human ecosystem.

This is all really cool and cerebral, but does this stop rape threats?

(Hasn’t happened yet to my knowledge, but it’s a decent question.)

information flows in a peer network

Block them

This is the feature I’ve just finished building. Applying culture only gets you so far — it can’t necessarily protect you from a malicious actor.

In an extreme situation, the things I want you to be able to avoid are:

being contacted by someone
being stalked by someone

The first one is easy to implement — you can just tell the interface to not show anything new from that person. What I’ve built actually goes further, by ceasing propagation of that person’s data to friends of yours not already connected with this person.

The second part is harder. We’re a p2p network, where messages are gossiped — how do you say things publicly and have them not get to that person? You tell your friends that’s what you want, and they respect your decision!

In programmatic terms, a ‘block’ is just another type of message which is gossiped. As soon as a peer receives it, their local setup effects the change and tops passing information about you to the person you’re blocking.

In a p2p context, being blocked means you have fewer connected peers, because the number of people gossiping your messages is reduced. Highly abusive characters might find themselves enjoying just the freedom of their own speech, alone.

The Medium is the Message

Marshal McLuhan coined this iconic phrase, and I’d summarise it roughly as, “The physics of your medium determine what is possible in that medium, and so ultimately the message.”

Given Scuttlebutt is a cypherspace (a space whose foundational physics is cryptography), what is the nature of the medium that is different here, and what is that message?

The underlying cryptography is what makes it possible for people to be totally autonomous agents in this social network. It affords a level of freedom from coercion that is probably unprecedented in a digital space. It also removes all responsibility for governance or custodianship of a space from any particular entity and devolves it to the level of individuals making choices. So far in the Scuttleverse, I’ve seen this lead to a lot of personal responsibility and growth.

It’s also fascinating to watch how the lack of dependence on shared hosting infrastructure means that we can have a multiplicity of overlapping communities. A recent example was when I found a user, who calls themselves Johnny Null, in the #dads channel (which I started because I’m going to be a dad soon, and wanted to talk about that with other crypto-dads). I was surprised, because I had experienced a lot of antagonistic threads with this person, leading to some of my friends blocking him, but I hadn’t yet.

In this new context, I wasn’t seeing unproductive abuse from him. We found another way to connect on a really human topic. I was surprised to learn he was a dad, and to receive encouragement and offers of support from him. It was such a sharp contrast from previous interactions. The diversity of approaches available made it possible for some people to block him, but he wasn’t banned from the network, leaving open new possibilities. I don’t know where that will go … but perhaps we could still have a chance at understanding each other.

I see alignment of the physics of p2p space and the physics of everyday in-person space. It feels poetic that the way we’ve implemented a block in Scuttlebutt is through communicating boundaries and asking our peers to respect them. That’s how it works in offline spaces, too. I see this pattern a lot in what we’re building — p2p interactions mirroring human interaction — and it’s the heart of what I want to communicate by invoking The Medium is the Message.

Building systems with peers means the tools we build might be just a little more human, and make space for adaptive communities. My hope is that this space will help us re-learn some of what we’ve forgotten in society, and that maybe this will make a difference in the rising challenges we have to face.

Co-op source

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Protozoa is a tech coop, and we write open source code. This is a little bit about what that means, and how open source is the foundation on which we’re building an aspirational future.

I recently published a new feauture for Patchbay - an open source project I maintain. It allows you to easily @-mention people in the scuttleverse. This isn’t straightforward because it’s a decentralised space where identity is subjective - many people have more than one use-name. (I gave a whole talk on subjectiviy here).

I mention Mikey by a name that people in our coding context will be familiar with (dinosaur).

Why is this significant?

I’m proud of this feature, but the more important parts of this story are the open source and the cooperative culture making this possible.

Open source

Over the next couple of days, I’m going to generalise this code into a module called patch-mentions. Then I’m going to propose changes to Patchbay, and a sister project called Patchwork so that they use use this new module.

