This #blocking conversation on the #oxfordboaters chat is a intolerant conflict between trying to manage the immediate problem and building the collective process needed to stop the same problems recurring. Lets look through a needed #KISS lens at the cludge between reactive (stupid)individualism and the harder work of building community structures.
The immediate conflict is a symptom, not the underlying problem
The conversation is filled with suspicion and frustration about people, conduct, and the proposed response to HT. There is a concern, and a #blocking that the group is accommodating behaviour that should be challenged. This is a two sided mess we need to compost as these conflicts become more damaging because the group lacks the processes and structures needed to deal with any collective working path.
Politeness and niceness become tools of control
The articles smiling-faced vileness and WhatsApp plebiscites reveal the wider mess we need to compost. That enforced niceness discourage the needed confrontation, that composting is about. our focus on informal #dotcons chat platforms encourage reactive opinions and shallow consensus rather than sustaining any working collective decision-making. People trying to challenge dysfunctional paths are framed as the problem because they make the people blocking and obscuring uncomfortable.
In this self creating mess, the pressure to remain agreeable prevents a working group empowered culture from developing the capacity to act effectively. This is not an argument against kindness, it is an argument against using politeness as a weapon of control to substitute for accountability, political clarity and collective action we need.
The current flipping of #WhatsApp groups is this same problem because it shapes the process. This is a part of the blinded objection to setting up the #opencollective page, its unthinking #blocking, not merely technological. The group had an opportunity to move away from the limitations of the #dotcons but instead blindly reproduced the same failed patterns and paths that are shaping the current mess.
The underlying argument here is simple that the tools we use shape what we can collectively do. When the group stays locked into a reactive chat environment, where decisions emerge through fragmented discussion and informal fear based influence, it becomes harder to maintain any shared direction, to challenge obstruction or organize sustained work we need. The medium is helping to reproduce the dysfunction we already suffer from.
The group needs basic, half step, working activism infrastructure, like moving to Signal chat from WhatsApp, not just more noise, and blind reaction inside the #dotcons. Then we have #OpenCollective role in cutting through and composting this crap, to establish a clearer organizational and resource base. then the simple process of Working Groups give people defined areas of responsibility and #KISS accountability, with out this the is ZERO trust that we can deal with conflict without repeatedly returning to the same informal blocking arguments and paths.
The purpose for this change is not bureaucracy for its own sake, it is to make collective action possible without relying entirely on personal relationships, goodwill or whoever happens to be most active in the chat.
Working groups are not a magic solution
Yes, working groups often disappear, and the same people end up doing all the work. That is a genuine challenge to any horizontal path. Composting is not just adding more material to the pile, it requires active work to turn the material into something useful. A working group without responsibility, follow-through and a shared direction is just another layer of organizational clutter. What it dose give us, and what we need, is transparency and focus, it can be used as a path to organically work round the nasty-ness of smiling passive blocking.
We need to focus, on taking responsibility for growing the path out of our group’s own dysfunction. The difficulty is not an external force that the group can do nothing about, the group is reproducing its own problems through its current practices. Instead of treating every dispute as a fresh crisis caused by particular people, the group needs to examine the conditions that allow the same patterns to recur. That means moving past blame to structure, from reaction to process, and from informal influence to shared responsibility.
The immediate HT response is distracting from the work
The disagreement is not necessarily about whether NBTA proposed response is factually or tactically sound. It is about whether solving the immediate problem is being allowed to substitute for fixing the conditions that keep producing these problems. The group needs an active pause, to examine the wider issues and decide whether it is willing to pursue a more functional collective path.
What is not working or sustainable is the current messy flow of immediate conflict, suspicion, frustration, disagreement. We need to compost the mess of enforced niceness, reactive chat, informal power and avoidance of any difficult questions. Its been a year and we still have no reliable shared process, clear responsibilities or sustained collective organization. OpenCollective, working groups, #KISS structures and accountable processes. So the question that matters is can we do the difficult work of changing our practices, or just continue reacting to each new crisis?
Lets look at these flows – first, #stupidindividualism is strong, treating each incident as a problem of individual behaviour rather than examining the social structures that reproduce it. Even when people recognize that something is wrong, they remain trapped in personal reactions, competing opinions and informal status games. The answer to this kinda mess is not to build an elaborate governance system, it is to establish the minimum viable structure that allows our group of disparate boaters to make decisions, share responsibility, resolve disagreements and get things done. Simple does not mean structure-less.
We need to focus on social composting of the existing conflict, frustration and failed attempts are the raw material for building something better. But they do not transform themselves, the current people (or a smaller subset of them) has to do the work of turning experience into shared learning, practical process and renewed collective capacity. The important distinction is that a working group, an OpenCollective account or a new chat platform is not, by itself, an alternative. These are tools, the alternative is the commons practice that makes them useful. There is still to wide a gap between identifying the problem and making the solution work in practice.
Peoples objection exposes this – how do working groups avoid becoming inactive, and how do they stop the same few people carrying all the work? The next step needs to have solid moorings, what is each working group’s purpose? Who has committed to take responsibility for this work? The #4opens is core here, how are decisions made and communicated? What happens when commitments are not met? How does the group review progress and change direction? Yes, without answers to these questions, calls for structure risk becoming another round of mess created discussion. With them, #KISS becomes a practical path rather than just a principle to stand on.
The Oxford boaters’ problem is not simply a difficult dispute with #HT, it is that the group is trying to act collectively through bad, reactive and conflict-avoidant practices that repeatedly undermine our ability to act. Rather than building the simple, accountable structures needed to turn shared frustration into collective power we need to keep our moorings. That is the central #OMN point – stop trying to fix each new mess in isolation, and start building the community process that compost our mess into something useful.
#Oxfordboaters need to do better.
