Continuing the discussion from SocialCG should consult SocialHub before appropriating tasks:
This is a serious problem and one that merits further discussion. One of the challenges of decentralised organising is that we’re always walking a tightrope between two undesirable states. On the one hand, a tyranny of structurelessness, in which creeping centralisation of decision-making power takes places behind closed doors. On the other hand, the risk of formal decision-making institutions hardening over time into a rigid bureaucracy. Gradually freezing the community out of decision-making anyway, despite the formality and transparency.
Another problematic variation is where the community “just want to get on with the work”. Delegating decision-making to whoever is willing to take the flack involved in making decisions that must be made, for the community to survive and progress. In Open Source projects, this often (but not always) ends up being a founder or founders who - without any formal institutional power, and often against their wishes - becomes the so-called “Benevolent Dictator for Life” (1).
Because here’s the dirty secret about leadership in unpaid community projects; it’s a poison chalice. Nobody can please all the people all the time. So when people step into a leadership role to get a particular decision made, there’s inevitably somebody pissed off that it wasn’t the decision they wanted. Despite being conspicuously absent when the work of canvassing options and negotiating consensus was being done.
On the other hand, people also use that dynamic as an excuse to “streamline” decision-making, in either a tyranny of structurelessness way, or a rigid bureacracy way. Then others, in trying to prevent that, end up blocking any attempt to converge around formal decision-making of any kind. Which blocks organised cooperation beyond the ad-hoc-racy of ‘quick chat around the watercooler’ decision-making. That, in turn, can become tyranny of structurelessness.
There are many, many failure modes in horizontal organising. Even before you introduce the fact that as soon as it starts to succeed enough to get attention, it becomes a threat to ideological centralists. Who will send people in to cause trouble and engineer splits and schisms. This is where the fediverse has got to IMHO. Here be dragons!
Fediverse governance, as I understand it, is similar to the UN system (the ideal, not always the reality, because of the Security Council etc). There are a number of longstanding institutions, including SocialHub, SocialCG, and others, and newer institutions likes IFTAS, FediDevs, and now SWF. All of them exist in a peer-to-peer network, with each having defined but overlapping areas of interest. Each one can do internal decision-making and work with each other as their participants see fit. But so far, most have worked on a principle of what @aschrijver calls “do-ocracy”, or to use the old hacker phrase; “rough consensus and running code”.
Is this structure sufficient to resist attempts by datafarmers to pull us towards tyranny of structurelessness or rigid bureaucracy? I’m optimistic that it can be, as long as we commit to robust and transparent community processes, including calling out opportunistic and sociopathic behaviour as we see it. But what do we need to do to sustain and extend the inclusive horizons of our horizontal democracy? Including finding ways to hear the voices of those @devnull says are currently feeling like they’re out in the cold.
@aschrijver tends to think the do-ocracy is not enough. If he’s right, what are the alternatives? How do we build consensus around specific governance changes, and set them in motion, in the most consultative and decentralised ways possible?
(1) Sadly, the continued use of this term for people like Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds, even after they do start to hold institutional power, has obscured the original meaning of the term to describe a burden of stewardship, not a privilege of status.