That way everyone gets the new functionality, and when we find bugs in what I’ve done, we’ll all benefit from the solution. I’ll also be able to use this in subsequent contracting work - a massive speed and reliability boost for myself and for clients.

(I’ve actually already done this with a couple of other modules patch-profile (an easy profile editor) and patch-settings (which manages client preference settings).

If you’re talking to a programmer about what excites them about open source, this is probably the heart of it. Every time someone generously shares their work, we save hours / days / weeks of work, and are able to channel these savings into things that matter - like making more accessible interfaces, or building a feature to flag abusive actors (next on my todo list).

Cooperatives

Protozoa is a worker owner cooperative. While I’m writing this, Piet and Dominic are hard at work on different things - contract work, and forming collaborations with other decentralised projects (we’re currently crushing on the Economic Space Agency a bit).

For us, contributing to the commons is an important part of our work - it makes all our future work better, and helps build working relationships with other excellent humans.

Here’s an example of that:

Tableflip are a UK based tech coop we’ve been working with. We met them through the scuttleverse and this is a calendar invite to a catchup planning more work in the future. By working together, we’re able to work on bigger and more exciting projects with the confidence that we can expand to support each other.

The cal invite here is another tool we built is called gatherings. It’s a module Piet and I made to enable more community interaction. Other gatherings I’ve seen in the past week in include “Art~Hack Wellington: decommidify your creativity”, “Westhaven Car Boot sale”, and “Bad Ukulele Club”.

It feels amazing to have been able to support more connections between people, and to be doing business in a values aligned space - I honestly don’t know TableFlip’s email addresses…

If you’re an excellent human with a rad project you’d like to collaborate on, we’d love to hear from you. I’m mix@protozoa.nz, or you can join the scuttleverse from scuttlebutt.nz

How to use your Black Hat for good

Sun, 05 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a critical thinker. I’m a coder with a background in maths - I excel at taking ideas and problems apart. The blessing of this is that I understand systems I work with intimately, perhaps even better than others. The curse is that some-times my deep-analysis mode presents like “pointing out all the problems”; a nay-sayer; a devils-advocate.

If you relate to any of things, welcome, I’m writing this for you - you have a Black Hat. I’m writing this because having a Black Hat is a super-power, and if you’ve got one you’re probably deploying it sub-optimally. Here are a couple of easy tweaks to get the most out of it.

Know when to use it (and keep your friends!)

In the context of collaboration, I’m fantastic at reviewing, seeing vulnerabilities, and threats. Historically, I’ve also generated a lot of pushback for quashing fledgling ideas, or ‘always seeing the negative’.

Looking at de Bono’s thinking hats, has been a real help for me. There are six of them, each representing a different style - or mode - of thinking, de Bono proposed was that a lot of tension in a groups emerges from different people being in different modes. (In computer security, there are also ‘hats’, try the post-script for a mapping between the colours)

For example in a visioning session, I deploy the Black Hat (critical thinking), because it’s a strength of mine. Meanwhile others in the team are wearing the Green Hat (generative, exploratory thinking). The combination feels bad, because most people know that things being suggested aren’t perfect - that’s not the point of the exercise at this point - but I’m doing the opposite of creating, I’m bringing nothing to the table, I’m just cracking the things other things are bringing open.

The problem is that I’m just leaning on my strengths - this is a common and lazy habit of Black Hats. If you notice yourself being called a devils advocate, you’ve probably fallen into this trap. Generally people don’t like devils advocates and if you persist you’re in for a bad time.

This doesn’t mean you can’t use your hat, just know when to use it - check in with your group about what ‘mode’ we’re wanting to be in. If we’re doing exploring, lets agree to be Green Hat, and then agree when we’re ready to shift to stress testing the new ideas all at once (with our Black hats).

