Tag: process

Working Groups, Horizontal Organising, and Getting Things Done

“Working groups (#WG) have one job – get things done, they don’t need permission for every step – they need to report openly, consult when it affects others, and hand back decisions that are too big for them to own alone. That’s it, that’s the whole structure.”

One of the biggest recurring naiveties of horizontal organising is the belief that every decision needs to be made by everybody. This sounds democratic, but in long historical practice this leads to endless meetings, burnout, frustration, and eventually informal hierarchies where the people with the most time, confidence, or stubbornness end up making decisions anyway.

The result is a process that appears horizontal while quietly becoming ineffective. A simple principle cuts through much of this mess – Working Groups (#WG) have one job: get things done. They do not need permission for every step. They do not need endless consensus rounds, do not need to return every small decision to the collective, they need to:

  • work openly
  • report regularly
  • consult when their actions affect others
  • hand back decisions that are too large for them to own alone

That’s it, everything else is unnecessary.

The purpose of a working group is not to represent the collective. It is to carry out practical work on behalf of the collective. If people have agreed that a task matters, then the group trusted with that task needs the autonomy to do it. This is the difference between #4opens governance and bureaucratic administration.

To make this work we do need to compost some mess, we have the trap of process fetishism, many activist groups develop what can only be described as a fetish for process. Every decision becomes a collective decision, disagreement becomes crisis, and every proposal requires multiple rounds of consultation. The intention is usually good, people want participation, accountability, and fairness. But the outcome is the opposite, the people doing practical work become exhausted, new people struggle to engage, urgent opportunities are missed, and hidden power emerges behind the scenes. What looks democratic becomes an all to familiar form of paralysis.

The irony is that this benefits the existing informal leadership. When formal decisions become impossible, influence shifts to whoever has the strongest social networks, the loudest voice, and the most time to spend in meetings. The supposed “open” process becomes a mask for power rather than a challenge to it.

Healthy horizontal organising is not about removing responsibility, it is about distributing responsibility. People take on work, groups take on tasks. Decisions are made at the lowest level possible and issues only move upwards when they genuinely affect the wider collective.

This keeps decision-making close to the work itself, as the people closest to a problem usually understand it best. The wider group only needs to step in when questions become collective questions. It’s a #KISS working path with a long history that creates a living structure rather than a bureaucratic one – healthy movements should feel more like a network of trust than a chain of command.

The challenge is not only structural, it is emotional, organising through feelings, relationships, identity, and emotional response, is not inherently bad, as movements need care, solidarity to build people to people who support one another, without this emotional connection, activism becomes mechanical and brittle.

But there are too sides to this, when emotional comfort becomes more important than practical outcomes, problems emerge. Conflict becomes difficult, criticism becomes threatening leading to accountability becoming personalised leading to disagreement becoming interpreted as harm. The result is that difficult conversations are avoided until they explode, groups become trapped between politeness and resentment so nothing gets resolved. This is where the debate between fluffy and spiky becomes useful.

  • Fluffy practices build trust.
  • Spiky practices solve problems.

Healthy organising needs both, but too much fluffy and nothing changes. Too much spiky and people burn out. The art is finding the balance.

The foundation of horizontal organising is trust – Trust people to take initiative, working groups to carry out agreed tasks. Trust transparency more than control, trust report backs more than permission, accountability more than management. The goal is not to eliminate power, it is to make power visible, distributed, and accountable.

That means allowing people freedom to act while ensuring the collective remains informed and able to intervene when necessary. A working group should never need permission to do its job, if it does, then either the group has not been trusted with the task, or the collective has not yet decided what it wants. In both cases, the problem is not the working group as good process should help people act together, not prevent them from acting at all.

Trust the work.

UPDATE Q&A

Q: I agree, but how do we even set them up?

Use the WG (Working Group) as they are designed to solve this problem. They are spaces of action. Because they are small and focused, they naturally filter out the people who are there only to block, endlessly discuss, or avoid action. The word WORK has an effect.

Q: But where do the people come from? We need people.

WGs are permissionless – you don’t wait for a structure to approve them. You call one, a few people (or even just one person to start) come together, focus on a task, and make decisions. Then you feed those decisions back into the wider group. Feedback happens – or it doesn’t. Then the WG gets on with the work, adjusting based on useful feedback, and reports back openly. Then you move on to the next decision. The important thing is that this can start small, it could be one person, but it works better with a group of committed people.

