Mutual aid is “cooperation for the sake of the common good.” It’s getting people to come together to meet each other’s needs, recognizing that as humans, our survival is dependent on one another.
Contemporary Origins
tag > P2P
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EU Open Web Search Project Started
I’m looking forward to following this project, Djoerd! It sounds sort-of IndieWeb like. Where e.g. MicroSub decouples feed fetching from feed reading and Micropub writing from posting, this project decouples index building from the search. Within IndieWeb that allows the creation of a variety of personal tools, to read and write the web. I’ve long been musing about personal search engines and personal agents and crawlers without putting anything into action. I’m curious to see if this project will actually deliver some of the things I dreamt of over time, by enabling personal tools for search.
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Decentralized Science is Poised to Disrupt… Well, Everything - TL;DR: Well funded people proclaiming that Crypto and its derivatives (NFT/DAO) is magically ushering in a revolution in how science is done 🤡
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Bee-Nomics
In the 80s a Swedish beekeeper created a local currency to see his little village through cash-strapped times. One Clover (the name of the currency) is worth the same as (and exchangeable for) a 0.7kg jar of honey. Honey stores forever and its value fluctuates extremely little. There is currently around 2500 Clovers in circulation, quite enough for the village to run a functional local economy without involving the government.
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Dunbar Spheres
This illustration is from Robin Dunbar’s recent book, Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships. You might recall the author’s name from his concept of Dunbar’s number: that on average people can maintain about 150 friendships with others, a limit that is determined by human brain size and function. The chart is a more detailed version of the concept: it shows, roughly, the number of people we can have meaningful relationships with at various levels of intimacy. Dunbar explains in this Atlantic interview:
The innermost layer of 1.5 is [the most intimate]; clearly that has to do with your romantic relationships. The next layer of five is your shoulders-to-cry-on friendships. They are the ones who will drop everything to support us when our world falls apart. The 15 layer includes the previous five, and your core social partners. They are our main social companions, so they provide the context for having fun times. They also provide the main circle for exchange of child care. We trust them enough to leave our children with them. The next layer up, at 50, is your big-weekend-barbecue people. And the 150 layer is your weddings and funerals group who would come to your once-in-a-lifetime event.
The layers come about primarily because the time we have for social interaction is not infinite. You have to decide how to invest that time, bearing in mind that the strength of relationships is directly correlated with how much time and effort we give them.
There’s evidence that introverts have fewer connections in each layer than extroverts, your numbers go down as you get older when relationship become harder to replace, “falling in love will cost you two friendships”, and how much time is necessary to form a friendship:
It takes about 200 hours of investment in the space of a few months to move a stranger into being a good friend. This fits with our data, which suggests that close friends are very expensive in terms of time investment to maintain. I think the figures are a guideline rather than precise. It just means friendships require work.
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Manage stress: Strengthen your support network (American Psychological Association)
Scientific research has found that interpersonal relationships can have a number of important benefits for physical and psychological health. 🤡
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Alcoholics_Anonymous (AA) is a fascinating case-study in resilient bottom-up org design
- Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is an international fellowship requiring no membership dues or fees dedicated to helping alcoholics peer to peer in sobriety through its spiritually inclined Twelve Steps program.
- AA says it is "not organized in the formal or political sense", and Bill Wilson, borrowing the phrase from anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin, called it a "benign anarchy".
- The Steps also suggest the healing aid of an unspecified God—"as we understood Him"—but are nonetheless accommodating to agnostic, atheist, and non-theist members.
- In Ireland, Shane Butler said that AA "looks like it couldn't survive as there's no leadership or top-level telling local cumanns what to do, but it has worked and proved itself extremely robust". Butler explained that "AA's 'inverted pyramid' style of governance has helped it to avoid many of the pitfalls that political and religious institutions have encountered since it was established here in 1946.
- The Traditions hold that helping others recover from alcoholism is AA's primary purpose. That it should have no opinions on anything else to avoid public controversy. That members and groups should not use AA to gain wealth, prestige, or property. That dogma and hierarchies are to be avoided. That AA groups are autonomous and self-supporting—declining outside contributions—but are barred from lending the AA name to other entities. And, without threat of retribution or means of enforcement, that members should remain anonymous in public media.
- A member who accepts a service position or an organizing role is a "trusted servant" with terms rotating and limited, typically lasting three months to two years and determined by group vote and the nature of the position. Each group is a self-governing entity with AA World Services acting only in an advisory capacity.
- AA groups are self-supporting, relying on voluntary donations from members to cover expenses.[27] The AA General Service Office (GSO) limits contributions to US$3,000 a year.[31] Above the group level, AA may hire outside professionals for services that require specialized expertise or full-time responsibilities.
- AA's program is an inheritor of Counter-Enlightenment philosophy. AA shares the view that acceptance of one's inherent limitations is critical to finding one's proper place among other humans and God. Such ideas are described as "Counter-Enlightenment" because they are contrary to the Enlightenment's ideal that humans have the capacity to make their lives and societies a heaven on Earth using their own power and reason.
- This commitment is facilitated by a change in the member's worldview. To help members stay sober AA must, they argue, provide an all-encompassing worldview while creating and sustaining an atmosphere of transcendence in the organization. To be all-encompassing AA's ideology emphasizes tolerance rather than a narrow religious worldview that could make the organization unpalatable to potential members and thereby limit its effectiveness.
- US courts have not extended the status of privileged communication, such as that enjoyed by clergy and lawyers, to AA related communications between members.
More on AA's history: https://silkworth.info/ - Frank Buchman Oxford Group Documentary
#P2P #Praxis #Health #Politics #Religion #OpenSource #Networks #Systems
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In the network era, developing the skills of a master artisan in every field of work will be critical for success. While getting work done collaboratively will continue to be of importance in all organizations, it will not be enough. New ideas will have to come from our professional networks in order to keep pace with innovation and change in our fields. More importantly, a safe place is needed to connect these new ideas to the work to be done.
Communities of practice will continue to grow as knowledge artisans need to integrate their work and learning in a trusted space. As the gig economy dominates, communities of practice can bring some stability to our professional development. These are owned by the practitioners themselves, not an association and not an organization. You know you are in a real community of practice when it changes your practice.
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How Big Tech Runs Tech Projects and the Curious Absence of Scrum - "Team autonomy and high satisfaction seemed to be correlated."