How to be think critically AND generatively

This is what I’m most excited about. It’s the realisation that you can use you Black Hat to spot threats or weaknesses, and then put on a Yellow Hat. If the Black Hat is the destructive critical thinking, the Yellow hat is the future-facing critical thinking about our values. (This might not have been de Bono’s intention, but bear with me.)

For example, I’m currently teaching a group of coders at Dev Academy. There’s this dynamic emerging where 3 of my students are excellent at asking questions. I noticed I was feeling annoyed, and my Black Hat says “These students are dominating the air-space, to the exclusion of the quieter students, and to the exclusion of the women in the group”. It goes on “There are gender and societal dynamics at play here, I wonder in what ways I could be contributing to this?”. The solution that comes from this hats thinking is “You need to tell them to stop asking questions and tell them we’re making the gender gap worse”.

While this is kinda the desired outcome and there is truth in it, it lacks compassion, and sure as hell isn’t going to be received well.

By pivoting into my Yellow Hat, I’m able to ask the critical question “In what ways is falling short of the desired values I want us to be living?” Which leads to the subtle shift in focus “What are the values I want to be living here?”

The answer is easy and I kind of already knew it but it was tangled up in my Black Hat deficit thinking. Clearly resolving “I want everyone to be practising confident question asking, so they can be well equipped for their career.” meant resolving the situation was a piece of cake. I invited the confident 3 to a conversation, told them the value I wanted to realise, and invited them to help me.

TL;DR - applying critical thinking to underlying values (as well as the problem) will help you see and communicate more clearly.

The difference between this solution and the Black Hat-only one is that it has baked into it the aspirational end state. If others don’t agree with that aspiration, that’s a fricken fantastic thing to talk about - you’re going to skip out a bunch of painful mis-alignment.

Most of this learning was possible because of the incredibly supportive and nourishing atmosphere the Enspiral network is growing. Particular families I’ve had the priveldge of learning with / alongside are Loomio, Dev Academy, LifeHack, EXP, Root Systems.

p.s. mapping for Security Hat

de Bono	Security
Black	Black - cracker, approaches offensively, is interested in poking holes
White + ?	White - employee, follows ‘the rules’, approaches defensively, is interested in stopping holes
Black + Yellow	Grey - ‘the best defence is a good offence’, the White Hat informed by a Black Hatness

Group Smells

Sun, 17 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As a programmer, part of my job is to spot ‘code smells’. Like being alert for musky over-ripeness somewhere in your fridge, or unwanted acridity of burning plastic coming from your computer, smells hint that nearby, something is amiss, and it’s probably going to get worse.

In code it’s usually that you’ve used a pattern that seemed good when you started, but as you continue to add things, suddenly it gets volatile. An everyday example would be running too many appliances off a multi-board.

Patterns of coding that lead to future instability we call anti-patterns.

Code smells are the whiffs that help us notice anti-patterns. Naming them helps us spot vulnerabilities, avert catastrophes, and support an evolving discourse about best (and worst) practice.

My flatmate just came back from a conference where she was pulling her hair out because the way the group was working together was counter-productive. It occurred to me that it would be useful to port anti-patterns into the group-work context.

I want to know what group-smells are. Here’s a few we were able to name in my lounge just now:

Cargo-cult collaboration

A variant of Richard Feynman’s cargo-cult science, this is implementation of collaboration through shallow adoption of whatever latest buzzword.

A classic example you might hear is people asserting “we’re a totally flat self-organised group”. Self-organisation is a thing, but it doesn’t grow just anywhere. There are certain conditions in which it tends to work well, and many in which it doesn’t.

Some smells to watch out for :

lack of clarity about where and how decision making is happening
invitation to ‘be the change’ without any guidance/ support to do that
no description of what or how self-organisation is going to occur
founders deny their power and leadership
not everyone feels empowered to intervene in group processes

The anti-pattern :

you think you’re making space for an ecosystem to magically appear, but you forgot to resource it

Where this anti-pattern can lead :

invisible power structures which privilege some actors without them being aware of it
emergent inside / outside groups
poor communication systems that lead to distrust
people taking on too many things and burning out
white men dominating lots of things, women doing administrative roles

Patterns which support self-organisation :

naming power / leadership roles that exist
actively sharing roles around
making decision making processes clear
clear communication systems

Talking over each other

This one is easy. In the best case, everyone just cares a lot about the topic of conversation, and they’re excited to share what the conversation is bringing up for them.

