Themis Workshop 2 and Next Steps

October 29, 2008 in Emergent Democracy, Themis Project | by | 1 comment

Yesterday evening CIRCUS foundation hosted its second Emergent Democracy Workshop at the Trampery in London’s Shoreditch neighbourhood. The workshop’s aim was to continue a general exploration of democratic innovation whilst developing specific ideas and tools around emergent democracy.

Francis Irving kicked off with a presentation of several of MySociety‘s web services including TheyWorkForYou, FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow. Each product creates a new interface between citizens and state-sector actors. They simultaneously increase the accessibility and relevance of public-domain information whilst providing simpler mechanisms for people to engage with government bodies. Francis emphasised the value of enabling users see other people’s inputs, for instance FixMyStreet allows you to see if someone else in your neighbourhood has already reported the pot-hole you want the council to repair. This is a subtle disruption, providing a catalyst for the formation of communities of interest that might more effective at getting results than solitary individuals. By the way, I promised to mention Francis’ latest initiative Serious Change: go sign up now!

Saul Albert came next introducing The People Speak and talking through several case studies of their “Who Wants to Be” event format. This is a fabulous tool for stimulating ad-hoc collective decision making in a community. Up to two hundred people assemble in a hall or open space where they’re armed with coloured cards, a common objective and a budget to spend. There then follows a tightly-facilitated process where proposals are gathered, grouped, refined and whittled down to a collectively-determined outcome. The coloured cards, coupled with a visual recognition system, provide a lightweight tool for instant voting. The genius of the format is that it’s deliberately designed to evoke a television game show rather than an earnest debate. This leads people to take part in a more playful and dramatic fashion, better suited to creative problem solving and breaking down schisms in the community. Another crucial element is the freedom participants have to change the rules in any way they wish. It was fascinating listening to Saul describe how groups’ energy changes after they start to do this. it would be interesting to study whether such an experience has any impact on the individual’s engagement with the democratic system subsequently. I think many of us will now be joining in the next “Who Wants to Be” event on 7 November.

To start the second half of the workshop I recapped the ideas behind Emergent Democracy that were discussed at the first workshop. From this I led into a walk-through of four model Themis Constitutions that I drafted last week in Washington. These apply principles of Emergent Democracy to four kinds of organisational decision-making:

– A simple collective model where all members participate in decision making
– A proxy model where members can pool decision-making power fluidly
– A council model where a representative group is empowered to make decisions on behalf of all members
– A presidential model where a single individual is empowered to make decisions on behalf of the members

In each case the organisation functions through continuous discussion and decision-making. The constitutions don’t contain a single clause relating to meetings. I then proposed that the Themis Project should work towards developing an open-source platform for creating and running organisations along Emergent Democratic lines. As soon as I have a chance I’ll put this proposal into a more structured form and publish it on the site.

The rest of the evening was spent in a very interesting discussion which touched on questions of transparency, potential user communities and the practicalities of working with such an organisation. At ten o’clock, an hour later than planned, we finally drew to a close and discovered it was miraculously snowing. All in all it felt like a very productive evening.

Thanks to everyone who took part and particularly to Francis and Saul for their superb contributions.

: c :

Modus Focus

September 4, 2008 in Structure & Approach | by | Leave a comment

: Charles Armstrong, Custodian :

Over the past few months I’ve been sounding out various people about what the most useful focus for CIRCUS would be in this next stage of its life. It needed to be something to do with the relationship between technology and social change, since that’s part of its DNA. Also it had to be something practically focused, concerned with a big issue and different from what others were pursuing. Beyond that I had a completely open mind.

When I asked people about this I got a lot of different answers. However several people observed that whilst there’s a reasonable consensus about the way we need to be living in twenty years’ time (less energy usage, less greenhouse gas emission, more local patterns of consumption, etc), there’s very little clarity about how we get from here to there. That appealed to me enormously as a mission. It’s hard to imagine a more important question to confront. The Bridges to the Post Industrial Planet project was designed as a way to gather ideas for exploration.

In July I was at Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp in Sebastopol so I took the opportunity to ask a variety of technology luminaries their thoughts about what most difficult transitions were likely to be and how we could overcome them. One of the people I spoke to, the investor and thinker Joi Ito, highlighted the role of decision-making systems. A long conversation about the potential for Emergent Democracy ensued. This is a long-standing interest of mine. Indeed I wrote a couple experimental constitutions on these principles back in 2000 when I was with Michael Young. This seemed like a useful and narrower focus, hence was born the Themis project.

