Tag: Oxfordboaters

People, Process, and the Myth of Difficulty

What we are doing at #Oxfordboaters is simple, that’s the uncomfortable truth for people who see this as to complex. The core idea – people coming together around shared concerns, communicating openly, and acting collectively – is about as old as human society. There’s nothing technically complex about it, nothing conceptually obscure. Yet in practice, it feels almost impossible.

So where does this friction come from? It’s not the goal, it’s not even the surface the process, most of the time, it’s the people – and, more importantly, the tools and cultures we bring with us. The path we need is simplicity underneath – #Oxfordboaters is doing three things:

  • Sharing information about what’s happening
  • Building a shared understanding of that information
  • Acting together based on that understanding

That’s it, strip away the noise, and that’s the whole system. It’s classic #actavisam: publish, discuss, act. You don’t need layers of management theory or complex governance frameworks to make that work. You need #KISS trust, visibility, and participation.

But we rarely get to operate at this level of clarity, the difficulty creeps in as people bring baggage – Everyone arrives with habits shaped by the #mainstreaming worshipping of the #deathcult that leads to the imposing of unthinking expectation of hierarchy (“who’s in charge?”) and fear of speaking openly (“will this be used against me?”) leading to the desire for control (“we need to manage the message”) this “common sense” mess leads to focus on avoidance of conflict (“let’s keep it positive and not rock the boat”).

    These aren’t individual personal failings, they’re social learned behaviours, that distort simple processes into complicated ones. This mess is amplified by a second “common sense” problem, that the tools we use shape behaviour, the #dotcons platforms we “use” default push us in particular mess making directions:

      • Chat tools fragment conversations into noise
      • Social media rewards reaction over reflection

      Instead of supporting collective clarity, these default tools amplify confusion, they make it harder to see what’s actually going on, and thus easier for misunderstandings to spiral. One tool we have is process but is it a tool or weapon? Process can either help people work together, or it can be used to block this work. Some processes are designed to:

      • Encourage participation
      • Make decisions visible
      • Build shared ownership

      Others – often unintentionally – end up:

      • Slowing everything down
      • Creating gatekeepers
      • Hiding power behind “procedure”

      You can see this easily when something urgent comes up – healthy process helps people respond quickly and collectively, were a broken one turns into endless discussion, deferral, and inaction. Same situation, same people – different outcome depending on the process.

      At #Oxfordboaters, the work itself is straightforward: There’s an issue affecting the river community – People gather information about it – That information is shared – A response is organised. But what makes it hard? People are different – Disagreements about tone (fluffy vs spiky), uncertainty about who should act and fragmented communication across platforms leading to #blocking of action.

      None of these are about the actual goal, they’re all about how people relate to each other and the structures they’re working within. The illusion of complexity is one of the biggest traps – mistaking this friction for complexity. When something feels hard, we assume the solution is to add more structure, more meetings, more rules, more #dotcons tools. But this “common sense” push to often adds another layer of blockage, it treats the symptoms, not the cause.

      The reality is harsher the system is simple, but we as a community are messy. So how can we work better in this mess? The answer isn’t to eliminate the mess – that’s impossible. It’s to design processes that work with it instead of work against it. That means accepting disagreement as normal, making conflict visible rather than suppressing it. Keeping structures lightweight and adaptable, in the end it’s about prioritising clarity over control. In #OMN terms, this is where the #4opens come in:

      Open data → everyone can see what’s happening

      Open process → decisions aren’t hidden

      Open source → tools can be adapted

      Open standards → systems interconnect

      These don’t remove human complexity, but they can mediate it from becoming opaque and blocking. So what do we mean by blocking vs enabling. You can tell the health of a project by a simple test – Does the process help people act, or stop them from acting? If people feel empowered to contribute → the process is working. Hesitant, confused, or sidelined → the process is blocking.

      At #Oxfordboaters, like many grassroots efforts, both dynamics exist at the same time. That’s normal. The work is to shift the balance toward enabling. So the hard truth is this the challenge isn’t building the perfect system, it’s growing the relationships that allow the #4opens path to function. That’s slower, messier, and far less comfortable than designing a neat process diagram, but it’s the only thing that actually works.

      Keep it simple (#KISS) – when things get messy, the instinct is to add complexity. The better move is usually the opposite by striping things back to focus on what actually needs to happen. Make it easier for people to take part, because underneath all the noise, the work is still simple. People, talking to each other, deciding to act. Everything else is either helping that – or getting in the way.

      What we’re growing at Oxford Boaters is simple

      From the towpath at dawn to moonlit moorings at dusk, Oxford’s boating community is not a curiosity, it’s part of the city’s living fabric. Generations of people have chosen to make their homes on the water, creating a culture rooted in community, care, and independence. This is a quieter Oxford, rarely captured in guidebooks but felt by anyone who walks the river or canal: a human-scale world of shared tea, passing conversations, and everyday presence. In a city shaped by wealth and exclusion, the river remains one of the few places where real social diversity still exists, where people live side by side not because of status, but because they’ve chosen a different way of life.