Other smells you might notice :

2 people having a conversation, while everyone else watches
anxiety about when you’re going to get to speak
lots of loud people, no quiet people
an old white guy opinion-fest

The anti-pattern :

you’ve skipped an agreement about how you’re going to approach things, and conversation has defaulted to loudest / most dominant

Where this anti-pattern can lead :

less listening
less diverse opinion
shallow analysis

Patterns you might consider that help:

appoint a facilitator
introduce a rule (e.g. talking stick, or you can only talk again after 2 other people have spoken)
change the format (e.g. split into smaller groups, get everyone to write thoughts on cards, go for a walking dialogue)

Miscy meeting

(pronounced ‘misky’, *misc = miscellaneous,) There’s a bunch of you in a room talking about your project and raising relevant ideas. The conversation energy is good, and you’re discussing all the things.

This is a great space for combining ideas, exploring shared values, and connecting with each other. If you were intending to run a discovery session, or a workshop, that’s great. If you were expecting decisions and action, it might be worth checking whether you’re in a miscy meeting.

You might smell:

no-one recording any actions / agreements
surprise at the topics being raised (lack of agreement about why you’ve met)
topic drift / people changing topics annoyingly
excited exploration of rabbit-holes
no clear ending to meeting

The anti-pattern :

you haven’t agreed on what you’re actually doing, so you’re starting a range of things and doing them poorly or not at all.

Where this anti-pattern can lead :

massive waste of group time
frustration when people remember agreements / actions differently in the next meeting
more miscy meetings, gradual loss of momentum
inability to unlock continuous improvement / evolution

Patterns for clearer meetings :

start by asking ‘what is the purpose of this meeting?’
use an agenda, and refer back to that when needed
record agreements / actions (and who is going to do them) and share
call ‘rabbit hole’ when you smell one
use some ‘meeting ending’ ritual (e.g. a checkout-round) so everyone knows when you’re done and don’t auto-extend your meeting ad infinitum

These are just a sample of course. Lets spot anti-patterns together and name them. Lets spot group-smells and do better work together. I’d love to hear of any common anti-patterns you’ve already named in your group work, please post them up.

Power & Learning

Wed, 01 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I value conciseness so here’s what I think the essence of it is:

 Power dynamics hamper learning
 What a waste of potential

My History

There’s a chance I’m wrong. Here’s my story if you want to parse it yourself.

School

As an inquisitive (and naive) teenager, I judged IT largely by what was offered at school. Touch typing, some HTML maybe, but none of the really beautiful stuff. The offering was boring and unchallenging compared to centuries-old maths and sciences.

University

My inquiry led me to study neuroscience, which turned out to be a bit too reductionist to practically help me understand people (so western!). I graduated as a mathematician, and after failing as a post-graduate research assistant (modelling blood splatter of blunt weapon trauma), I took a government subsidy to train as a teacher.

I’d really enjoyed tutoring at university, but found that my higher education on education guided me into surprisingly unsavoury amounts of acting (playing some authoritarian role) and crowd control (learning tricks to manipulate group social dynamics to maintain control).

I didn’t care about the length of hair or the height of socks. Quiet (but noticed) protest looked like attending careers day and meeting prospective school principals in ripped jeans. I didn’t bother attending my graduation (NOTE

going off piste often requires more paperwork later).

The irony of teaching engaging learning in a lecture format was a laugh, but the university did introduce me to Ao Tawhiti Unlimited Discovery - the only high school I would take a job at. This wasn’t an act of rebelion, more an extension of my stubornness and pickiness (which I was rich enough to be able to afford).