Meanwhile I’d met Ed Murfitt whilst serving as a mentor at Social Innovation Camp and discovered we had a lot in common in our outlook. In July Ed became a Fellow of the foundation and is currently in California pursuing his Mass Collaboration in Design project with Menka Parekh.

None of these things are definitive answers to what the foundation should do or how it should work, but it is fitting that instead of pondering the question until the answer is clear, we are going out and doing something.

Once More Unto the Breach

July 1, 2008 in Structure & Approach | by | Leave a comment

I’m Charles Armstrong, custodian of CIRCUS foundation. This blog post is my first action in CIRCUS in exactly five years.

CIRCUS foundation was founded in response to the recognition that many promising social change initiatives were hampered by inadequate access to digital expertise. This gap seemed to require an efficient mechanism to connected talented digital-sector professionals from the commercial sector with the best non-profit initiatives. Thus the foundation’s initial design was a kind of managed brokerage. There were three elements to it. First, building a network of people with relevant skills (technology consultants, web designers, software engineers, film makers, etc) who were willing to contribute a few hours a week to pro bono or low cost work on social projects. Second, picking out high-impact initiatives that could benefit significantly from such skills. Finally, project managing the interaction between the experts and the initiatives so people’s time was used effectively and generated desired outcomes.

The foundation opened its doors (virtually) in the spring of 1997. Its very first job was a short project to provide consultancy, photography and web design skills for a small metalworking collective working with reclaimed materials. The second project was considerably more ambitious, helping Lord Young’s newly-formed School for Social Entrepreneurs provide a learning and communication platform for its network of 200 students spread around the UK, some of them with very low computer literacy.

Over the next six years CIRCUS evolved. The network of digital-sector professionals continued to grow, but increasingly the focus was on experimental projects initiated by the foundation itself. The Scillonia Digital Workshop, in the Isles of Scilly, tested a model for accelerating the development of digital economic opportunities in remote rural communities, fitting modern trades and skills within the patterns of a crofting community economy. “Dispersed Apprenticeships” explored decentralised models for production-based learning connecting experts in urban centres with learners in small communities. The Tamale Digital Workshop, in the Northern Region of Ghana, sought to provide a model for developing societies to grow a small pool of high-level digital skills (such as desktop publishing, system maintenance and web design) within a broader platform of basic computer literacy. At the same time “Digital Storytelling” put sound recorders and cameras in the hands of Ghanaian school-children enabling them to share their life experiences and interview those in power in their communities. Bushlink was a research initiative aiming to provide a toolkit that could provide a basic communications mesh for the developing world using solar energy, cheap WiFi equipment, Pringles cans and hand-me-down laptops.

Some of the experiments were successful, others weren’t. But a pattern emerged in the foundation’s work in which digital technologies were applied in developmental and economic models that challenged the assumptions of urban industrial society.

All the while work with the School for Social Entrepreneurs continued. The original consulting project led to a realisation that conventional platforms imposed significant barriers to peer learning and entrepreneurial development. As a result the foundation proposed concepts for a different kind of platform, codenamed “Trampoline”. This was based on more fluid sharing of information, with an even balance between formal and informal structure, in an environment where it was easy for any user to create new parts of the system or manage how information was delivered to them. A prototype system was developed through 2001-02. Today it would probably be called a social networking platform (though it also incorporated a fully functioning email system) but no such thing existed in 2001.

By the end of 2002 investors in San Francisco, London and Tokyo were taking an interest in Trampoline and it became clear the project was in tune with changing demands on organisational information systems. In mid 2003 the decision was made to spin off Trampoline Systems as a separate commercial venture. I became its CEO, imagining I could recruit a team within a year to take the business forward and I’d be able to turn my focus back to CIRCUS.

That was five years ago and I remain fully committed as Trampoline’s CEO. In retrospect my assumptions about how long the business would need me seem amusingly naive. Trampoline’s gone from strength to strength, establishing a worldwide reputation as a pioneer of human-centred information systems and working with some of the world’s brightest corporations. In the process I’ve learned more than I could have imagined.

But the moment has come to breathe new life into CIRCUS foundation. I’ve been discussing different possibilities for a couple of months and starting to gather the necessary forces. The foundation’s spirit and direction will remain the same but its specific objectives and modus operandi will be substantially different. Over the next few weeks I look forward to introducing new projects and ideas.