Tag: opencollective

A reminder, what is the #OMN

In the Open Media Network (#OMN), the commons represents both the foundation and the destination of the native #openweb. Rather than relying on #closedweb corporate #dotcons or top-down state power, re-framing the commons as a practical, lived alternative – what you might call a “quiet” form of collective ownership and mutual aid grown into daily social infrastructure.

The OMN makes a distinction between native and non-native technology paths. A native path starts from the commons: open, federated, participatory, interoperable, and community-controlled. Conversely, non-native paths import corporate assumptions – turning participation in a network into a commercial product, creating paywalled event cultures, or establishing centralized platform hierarchies. The OMN always asks whether technical infrastructure is being built to maintain a commons or to turn participation into an industry.

The OMN sees technology as a way to secure the commons, but it should never become a substitute for the commons itself. The OMN cautions against the #geekproblem and #encryptionist mindsets trying to replace human trust and accountability with hard code or cryptography. True commons require human relationships, transparent governance, shared memory, and mutual aid – technology is merely the piping that supports these social processes.

Rather than engaging in endless ideological debate or waiting for top-down system shifts, the OMN views growing the commons as a quiet, everyday practice. This happens through minimal viable structures – such as working groups, shared resource bases (like the #NGO #OpenCollective), federated media flows, and shared archives. By applying the (Open Data, Open Source, Open Standards, Open Process), communities keep their resources public and accountable without relying on private profit or blinded #stupidindividualist survivalism.

To grow a healthy digital commons, the OMN works on social composting: breaking down the “dead material” and toxic habits of both #FOSS and corporate tech. By taking the lessons and failures of past projects and turning them into organic material, communities build the collective capacity and trust needed to sustain shared networks long-term.

Let’s try and simplify the #OMN

Pause fixing each mess in isolation, building process that composts mess into more useful paths

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 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.

How #mainstreaming funds grassroots movements, they get their value from

One of the tensions in the fight to build an alternative, sustainable future is the relationship between mainstream resources and seeding grassroots projects. The reality is STARK that grassroots movements need resources to survive and thrive, yet the act of receiving funding, if they can access it at all, drags them into the suffocating grip of #mainstreaming culture, where the radical edges are dulled and destroyed. So, how can conscious mainstream actors support grassroots movements without killing the radical energy that creates the value in the first place?

The answer to this mess making, lies in sharing resources in non-mainstreaming ways, a difficult leap for many, but an essential one. The only people who can truly be useful in sustaining #openweb paths are those willing to break free from the entrenched habits of top-down control, endless bureaucracy, and the need to polish everything into marketable, bite-sized pieces. So what does this non-mainstreaming support look like?

  • Unconditional funding: grassroots projects need funding without strings attached. Too often, funding comes with requirements that reshape the project itself, turning radical experimentation into pointless palatable, measurable outputs. True, useable support means trusting grassroots communities to know what they need and allowing them to allocate resources nimbly. #TRUST #opencollective
  • Trust-based relationships: A “native” healthier approach is to build long-term relationships with grassroots groups, listening to their needs and responding in an organic, flexible way. #TRUST #OMN
  • Decentralized decision-making: Bottom-up governance models, when funding flows to collectives, not charismatic individuals and figureheads building careers #KISS #OGB
  • Infrastructure, not ownership: A path that might work, rather than buying influence, mainstream actors can provide infrastructure, hosting, bandwidth, servers, physical spaces, without attempting to control the projects using them. Think of it as building bridges, not fences. #Fediverse instances
  • Amplify, don’t Absorb: Mainstream platforms and institutions need to amplify grassroots voices without assimilating them. This means using their reach to highlight native radical projects while at the same time stepping back to let those projects speak for themselves. No need to repackage the message, people can handle raw, messy reality. #indymediaback

This bridge building matters as the current mainstream is crumbling under the weight of its contradictions. As #climatechaos accelerates, as #neoliberalism fails to deliver anything but more suffering, people will look for alternatives. But if those alternatives are already swallowed and sanitized by the current mainstream, hope dims. Grassroots movements are the seedbeds of any real change, at best they hold the living knowledge of how to build differently.

Keeping the bridge in place isn’t an act of charity; it’s a basic #KISS survival strategy. The future will grow from the compost of the old world, and those willing to step off the conveyor belt of #mainstreaming and into the rich, chaotic soil of grassroots experimentation will be the ones who help plant the seeds.

#fediversehouse