What was so attractive about Unlimited was the atmosphere (or people dynamics).

Radical Education

Unlimited is a state funded public secondary school that exists because of a loophole in the law, which allowed the bending of a rule meant for the integration of church schools into a rule which allowed the school to write its own assessment rules. Its “special character” is “a fundamental tenet that the child is central in directing his or her own learning so that the enthusiasm and love of learning is retained.” My kind of place.

I can talk a lot about what made that environment transformative, but I think the key was radically more equal power dynamics. As a Learning Advisor there, I didn’t assert authority through enforcing arbitrary rules. I had conversations on a first name-basis with people about what they cared about in life. Classes didn’t have age-barriers, and students could choose what they wanted to do every 5 weeks. Instead of segregation and age-based hierarchy, there was conversation and experiementation.

It felt good. People were kind (not to be confused with nice), and they learnt a lot. Instead of negotiating bullying and claustrophobia, students spent their time doing things like attending university level classes, running New Zealand’s only OpenDNS server from a bedroom, and working together to support a friend with depression. Some of the experiences moved me so deeply I still cry when I recall them.

Most state education is missing the mark by a wide margin. It makes me thoroughly sad - and angry.

Art School

I loved Unlimited, and learnt an enourmous amount there, but I left to stretch skills outside of teaching. There was also a massive earthquake that destroyed the city. I moved to attend art school, where I got into programming the laser cutter (which I was shocked to find almost no one else was using).

I was the worst adult student - I know what good education looks like, and I like giving feedback. The context and tools were great but the educators (outside of the pure theorists) were weak.

I left and did some relief teaching where I tried to treat students as equals. I was horrified to discover that the acting I’d disliked in state teaching is a two part play, and exiting a play is hard when the other actors are continually asserting your role. Genuine conversation was overridden by a race to establish dominance and control.

Over a summer break I was introduced to Joshua Vial who taught me (and several others) to be web developers. I took these skills and helped build Loomio (an open source collaborative decision-making tool).

The people of Loomio - and the garden-nebula Enspiral within which it grew - were the next group of most excellent people I met. This is where I was introduced more explicitly to a discourse around power.

More Radical Education

I’m now a teacher at Enspiral Dev Academy, a coding bootcamp that trains non-technical people to become junior web developers in 9 weeks. It’s a synthesis of my interests to date - programming, learning, and community building.

I take myself, and those around me to and beyond the limit of our technical ability. The only way you can do that effectively and get anything out of it is to be super up-front about what you do and don’t understand.

Power and Knowledge

Not knowing things for some reason brings up shame for people. The most dangerous thing for a student is self-doubt, and sitting on shame is a good way to get that. This is another topic I’m currently really interested in, and will write more on some time.

I think that might be a study in itself, but I’m more interested in how not knowing plays out for teachers, because I believe this is the reason I’m not currently an ascendant cyber-wizard.

When you don’t know a thing as a teacher, a very interesting decision path emerges:

A) lie

B) admit you don’t know

Why would you lie?

Well, if your position as teacher is predicated on your knowing more, being the source of truth, then not knowing might seem to undermine that.

The average high-school teacher is in a surprisingly precarious power-position - it might look like they have control, but only through carefully guided consent of the class.

For a teacher in a position where their authority is coupled to their knowledge, it is awfully appealing to steer conversation away from topics which might erode that position.

I think this is why classes on computers suck so bad in high school - they are born of institution, which is established in such as a way as to bind teaching to the bounds of individual mastery, which is finite.

Education around computers offer a unique window into the future of learning. The field is moving so fast, that the only reasonable path is to say “I don’t know” a lot. If you don’t, then talking about new and relevant ideas won’t be part of your curriculum.

In many educational institutions, saying I don’t know is not safe for educators. Generally they are in systems that give them positional authority to solve the ‘behaviour management’ problems. They are generally not afforded humanising tools of social safety, like building genuine relationships, or sharing vulnerability.