As people see real work happening, they join, or they don’t. Over time, a campaign grows and the WG becomes the place where committed people organise, while larger meetings remain open spaces where everyone can have a voice. The WG listens, but it also has to make decisions and move forward.

The key is that it always operates through the #4opens – open process, open communication, and open access – so people can see the work and join in if they want to. Action creates momentum.

#process #oxfordboaters #WG

SAVE THAMES RIVER HOMES

DRAFT: Let’s look at this as an example of effective and ineffective activism. The mess we make and how we can compost it. Let’s start with an example outreach text that has not been sent out yet.


WHO WE ARE
We are resident boaters living on a stretch of the River Thames near Donnington Bridge. For many years, people have made their homes here peacefully and continuously as part of a long-standing river community.
 
WHAT’S HAPPENING
New signage already in place states that mooring, anchoring, or remaining stationary requires a licence in addition to the licence already paid to the river authority. Only a limited number of moorings may be available, and additional fees could apply for continuous occupation.
 
WHO IS AFFECTED
Long-term residents, low-income households, people living with serious illness, and vulnerable members of the river community. For many people, the river is not a lifestyle choice – it is their home.
 
WHY PEOPLE ARE CONCERNED
At a time of rising housing costs and increasing housing insecurity, these changes could reduce access to long-standing mooring spaces, push vulnerable residents out of the area, leave people without secure housing alternatives, reduce access to affordable river living, and undermine an established and historic river community.
 
WHAT WE ARE ASKING FOR
Protection for long-term residents, no forced removal of vulnerable people, fair and transparent consultation with all boaters, and respect for existing river communities.
 
BOATS ARE HOMES!

WE SUPPORT environmental protection, safe navigation, responsible shared river use, and respectful cooperation between all river users.

WE DO NOT SUPPORT loss of homes, exclusion of vulnerable residents, reduction of social diversity on the river, or the enclosure of historic river commons.

The first thing that needs to be said is this path is pretty simple #KISS

Affectiveness is trust = speed and power, every action flows from this, so the obvious immediate actions:

  • Working Groups – activate, not just name. Fill the gaps (Moorings WG is missing people). Each group needs tasks and a timelines. Media, Environment, Legal, Moorings are the four pillars.
  • Summer visibility campaign. Litter picks were a start – now make them scheduled, social, and photographed. Visible care builds public sympathy faster than arguments.
  • Public messaging. Posters and leaflets with LINKED to online messaging. Creative subversion of public space – keep it warm and community-facing, not aggressive.
  • Media outreach – urgent. Contact sympathetic journalists now, before a hostile narrative sets in. Reach Green Party contacts, housing groups, environmental organisations, river users. Positive stories first, defence second.

Offline organising – sensitive coordination stays face-to-face in trusted spaces, not in public chats. Trust meeting prep for small delegations. Agreed talking points only. Anticipate reframing and deflection. Stay calm, stay on message, make clear asks.

Holding the physical space – Committed, confident people physically and socially present on the land

We are walking the horizontal path when groups strengthen: Working Groups coordinate laterally – not waiting for a centre to direct them. Visible action builds public trust, community care as the face of the campaign. Messaging stays simple and consistent, across all groups and channels. Relationships are built offline, where real trust and real decisions live. Institutions are engaged strategically, not reactively

What we’ve had so far is #BLOCKING and more BLOCKING.

The initial process needed to be simple: a short, wide consensus stage to build enough trust and shared direction for people to move together. This happened, but, that process got bogged down by aggressive fluffy and spiky pushing in different directions. What should have taken a short time stretched into months of churn.

The fluffy path kept smoothing over conflict with endless distractions, “feelings”, and disconnected “positive” non activity. The spiky path pushed outcomes through hard positioning and confrontation without the collective grounding needed to make this effective. Both ended up feeding the same result – paralysis of any action at all.

Then, just as when were finally beginning to move toward the next step – actual coordinated action through working groups – the same blocking pattern repeated itself. The working groups, which were there to move us past endless whole-group debate, got dragged backwards into re-running the original consensus arguments on continues repeat. So instead of moving from consensus, to coordination, to action, we got trapped in a loop:

  • process,
  • argument,
  • process again.

The result has been mess of ossification and prevarication for the last three months. At best, people scattered into redundant, uncoordinated fluffy actions of litter picks, isolated messaging, disconnected outreach, and individual goodwill projects with no shared direction or any cumulative strategy.