      This matters because the boating community doesn’t just live on the river, it sustains it. Their daily presence keeps the towpath safer, more welcoming, and alive. They act as informal stewards, noticing changes in the water, caring for the banks, and maintaining a relationship with the environment that no institution can replicate. Remove this community, and you don’t just lose homes, you lose Oxford’s character, its openness, its lived connection to the river. The waterway becomes quieter, more managed, less human. What looks, from a distance, like a marginal issue is in central, a question of whether #Oxford remains a living city, or becomes more controlled, polished and diminished.

      Exchange CRT for EA its the same story.

      How can we protect that space?

      We want to protect a shared space, keep the river livable, and organize ourselves to have a voice. None of that is technically complicated, the difficulty isn’t the goal, it’s the people, and the tools we use to try and work together. No matter what process we choose, it always comes back to the people who make it work, or the people make it stall. Some processes recognise this and work with human reality – trust, conflict, misunderstanding, ego, care. Other processes ignore it, and end up being used (consciously or not) as blocking. Let’s look at a few grounded examples of this.

      We’ve already seen this clearly, in a face-to-face meeting (the “whispering fire”), trust rises fast. People read each other, soften, find common ground. You can go from 50% to 70–90% trust in a couple of hours. Move the same conversation to online chat, and trust collapses. Tone gets lost, small disagreements escalate, and people start pulling things apart. You drop to 20–30% trust, sometimes lower. Completely different outcomes, it’s not a failure of individuals, it’s a mismatch between tools and human communication.

      The website vs the chat is another clear split. The website (or any structured space) holds higher trust, but lower participation. The chat holds high participation, but low trust – knowledge isn’t captured properly, decisions aren’t visible and new people can’t easily get up to speed. Result: constant rehashing, frustration, and burnout leading to momentum loss.

      There’s a temptation to design the perfect structure with formal agendas, strict procedures and detailed governance. On paper, this looks like progress, in practice, it becomes a brake. As people use “hard” process to delay decisions (“we need another meeting”), avoid responsibility (“that’s not my role”) and assert control (“this isn’t the proper channel”). Instead of enabling action, the process becomes a gatekeeper, leading to the same basic issues resurface again and again. Not because people are stupid, because the basic social fabric isn’t being maintained.

      Processes that work can see this cycle and design around it so as not to keep restarting from zero. So what actually works? The path isn’t finding a “perfect” process, it’s choosing #4opens processes that fit people as they are. That usually means prioritising face-to-face (or close equivalents) for trust building. Keeping structures simple (#KISS) so they don’t become tools of control. Capturing shared knowledge clearly (FAQ, summaries, decisions). Accepting mess as normal, but making sure it composts rather than festers. Balancing fluffy and spiky – you need both to move forward

      And most importantly recognizing that process is never neutral, every structure we put in place will either help people collaborate or give them ways to block each other. Often both at the same time. So yes, what #Oxfordboaters is trying to do is on the surface easy, but what makes it hard is human complexity, mismatched tools and blinded pushing processes that don’t align with either. When we get those bits even slightly more right, everything else becomes possible.

      If we don’t, even the simplest goals turn into a grind, that’s the real work.

      Closed systems protect individuals, but they rarely build movements
      Trust and fear – the spiky/fluff debate – OxfordBoaters

      Trust and fear – the spiky/fluff debate – OxfordBoaters

      People fight against or/and ignore the #KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach to social movements because simplicity can expose power. Complexity gives cover, making control look like competence. When paths are simple and transparent, everyone can see who’s blocking, who’s hoarding, who’s acting in bad faith. Many “experts” and institutions are emotionally and professionally invested in keeping things complicated as simplicity threatens their authority and their identity.

      As second step in change and challenge we need to face some uncomfortable roots: fear of death, fear of the “other.” Fear, as the man said, is the mind killer. Too few people trying to change the world bother to look at the psychological ground they’re standing on. Our social mess isn’t random, it grows from somewhere. If we don’t deal with the roots, we just keep trimming the leaves and wondering why the weeds grow back.

      At the centre of this is trust, it is what makes social change possible. It’s the messy, ongoing tussle between horizontal and vertical forces, between collective process and imposed control. Take Oxford boaters as a lived example, this is observational, based on 40 years of doing this kind of work.

      Face-to-face meetings? They start at maybe 50% trust and can rise to 70% without too much trouble. That’s because the people who show up are self-selecting – a mix of fluffy and spiky, but open enough to engage. You get debate, but also movement.