This does everyone trapped in that dynamic a huge disservice. Both teachers and students achieve less understanding, less empathy, less collaboration, less critical thinking, etc. The learning is poorer.

Not knowing as Power

Being able to say “I don’t know” is the beginning of some fantastic cascading effects:

reveals ‘students’ and ’teachers’ both as learners
opportunity to model good learning
- critical thinking/problem solving (process over rote learning)
- asking for help
- listening
shows teacher as human, relatable
- more trust, less lying
- more humanistic dynamic, better conversations
drop shame, move to a growth mindset
go beyond boring ‘safe’ topics
- interesting, inspiring
- engaging (perhaps people like me 15 years ago)
play

This is how I see power dynamics hampering our learning.

I’m investing in education systems which set aside positional authority, and foster environments in which it’s safe for everyone to be vulnerable. For older systems, I’m building an evolving book format, designed to open education resources and support teachers to transition from authorities to guides and catalysts of learning.

I’m excited to be working in a community which is supporting me to develop a different sort of learning pattern for myself. Maybe if we’re lucky (and persistent), we can shift learning patterns more broadly.

I would love to hear from anyone else playing the long game of reshaping education.

Uncapturable Distribution

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

So I hang out with a bunch of big dreaming nerds with a bunch of different interests, but when we explore what it is we want in our future, it’s a happy thriving civilisation. You’ll know we’re there because we’ll be looking after each other, curiously exploring, sharing our successes, and making intergalactic friends.

The workshops were about developing a Theory of Change for each group.

Theory of Change

The process of forming a Theory of Change is about coming up with a map of how change will come about in the world. It starts by a group building a shared vision of it’s particular desired end-state is.You then proceed to build a graph of dependent states back from that end point to the current state of the world. This is called ‘back-casting’.

The process has several steps including things like surfacing and testing assumptions, detailing how you would measure successful change at each step, and assessing the cost and nature of intervention to prgress between states.

In each of the workshops, 2 hours of conversation made barely a dent in completing a fully detailed map, but we’d revealed a lot of territory. Both workshops explored similar veins, but here I’ll explore the second, because it’s fresher in memory and highly relevant to my current work.

Why build a decentralised database?

This is a workshop I ran with the Secure Scuttlebutt team who all happened to be in San Francisco recently. Here’s what the top of our theory of change diagram looked like :

Some important things we agreed we need to achieve were :

specialisation without inequity
rich ecosystem (supports diverse approaches)

I’d like to explore one particular chain of states back. This format makes it hard to simultaneously discuss the branching and interconnected dependencies, so please forgive me if the analysis seems to narrow. I’m interested in this particular chain because it raised questions which provided a useful frame or lens for projects I’m working on or with. From the top it reads :

Galactic council
Large scale social harmony
Post scarcity
Distribution primarily in service of society
Distribution is distributed and un-ownable
We build our distribution on un-capturable technologies

As distribution surfaced as a theme, we tested our assumptions against real-world examples :

distribution of food and goods: supermarkets, walmart
distribution of information: email, google, facebook

We observed that ownership of distribution by actors mainly interested in profit has lead to problematic dynamics which block us from joining the Galactic Council. See massive food waste, destruction of diversity through monopoly, development of tools which optimise addiction and consumption, development of tools which define value for us.

Some examples

Here’s a breakdown of a couple of interesting cases in the context of information distribution.

[Email] : a super successful open protocol. Anyone can send emails to anyone. The failing of email is that it has no mechanism for dealing with un-wanted noise (see spam). This has generated a niche for organisations to offer value (spam filtering), and capture users. For example Gmail is popular because it does fairly reliable spam filtering. This makes email less open, because small private servers have a harder time generating a good ’not-spam’ reputation.

Distribution systems must have a solution to noise.

[Facebook] : built on an open protocol - http - but has centralised closed databases, and a closed (proprietary) interface. Facebook’s primary motivation is profit, which inclines it to leverage it’s closed-ness (right of refusal of access) to extract value from it’s user-base.

