For me, his article does an excellent job of highlighting the challenges the open source sector in particular really faces with shifting to more democratic (and hopefully sociocratic!) processes that improve the people’s voice and equity.
It gives important background on the prevelance of ‘benevolent dictatorships’ in open source, the challenges of coding privilege and the paradox of open including the disconnect between open content and power equity.
The article comes away with three suggestions:
To start on this path, I recommend three priorities:
Launch a participatory project to define a shared mission for building the digital public space on the basis of the Fediverse.
Secure greater involvement of public institutions.
Build a stronger social and institutional layer.
I wonder if #1 has begun and where… or how it could get started! There have been some rumblings, but I haven’t yet noticed anything really taking off.
CJ, the article you shared seems very interesting to me. I’m passionate about the philosophy of building scalable communities and I think the main ingredient is personal and collective governance. I’m still studying the article. Here is a quote from the article that catched my attention: “Ultimately, what is at stake is our capacity, as societies, to control and manage planetary-scale communication spaces that are, in the broadest sense, democratic.” Of course, I imagine democracy being built on a sociocratic foundation. I would like to share here a link to a video-presentation made by Pierre Houben: Integrate inner sociocracy into training as opportunity for practice CJ, thank you for sharing!