      Then we go back online were trust drops fast – down to 20–30%, sometimes even into negative territory. That becomes the dominant tone as things splinter. Work that was built collaboratively offline gets pulled apart, the focus doesn’t hold.

      On the open collective website, trust is actually high – but usage is low, again, self-selecting. So rollout stalls, no shared space, no shared understanding, no momentum.

      So we call another face-to-face, the “whisper fire.” Trust shoots up – 90%, easy. People align, decisions get made, it feels like progress. But then everyone goes home, the next day? Momentum evaporates, as few people feel responsible for carrying things forward. And very quickly, we slide back into the low-trust dynamics of online chat.

      Meanwhile, the group has grown, more people from offline outreach and leafleting. But the website is still stalled, so there’s nowhere to hold shared knowledge. We keep re-arguing basics, we don’t even have a solid FAQ. Trust drops again.

      Next meeting: bigger pool, smaller turnout. Trust starts at near zero, the first half is rough – people filtering out, clashing, posturing. Slowly, some shared ground emerges and trust crawls up to maybe 50% but still, nothing concrete gets resolved. A few working groups are seeded. Environment sort of functions. Media splinters from the start, but manages a press release, but without any clear #4opens process. Beyond that, the next steps remain unanswered.

      Back online? Trust gets ripped apart again. The whisper fire is supposed to be every week, but we have lost focus, but we try agen – half-heartedly at first. Poor turnout, then people drift in after a couple of hours. Trust rebuilds to around 70%. Real decisions get made, consensus emerges, it starts to feel like an actual working affinity group.

      But the chat? Still toxic, low trust, constant tearing-down, fixation on side issues, and a push toward rushed bureaucratic structures that crumble under their own weight. The only thing that actually works is the consensus built in the whisper fire – because that’s what people really agree on, underneath the passive-aggressive noise. But after each cycle, trust in the online chat drops again, down below 30% on the surface. Maybe 40% underneath, if you’re generous.

      And now we hit the next stage: formal process, bureaucracy, decisions that actually matter, where it gets real. And because online trust is still so low, everything becomes harder than it needs to be, friction everywhere, misunderstanding as default.

      But – and this is the hopeful bit – offline trust is slowly growing. So maybe, just maybe, we can carry that through, if we don’t let the chat tear it apart first.

      Individual fears
      So how do we mediate this fear?
      Process is what gives legitimacy

      #OxfordBoaters

      So how do we mediate this fear?

      Who would have though this would sum up our needed path for the #Oxfordboaters and the #fedivers?

      You would have to be an #asshole to unthinkingly disagree with what we are doing and pretty wise to thinkingly disagree with the path. Which one are you? So why are we in such a mess? Because people are acting from fear. Not always consciously, not always honestly – but fear is the driver.

      • Fear of losing control.
      • Fear of losing status.
      • Fear of uncertainty.
      • Fear of each other.

      And when fear leads, people grasp for control. They close things down, centralise, gatekeep, and default to the safe, known paths of the #closedweb and institutional power. That’s how we get the current mess – top-down structures trying to manage what was meant to be lived, messy, and shared.

      In #OMN terms, this isn’t a technical failure, it’s a cultural one. A failure to hold open processes in the face of discomfort. So how do we mediate this fear?

      Not by pretending it isn’t there. And not by fighting it head-on – that just feeds it. We mediate fear by building trust through practice:

      • Keep things open (#4opens): transparency reduces fear of hidden agendas. When people can see what’s happening, they relax.
      • Lower the stakes: small, reversible steps instead of big, risky commitments. Let people edge in rather than jump.
      • Normalise mess: show that not everything has to be controlled to work. Messy, lived processes are not failure, they’re how real communities function.
      • Create shared doing: fear shrinks when people work together on tangible tasks. Composting, media, infrastructure – doing builds trust faster than talking.
      • Hold both fluffy and spiky: the fluffy path makes space for people to come in; the spiky path protects that space from being captured or hollowed out. You need both, visibly and honestly.
      • Refuse false clarity: the #dotcons sell certainty and simplicity. The #openweb is different, it’s about holding complexity without collapsing into control.

      And maybe most importantly, stay present. Fear thrives in abstraction, it weakens in lived, grounded relationships. In the end, mediating fear isn’t about convincing people with arguments. It’s about creating environments where fear has less reason to exist.

      This is the same dynamic you can see with Oxford boaters. The river culture is native, messy, negotiated, based on lived practice and mutual understanding. People want the freedom to move, to live lightly, and not be bound by rigid landlord rules. But when outside structures push in – formal control, ownership models, enforcement – they reshape that culture into something else. The tension isn’t really about rules or functions; it’s about which culture gets to define the space.

      That’s the real work of #OMN: not only building tools, but growing the social soil where people feel able to act without retreating into control.

      Individual fears