All parts of a distribution system need to be uncapturable - open protocols are not sufficient

facebook ToS

[Google] : the growth of the internet beyond easily navigable scales led to the birth of search engines. The current winning solution to this problem is an algorithm which determines site value based on linkages and references. Again, this is a niche which has been captured by a primarily profit motivated organisation. This capture looks something like a monopoly through dependence, and is defended by a suite of related free and powerful tools.

Distribution systems need to address capturable searchability

Things you should consider

I’ve named a bunch of assumptions and principles that we think need to be integrated in order to get us on the road to The Galactic Council.

What is your interaction with distribution systems, are you investing in systems that build the future you want to see?

How do you network online, is it via an actor interested mostly in profit?
Who holds power over the definition of value of what you’re interacting with?
Where do you publish your content?

I think it’s overly idealistic to transition immediately to decentralised uncapturable solutions, but there are small choices that we can and should start making if we want to live in a thriving society.

Possible solutions

Open-sourcing

With Loomio (a collaborative decision-making platform), we’ve addressed some of these same problems by a steadfast commitment to being open-source. While individual instances of the platform may have closed databases, the open-sourcing of the platform code means that anyone can own and control their own instance. It also makes advertising and data-mining significantly less likely, because anyone in the community can fork the code-base and rip anything extractive out. For Loomio this is actually a selling point - it’s a clear signal that our primary value is in serving society.

With Loomio, capturing ownership has also been very seriously addressed in how we’ve written our constitution, and our approach to investment. In short, you can’t buy Loomio, and no one person can control it.

Publish carefully

You might notice this isn’t published on medium. Honestly, this is an experiment in document splicing using a tool I made currently called Hypermarkdown. In retrospect this approach does tick some boxes. This content is currently being hosted at github.com… which sounds like my content might be captured buuuut, github is acutally built on a distributed content system called git. An exact mirror of the data lives on my computer as well, and could easily be hosted by any git based server, like a self-hosted gitlab.

There’s still the problem of how it is you’ve found your way to this blog. 99.9% liklihood is that in 2015 it was via facebook, or twitter (it probably wasn’t via google because the way I built this accidentally makes it harder to index).

(Edit (2025) - I’ve since pulled this into another git repo which generates this static site using Hugo)

Build an open combined protocol-database

The solution I’m currently investing in is Secure Scuttlebutt . It’s an open and secure decentralised database where distribution flows along trust lines, as determined by following (positive value) and flagging (negative value).

Anyone is free to build an app to interface (read/ write) with this database. The first app is a proof of concept messaging app called Patchwork.

Check out a brief introduction +

The Scuttlebutt team is planning to open beta Patchwork in November 2015.

An overview of scuttlebutt’s solution to some know problems with distribution systems:

All open uncapturable system: the protocol is open and the database is open and distributed. People can only edit their own data and reference others.
Has an uncapturable solution to noise: distribution only flows along trust lines in the network.
Searchable: relevance is similarly determined by trust relationships in the network.

(Which pitfalls have we missed?)

Posts on mixmix

Grublins

1. 🥔 Potato

2. 👶 Chublin

3. 💩 Grublin

4. 👹 Grumplin

5. 👺 Squablin

Personal Safety in a p2p Social Network

Just kick them out

Have a strong culture

Block them

The Medium is the Message

Co-op source

Open source

Cooperatives

How to use your Black Hat for good

Know when to use it (and keep your friends!)

How to be think critically AND generatively

Group Smells

Cargo-cult collaboration

Talking over each other

Miscy meeting

Power & Learning

My History

School

University

Radical Education

Art School

Social Enterprise

More Radical Education

Power and Knowledge

Why would you lie?

Not knowing as Power

Uncapturable Distribution

Why build a decentralised database?

Some examples

Things you should consider

Possible solutions

Open-sourcing

Publish carefully

Build an open combined protocol-database