At worst, individuals entrenched themselves into blocking positions that lacked any collective backing, making attempts at movement all to easy to isolate, dismiss, and weaponise against the needed broader outcomes, dissipate energy instead of concentrating it.

This is the hard truth about horizontal organising that people often avoid saying out loud: a horizontal movement without functioning working groups is not horizontal, it is just flat. And flat structures spread energy equally in all directions until nothing gains traction.

Working groups are there to solve this problem, they are the mechanism that turns shared trust into coordinated action. But instead of empowering them, thus our selves, we allowed the unresolved tensions of the first stage to spill endlessly into the second.

The deeper issue is that people are still acting from the poisoned culture we are supposedly fighting of individual performance over collective strategy, emotional positioning over grounded coordination, symbolic activity over practical outcomes. This “common sense” mess is leading us to the normal #stupidindividualism of identity and ego in conflict with trust and process.

This is why trust matters so much, trust is not fluffy morality, it is practical movement infrastructure. Trust creates speed, coordination, resilience, and collective power. Without it, every decision reopens old arguments, every action fragments, and every process becomes another site of blockage. While meanwhile, the mainstreaming benefits from all of this, they gain time, they shape public narratives uncontested, they observe our fragmentation, and they plan strategically while we churn internally.

The frustrating thing is that the movements already understands the problems, the issue is less lack of understanding. The blocking is active – the inability to stop reproducing the blocking dynamics long enough to move collectively in any direction.

This is the mess we need to compost. Until we create affinity groups to break this cycle, the next three months of this campaign risk looking exactly like the last three months – more shrinking than inflating big meetings full of hot air and scattering outcomes leading to more frustration, and little accumulated power.

The path is actually simple, though not easy – stop reopening the foundation process, empower the working groups, coordinate action, build trust through doing, and focus collective energy where it creates leverage instead of churn. Otherwise, we remain trapped in performative movement culture at best or compleat mess at worst – while the real decisions continue being made elsewhere.

#KISS

#oxfordboaters #process

Trust is the foundation of moderation in decentralised networks like the #OMN

In the world of decentralised, peer-to-peer, and federated networks, from the Fediverse to grassroots projects like the #OMN, moderation works differently. It’s not a matter of top-down control or terms-of-service written by #process lawyers. Instead, the basic unit of moderation is trust – and this shifts everything we think of as “common sense”.

Yes, we need practical moderation tools – blocking, filtering, reporting, curation – the whole established toolkit. But more importantly, we need to root these tools in a tech shaped culture of care, responsibility, and openness. This is where the #4opens come in:

  • Open data
  • Open source
  • Open standards
  • Open process

These aren’t #FOSS buzzwords, they’re guides to building (tech) trust in messy, real-world communities. In this path, you don’t have many hard “rights” in the liberal legalistic sense, there’s no authority swooping in to save you. Instead, you build #DIY community “safety” through the act of creating and sustaining relationships. You find people. You then build a crew to join or establish norms and communing practices.

This isn’t a call to abandon boundaries, it’s the opposite. You draw your boundaries with others and work to hold those, with #4opens bridges in place. You don’t demand control over others, you build spaces that work for you and find ways to federate, connect, and mediate with others doing the same. Your rights are your relationships. Your safety is your crew. Your power is your network.

This is the #KISS path – Keep It Simple, Stupid – agen, not in a naive way, but in a native way. It’s the opposite of the bureaucratic, compliance-obsessed, legal control systems of the #dotcons and the #NGO gatekeepers. Those are alien models people keep trying to drag into our “alternative” spaces and paths. And every time we do, we replicate the very systems we claim to oppose.

A #mainstreming view on this

We don’t need more frictionless tech platforms with “Trust & Safety” departments that answer to advertisers and #PR teams. We need open communities of care, rooted in shared values, transparency, and mutual responsibility. On this path its about working to compost the mess and growing something else.

This is how moderation works in a decentralised network, not by pretending we’re neutral, but by showing up with care and accountability. It’s messier, more human, and it works, when we let it.

On this path, we need a reboot of the #Indymediaback Infrastructure. As a core to reboot the radical media commons. Bring back trust based publishing, peer moderation, and local focus Why? Because #mainstreamin media isn’t neutral – it mainstreams the crisis while making resistance invisible. We need native alternatives.